India, Modi inaugurates large Hindu temple on the ashes of a mosque
Photogallery20 photos
Ayodhya, a pilgrimage destination
The sumptuous ceremony took place in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, a city that has been at the center of one of the main political and historical fractures of modern India for decades.
Here, 32 years ago, a chain of events began which over time, in addition to costing the lives of thousands of people, elevated Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to the country’s leading party and dealt a probably fatal blow to the secular nature of the country.
Temple on the ruins of a mosque
Built at a cost of 217 million dollars coming largely from private donations and spread over an area of almost 3 hectares, the temple stands on the site where once stood a 16th century mosque, the Babri Masjid, which was razed to the ground by a crowd convinced that it had been built on the ruins of the temple erected on the birthplace of Lord Ram.
The reverberations of that reckless political operation would be felt for a long time in India, a country characterized since its birth by religious tensions between the Hindu majority and the main minority in the country, the Muslim one.
The massacre of Muslims
Ten years after the destruction of the mosque, an attack on a train full of Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya triggered a pogrom in Gujarat, a state governed at the time by Modi, in which around 2 thousand people lost their lives, mostly part Muslims.