India: the temple that became a triumph for Hindu nationalists

AYODHYA, India — They fanned out across the vast country, knocking on doors in the name of a cause that would redefine India.

These trench soldiers and organizers, including a young Narendra Modi, raised millions of dollars in a long struggle to build a large Hindu temple in Ayodhya, northern India. Ceremonies were held in 200,000 villages to bless individual bricks that would be sent to that sacred city, which Hindus believe was the birthplace of the deity Ram.

The bricks, the campaign leaders declared, would not only be used for the construction of the temple on land occupied for centuries by a mosque. They would be the basis of a Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu nation, that would correct what right-wing Hindus saw as the injustice of India's birth as a secular republic.

Almost 40 years later, on January 22, Modi, now Prime Minister of the country, inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya—the crowning achievement of a national movement aimed at establishing Hindu supremacy in India by uniting the Hindu majority of all castes and tribes.

“After centuries of patience and sacrifice, our Lord Ram has arrived,” Modi said during the ceremony. “It is the beginning of a new era.”

The moment is one of triumph for Hindu nationalists and joy for many others who care little about politics. Ram has many followers in India; The excitement around the temple consecration had been building for weeks, with saffron bunting hanging in a million streets and markets, and posters of Ram everywhere announcing the event. But for the country's 200 million Muslims, the Ram temple has reinforced a sense of hopelessness and dislocation.

The Babri mosque, which the Hindu camp says was built after Muslim rulers destroyed a previous Hindu temple on the site, was torn down in 1992 by Hindu activists, unleashing waves of sectarian violence that left thousands dead. The way the mosque was demolished set a precedent of impunity that resonates today: lynchings of Muslim men accused of slaughtering or transporting cows; beatings of interfaith couples to combat “love jihad,” and “bulldozer justice” in which Muslims' homes are demolished by officials without due process due to religious tensions.

The Hindu right has exploited the Ram movement to become the dominant political force in India. The inauguration of the temple, built on 28 hectares at a cost of almost $250 million, marks the unofficial start of Modi's campaign for a third term in elections scheduled for the spring.

The fact that Modi was the star of the inauguration of the temple in Ayodhya — which Hindu nationalists have compared to the Vatican and Mecca — reflects the right's blurring of old lines.

India's founders went to great lengths to keep the state distanced from religion, seeing it as crucial to the country's cohesion after the communal bloodshed caused by the 1947 partition that separated Pakistan from India. But Modi has normalized the opposite.

After completing the consecration rituals alongside the priests, Modi prostrated himself in front of the Ram idol, carved with a warm smile and lucid eyes in black stone and adorned with jewels.

The president of Modi's party recently described him as “the king of the gods.” Before the inauguration, the City was covered with posters and billboards of Ram and Modi.

By mixing religion and politics, the omnipresent leader has achieved what his predecessors could not: turn a diverse and conflict-ridden Indian society into something of a monolith lining up behind him. To question it is to question Hindu values ​​and is almost blasphemy.

Manoj Kumar Jha, an Opposition lawmaker, said that while Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could be toppled one day, the transformation of the state and society would take decades, at least, to undo.

“Winning elections can be a matter of arithmetic,” Jha said. “But the struggle is in the field of psychology—the psychological breakdown, the social breakdown.”

Just as Muslim Pakistan was founded as a state for a religious group, he said, India “is now emulating Pakistan.

“The toxic mix of religion and politics is idealized,” Jha added. “No one bothers to see what such a toxic mixture has done.”

By: MUJIB MASHAL, and HARI KUMAR