A large Hindu temple was inaugurated on Monday in Ayodhya, in northern India: thousands of people attended the inauguration ceremony, and hundreds of thousands of faithful will visit the temple in the coming days. Among those present there was also the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi: many see the inauguration, and the large public celebrations organized for the occasion, as signs of the definitive transition of Indian society from a secular model to one in which the Hindu religion it is central. In the ten years in which he governed, Modi was the interpreter of this turning point, and he will also try to exploit it to gain consensus in view of the parliamentary elections scheduled for spring, when he will try to obtain his third consecutive mandate.
The temple is dedicated to the divinity Rama, who according to legend was born in that very place: in 1992 a crowd of Hindu fanatics destroyed a mosque that had been built there in 1528. For this reason the construction of a Hindu temple in Ayodhya has been much discussed in India. The local Hindu and Muslim communities disputed for a long time the right to build a place of worship there: in 2019 the dispute was closed by a ruling from the Indian Supreme Court, which established that a Hindu temple should be built on the site. The inauguration of the temple is a sign of the growing centrality of the Hindu religion in Indian society, practiced by around 80 percent of the population. To follow the long and elaborate ceremony, the Indian civil servants also had half a day of leave.