On Monday 22 January, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will participate in the great celebrations for the consecration of the Rama temple in Ayodhya, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in the north of the country. The projects include the Hindu temple becoming one of the most important in India, a pilgrimage destination and a tourist destination. It stands where just over thirty years ago a crowd of 150 thousand Hindu faithful destroyed a mosque built in 1528 in a few hours: that event was one of the most notable episodes of the historic dispute in India between Hindus and Muslims.
The consecration and opening of the temple to the faithful will be held a few months before the elections with which Modi will try to obtain a third consecutive mandate: the vote is expected between April and May, but an official date has not yet been set. Modi has been in office since 2014 and during these ten years he has successfully tried to bring the Hindu religion back to the center of Indian public and political life. Modi and his party, the Bharatiya Janata (BJP), have presented themselves as defenders of Hinduism, practiced by 80 percent of Indians, even with clearly discriminatory policies towards minorities, especially Muslims.
The Rama temple is seen as the crowning and symbol of this policy and the celebrations for its opening will be a great event, also for the political promotion of the figure of the prime minister.
Around 4,500 workers have worked in shifts for twenty-four hours a day in recent months to complete the first floor of the temple, which will have three floors at the end of the works and will be 50 meters high. The costs to build it should approach 350 million euros, just for the religious structure. Many of the funds were raised from donations from believers in India and abroad. But the entire area has undergone a radical restructuring, with much heavier investments: a new airport has been built and the train station has been completely renovated, as has the road network. The nearby city of Faizabad was obliterated, the buildings that survived the works related to the opening of the temple were incorporated into Ayodhya.
Silhouettes of Prime Minister Modi and God Rama (AP Photo/Deepak Sharma)
Local authorities expect around 200-300 thousand people to visit the temple every year. According to Modi «every Indian will want to see it at least once in their life» and «Ayodhya will represent the soul of the nation: there can be no progress without safeguarding one’s roots». By winning a third term, Modi would become one of the country’s most influential leaders ever and he plans to make the Rama temple something to be remembered for generations.
Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust shares pictures of Ram Temple premises#ayodhya | #frames | #RamMandirAyodhya | #RamTemple | #RamTempleInauguration | #AyodhyaRamTemple | #PranPratishtha pic.twitter.com/Im0mLY4cXh
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For the opposition, however, the celebrations for the temple are only a great tool of political propaganda, as well as a clear sign of the ongoing process of transformation of India: from a secular state to a Hindu country, in which religion is central, dominant and conditions the government choices.
In the ten years of Modi’s government, India has grown significantly economically, quickly and consistently improving its infrastructure and presenting itself as a credible trading partner for the world‘s major economies, often in direct competition with China. The stock market has recorded enormous growth, while the government expects GDP growth of 7.3% for the fiscal year ending in March 2024, one of the largest in the world. This greater economic weight has led India to count more on a political level as well.
The inauguration of the new Ayodhya airport (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)
However, the excellent economic results were obtained at the price of a gradual but constant limitation of freedoms and a free press, as well as the marginalization of political opponents, who were sometimes even arbitrarily legally prosecuted. A group of very powerful industrialists has been created around Modi and the majority party, with a relationship similar to that which binds the Russian oligarchs to Vladimir Putin. Corruption is widespread, at all levels of the Indian government.
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But it is above all religious minorities who have suffered the heaviest repercussions during Modi’s government. The 200 million Muslims remain the poorest segment of the population on average, many below the absolute poverty line. In recent years there have been repeated episodes of violence, even on a large scale, which have caused lynchings or fires of houses and commercial structures run by Muslims. In 2019, Modi’s government stripped the Muslim-majority Kashmir region of autonomy and no elections have been held since then.
The construction of the Rama temple on the site of the Babri Masjid mosque is a sign of the growing weight of Hinduism in Indian society. The Ayodhya dispute has ancient origins, but it became even more intense since the middle of the last century, when the requests of the Hindus to be able to build a temple where the sixteenth century mosque was located became increasingly insistent, because in that place the birth of Prince Rama, one of the manifestations of Vishnu, would have taken place. According to the Hindu version, the mosque was built right where a Hindu temple previously existed.
Muslims deny this reconstruction, and the study of documents by independent archaeologists has never found reliable evidence that confirmed the Hindu theses. From the 1980s the disputes became more intense, especially driven by the BJP, Modi’s party, and in 1992 a demonstration that was supposed to be peaceful turned into the destruction of the mosque. In the following days, violent clashes broke out between Hindus and Muslims: it is estimated that around 2,000 people were killed. A long legal battle followed, closed in 2019 by a ruling from the Indian Supreme Court that authorized the construction of the Rama temple. Work began in 2020.
Faithful with a model of the Rama temple mounted on a car (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.)
Other two similar disputes are underway in India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh: in Varanasi Hindu nationalist movements are waiting for authorization for the expansion of the Kashi Vishwanath temple, which should take place to the detriment of the Gyanvapi mosque (a ruling should arrive in June); There is an ongoing legal dispute in Mathura over a mosque that Hindu believers say was built on the birthplace of another Hindu deity, Krishna.
– Read also: The destruction of the Ayodhya mosque