Inauguration of Ram Mandir- Modi’s Hindutva in full force

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Ram Mandir in India is being inaugurated today (Monday) by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with state-sponsored fanfare.

“This will be our Vatican City, the holiest site for Hindus across the world,” said Sharad Sharma, spokesperson for Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a rightwing Hindu group, and member of the Hindu trust building the temple. “After 500 years of Hindu oppression, Lord Ram will finally be returned to Ayodhya,” The Guardian cites him as saying.

Considering the importance the event holds, the ceremony is going to be attended by a huge number of Bollywood celebrities, cricketers, politicians and leading businessmen of the country. A newly commissioned airport in Ayodhya is also in the works. Security has been tightened, while the fear of violence has prompted Muslim residents of Ayodhya to send their children and women to relatives in neighbouring towns.

Bollywood celebrities at the inauguration of Ram Mandir

The temple is a reminder of the very inception of this controversy built on the ruins of 16th-century Babri Masjid. It was demolished by a Hindutva-infused right-wing mob in 1992 after decades of disputes. The riots that happened following the demolition killed more than three thousand Muslims.

The mosque was built in 1527 by Mughal Emperor Babur and was a rare surviving example of the architecture of the early Mughal Empire, which ruled India from 16th to 19th centuries. Muslims worshipped in the mosque for more than 300 years.

Summarising the history of the site, Dr. Audrey Truschke wrote in Time: “In the 1850s, when India was largely under British colonial rule, the first signs of trouble arose as the Babri Masjid emerged as a key site of Hindu nationalist attempts to rectify perceived historical wrongs by Muslims, an idea inherited from British colonialists. Hindus claimed that Lord Ram, a major god and mythological hero, had been born at the very spot on which the mosque stood. Competing claims of Ram’s birthplace were once attached to many sites in Ayodhya, but the Babri Masjid drew particular fervor because it was a mosque. Some imagined further historical wrongs associated with the Babri Masjid, including claiming that the mosque was built after Babur’s general destroyed a Hindu temple at that location. None of these claims stand up to historical scrutiny. But in the 1980s, Hindu nationalist groups began tapping into these claims to argue that the mosque needed to be destroyed to clear the way for a new Hindu temple, declaring Mandir wahi banayenge (‘The temple will be built right there!’). After years of agitation, their efforts resulted in an explosion of Islamophobic violence on December 6, 1992, when a Hindu mob numbering at least 75,000 descended on Ayodhya and dismantled the Babri Masjid, brick-by-brick.

Modi’s BJP benefitted from the situation and came to power in 2014. After the second victory in BJP in 2019, India’s Supreme Court—laden with judges affiliated with BJP- the court called the mosque’s destruction ‘an egregious violation of the rule of law,’ but nonetheless ruled that a Hindu temple could be built on the mosque’s ruins.”

Modi laid the foundation stone at a groundbreaking ceremony in August 2020.

Posed as a divine moment this is interpreted as a political gimmick by The Guardian because general elections are going to be held in April in India and by invoking the religious sentiments of the 80 per cent majority of the country, Modi is seeking a third term in power. Prime Minister Modi has also declared that God had chosen him as an instrument to be “representative of all Indians” and he had begun 11 days of “strict vows and sacrifice” to prepare for the event.

Even though many Indians have given in to the political gimmickry, most are reminded that this Vatican City is nothing but a monument built after demolishing Babri Masjid by force with the help of brute majority.

Dr. Audrey posted, “Today is a dark day for India”. She was then hugely criticised by Hindu extremists over her tweet and the article she shared.

A Twitter user commented that this is the win of Jinnah’s two-nation theory.

Pratesh from India shared a clip from ANI where a teacher was teaching dance steps on bhajans in schools to celebrate the inauguration. He commented, “Now what happened to no religion in school? Was it only applicable for hijab?”

Someone sarcastically trolled Narendra Modi’s poster by writing, “Very hard to say at this point whose temple is being inaugurated.”

A user named Sabah counted the Bollywood actors that are attending the event just to appease the government.

Writer and Educationist Raju Parulekar lamented the state of India has lost its secular spirit in a tweet.

The most viral is that of a kid schooling the government that a Mandir can’t educate and enable people only a school can.

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