This Monday culminates a decades-long dream of Hindu nationalism with the inauguration of a great temple dedicated to the god Rama, in Ayodhya. To make it a reality, the 16th century Babur Mosque was razed to the ground on December 9, 1992 by tens of thousands of militants from Hindu supremacist organizations.
That agitation campaign, which ended with sledgehammers, swords and pitchforks, had been led by the previous leader of the ruling BJP, A.K. Advani. His successor, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, broke an eleven-day fast this morning before prostrating himself before Rama. The custom stone idol – selected from three offers – had been placed on the altar hours earlier, lulled to sleep by the Brahmins and bathed in honey, milk, flowers and cow urine. All this in order to activate his powers, according to his beliefs, to be able to respond – starting tomorrow – to the prayers of the faithful.
A helicopter has also flown over the seven thousand guests – among them, the two richest men in India, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, the actor Amitabh Bachchan and the cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar – to sprinkle petals on the historicist stone temple. white, which occupies less than a tenth of the twenty-five hectares expropriated.
The religious pretext actually marks the beginning of Narendra Modi’s campaign for his re-election in the April elections. In fact, the temple is far from being finished, something that has been criticized by some religious figures. Its first plant, as well as the spire that should crown it, will not be finished before the end of next year.
However, the absolute priority of the work has accelerated the deadlines, since the Supreme Court ruled definitively on the case in 2019. Its ruling caused astonishment, since it considered that the demolition of the mosque of the first Mughal emperor by a armed crowd had been “a flagrant illegality”, and then rewarded its instigators with everything they claimed. Singularly, the ownership of the lot, reduced to rubble.
As supposed compensation, the magistrates ordered that the Muslim congregation receive a plot of land to build another mosque, more than thirty kilometers away. A new humiliation and absurdity, as shown by the fact that not a single brick has been placed there.
The now nonagenarian Advani toured India from end to end since 1990, perched on a Toyota truck decorated as if it were Rama’s chariot, often with characters dressed as the characters from the television series Ramayana, which was all the rage at the time. This Sanskrit epic, even today, structures the culture of much of South Asia, up to Indonesia, through Laos, Cambodia or Thailand, without distinction of religions.
But the objective of Advani and the network of organizations subordinate to the RSS – of which the BJP is the last partisan expression – was not precisely cultural diffusion, but rather polarization and electoral consolidation. In 1987 they had only two deputies, but in 1996, still tailgating that car, they had conquered power, with A.B. Vajpayee as a presentable prime minister, until 2004. Narendra Modi – and his right-hand man, Amit Shah – has returned that ideology to power since 2014, in a much more relaxed way.
The legend of the rescue of Sita, kidnapped in Sri Lanka by the demon Ravana, by her husband Rama and her brother-in-law Laxman, with the help of the loyal Hanuman and his army of monkeys, is one of the cultural treasures of humanity. The reception of the victorious group with candles in Ayodhya – where, according to myth, Rama, an avatar of Vishnu, reigned more than seven thousand years ago – is at the origin of the Divali festival, as important for Hindus – and Sikhs – as Christmas for Christians.
The black stone idol that has been consecrated today represents Rama as a five-year-old child, although with the measurements of a giant. The building is completely new, since, contrary to what some believers and quite a few demagogues had argued for decades, there was no temple beneath the mosque of the first Mughal emperor. In any case, remains of older mosques. The hypothesis was not far-fetched, although it could be malicious, since there is historical evidence of several cases of mosques built on temples, or of Hindu temples on Buddhist temples, depending on the power of the moment.
That fateful December 9, 1992, in addition to the Mughal temple, another twenty-five mosques and 250 Muslim homes or businesses were destroyed. They only had to mourn a few dozen dead and wounded – burned, mutilated or lynched – because the majority had fled Ayodhya before the announced avalanche of Hindu militants sent from other parts of India. However, the barbarity of Ayodhya gave rise to a trail of blood throughout the country, with more than two thousand Muslim deaths, in addition to hundreds of Hindus (mostly among the aggressors. Several fanatics also died when the domes that they were hammering). Bombay was the city that suffered the most, with a true pogrom, which forced thousands of Muslims to abandon mixed neighborhoods and gave rise to several reprisal attacks that were no less chilling.
Hindu supremacism, which in 1987 had only two deputies, had finally found its rallying point. Before embracing Ayodhya, he had achieved relative success – in campaigns in which the young Modi already stood out as an organizer – in other pilgrimages from end to end of the country, to place a pike in Kashmir or to bless towns with water from the Ganges.
The one who now awaits the blessing of the electorate is Modi, despite the fact that he has not had to contribute a single rupee for the work, financed by donations and budgeted, from the outset, at two hundred million euros. The Indian government and that of the state of Uttar Pradesh itself have participated in the financing of the new – and beautiful – Ayodhya airport, as well as its new railway station. The inauguration is also a dream come true for Ajay Mohan Singh Bisht, the saffron-robed monk (he calls himself Yogi Adityanath) who joined political Hinduism in the heat of the movement in defense of the Rama temple and who is the current head of government of the host state, Uttar Pradesh, with a whopping 240 million inhabitants.
Local merchants hope that the town, renovated for the occasion, will become a great pilgrimage center. The Hindu pilgrimages are the common thread of many of the great investment campaigns of the Modi government, read the national highway under construction that will connect four of the great pilgrimage centers of the Himalayas.
One of its numerous tunnels under construction trapped dozens of workers last year, sparking criticism for the lack of environmental studies. Another bottomless tunnel is the fundraising campaign to clean the super-polluted waters of the Ganges. In the case of the Saryu River, which runs through Ayodhya, the emergency solution for today has been to open, in advance, two dams, with the aim of moving the dirt and bad odors downstream.
Among India’s 80% Hindu population, millions are looking forward to today. A climate fueled for weeks by practically all the media, which encourage the externalization of emotion. In the same way that atheists, secularists, Christians and Muslims maintain a prudent silence. In the case of the latter, no less moved.
It should be said that the opposition leaders have wanted to stay away from the ceremonies and have criticized the electoral manipulation of religion. In fact, the head of government of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, wanted to protest by leading at the same time, in Calcutta, a demonstration “of harmony between all faiths.”
West Bengal is among half of Indian states that have not declared today – or today’s morning – as a holiday. All this in a republic that, according to its constitution, is secular and that, at least until eight years ago, strove to appear non-denominational. But after ten years of Narendra Modi, it is something else.
So much so that the Indian Prime Minister was able to declare this morning, without embarrassment, that “the construction of this Ram temple is a symbol of peace, patience, harmony and maturity of Indian society.”
