Hindu nationalism marches on:

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the consecration on Monday of a grand temple to the Hindu god Lord Ram on a site believed to be his birthplace, in a celebratory event for the Hindu majority of the world’s most populous nation.

Believed by whom to be his birthplace? Certainly not everyone. Lord Ram is a “god”: a supernatural being. He wasn’t born anywhere, because he’s a fiction. He may be a very meaningful fiction, but that doesn’t make him a real person who had a real birthplace.

Hindu groups, Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its affiliates have portrayed the temple opening as part of a Hindu renaissance after past centuries of subjugation by Muslim invaders and colonial powers.

In other words they’ve intensified the same old Hindu-Muslim rivalry that saw so many people massacred during Partition.

For decades, the temple site was bitterly contested by Hindus and minority Muslims, leading to nationwide riots in 1992 that killed 2,000 people, mainly Muslims, police say, after a Hindu mob destroyed a 16th-century mosque that had stood there.

So let’s have more of that, yeah?

India’s Hindus say the site is the birthplace of Lord Ram, and was holy to them long before Muslim Mughals razed a temple at the spot to build the Babri Masjid, or mosque, in 1528.

Nearly 5 centuries ago – but do let’s keep the quarrel going!