The insidious campaign to demolish mosques in India

IN A CRAMPED home down a narrow alley in Varanasi, a hard-line Hindu activist flaunts a piece of mosque booty. It is a brick from the 16th-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, in north India. “I got it on December 6th 1992,” says Sohan Lal Arya, referring to the day the mosque was torn down by a Hindu nationalist mob. Mr Arya and other of its members, including leaders of the now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claimed the mosque had been built on the birthplace of Ram, a Hindu god.

The destruction of Babri Masjid, which sparked riots in which some 2,000 people died, was the culmination of a years-long campaign by bjp leaders to replace the mosque with a Ram temple. It galvanised the Hindu-nationalist movement, radicalising and recruiting millions of Hindu activists, and helped propel the BJP from the outer margins of Indian politics to become, by 1996, the biggest party in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house. When Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, inaugurates the long-promised Ram temple in Ayodhya next month, it will complete a staggeringly effective political campaign—from which the bjp leader will aim to wring yet more advantage. The ceremony will be the unofficial launch of his campaign for an election expected in April, at which the bjp could become the first party since 1971 to win a third consecutive majority.

The new Ram temple was made possible by India’s Supreme Court, which in 2019 rewarded the destroyers of the mosque by ruling that the site should be handed to a Hindu trust. Emboldened by this, Hindu activists such as Mr Arya are now targeting thousands of other mosques across India, including one in Varanasi, 200km (125 miles) south of Ayodhya. Built in 1669 by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the city’s Gyanvapi mosque sits on land formerly occupied by a Hindu temple. A long-standing local Hindu grievance, this has recently been raised by bjp activists to a matter of national importance. Some, including Mr Arya’s wife, claim to have found extant temple remains at the site.

The mosque is now surrounded by high metal fencing and guarded by armed police. As a possible augury of its fate, a neighbouring Hindu temple complex has been massively expanded; it now looms over the disputed mosque. The temple expansion is thanks to the local Lok Sabha member, Mr Modi. The prime minister has vowed to restore the area to its “lost glory”.

Untangling competing claims about events that occurred centuries ago is impossible. Some historians believe that, even before the Gyanvapi mosque site housed a temple, it housed an earlier mosque, and an even older temple before that. A law passed in 1991 sought to allay such disputes by mandating that places of worship should retain the status that they had at independence in 1947. Despite this, a court in Varanasi controversially ruled in the Hindu activists’ favour. Researchers from the Archaeological Survey of India, which looks after national monuments, have therefore been inspecting the mosque site for traces of Hindu worship. It is due to present a report to the Allahabad High Court later this month.

Agitating to replace mosques with temples illustrates Hindu nationalism’s strange mix of triumphalism and insecurity. It feeds a narrative that Hindus (who are 80% of India’s population) are victims, with grievances both old (such as oppression by Muslim emperors five centuries ago) and new (such as “love jihad”, a conspiracy theory that Muslim men are plotting to seduce and convert Hindu women). Such scare tactics help distract from the bjp government’s failures in other areas, including high unemployment and the filthy state of the Ganges river at Varanasi, though it is also sacred to Hindus and cleaning it up is another pet project of Mr Modi’s. Nonetheless, he is “the best prime minister ever; he’s like a saint,” says Shravan Kumar Mishra, a bead wholesaler in Varanasi. Thanks to Mr Modi, he says, “Hindus walk with their heads held high, and Muslims keep their heads down.”

Not far from the Gyanvapi mosque, when The Economist visited, was a poster of Mr Modi emblazoned with the slogan: “1.4 billion people. 1 dream”. In smaller letters, it clarified that this referred to the laudable goal of generating lots of electricity, on which the Modi government has made good progress. Yet the poster also depicted the steps outside that rapidly expanding Hindu temple in Varanasi. No wonder India’s 200m Muslims fear for their place in the increasingly Hindu-dominated country of which Mr Modi and his party dream. Many Muslims will look on the coming election season with dread. ■

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