How not to right historical wrongs
It is the “beginning of a new era,” said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on January 22 as he inaugurated a vast but still unfinished temple complex in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The temple, built over the remains of a 16th-century mosque, symbolized, Modi added, a “nation rising by breaking the mentality of slavery.”
As we’ve noted before in this newsletter, it was a moment of triumph for Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, the political arm of a near century-old Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization. The BJP owes much of its current dominance of Indian politics to the movement that began over 30 years ago to replace the mosque with a temple dedicated to the god Rama, the hero of one of India’s two great epics.
The mosque, according to Hindus, had been built over a temple that marked Rama’s birthplace in the city of Ayodhya. In 1992, a huge mob of Hindu nationalists destroyed the mosque using makeshift tools and their bare hands. And in 2019, India’s Supreme Court decided that even though the act of demolishing the mosque was illegal, a Hindu temple could be built on the site.
Last month, the process of replacing, even erasing, the mosque, was completed with the inauguration of the temple. Modi stood front and center at the ceremony, an act deemed so political that opposition leaders turned down invitations to attend.