PHOTO YUICHI YAMAZAKI/GETTY IMAGES
BY SHREEJAYA NAIR / ART News
As the world reeled from the Covid-19 pandemic in August 2020, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi fulfilled a decade-old campaign promise: breaking ground on a Hindu temple at Ram Janmabhoomi, a site in the Northern Indian city of Ayodhya, where the deity Rama is believed to have been born.
Hindu and Muslim religious groups have battled, often violently, for ownership of the site, which was home to the Babri Masjid Mosque from 1527 until it was demolished by a violent Hindu nationalist mob in 1992. That attack set off six weeks of rioting that claimed over 2,000 lives across the country and has had ripple effects for decades.
But on August 5, Modi laid an 88-pound silver brick for the new temple’s foundation, as onlookers chanted “Jai Shri Ram,” or “Victory to Lord Ram,” a seemingly innocuous phrase that has come to signal Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s increasingly exclusionary Hindu nationalism. Also heard among the crowd was the phrase “Ayodhya is just a preview, Kashi and Mathura are next in line,” a reference to similar controversies at the Kashi Gyanvapi Mosque in Banaras and the Shahi Mosque in Mathura.
The controversy at Ayodhya and other sites have become emblematic of the ways in which archaeology has become a political weapon, particularly for Modi and the BJP, who many argue have grown increasingly brazen in their efforts to shift India from a pluralist, secular state to an ethno-nationalist religious one that favors Hindus above all others.
Ayodhya looks to be only the beginning.
India’s Newest Political Battlefield
The current push to take back religious and archaeological sites in India have gained steam with the BJP’s rise over the last decade. Since 1996, the BJP included reclaiming the disputed temple site in Ayodhya in its election manifesto, a promise it renewed during Modi’s re-election campaign in 2019, which the BJP won in a landslide.
That goal became a reality later that year when India’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled the disputed land be given to the Ram Birthplace Trust for the construction of a temple. The Muslim community, represented by Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Waqf Board, was to be compensated with five acres for a mosque at a prominent site in Ayodhya. The decision reversed a previous court decision that split the land between the communities.
New campaigns to reclaim other contested sites like the UNESCO World Heritage site Qutub Minar Agra Jahanara Mosque and the Peer Pasha Dargah mosque are now underway.
Other groups have taken up the tactic as well. In May, Rashed Khan, a politician for Indian National Congress (the country’s other major party), filed a petition to open Charminar, a 16th-century monument in Hyderabad, to Muslims for prayer on its top-floor mosque, which was closed to the public by the Archaeological Survey of India decades ago. Khan also referred to the Hindu temple adjoining the monument as “illegal.” Prominent BJP politicians began visiting the temple in a show of strength and accused the INC of stoking unrest to promote the party.
The same month, in Goa, the state’s chief minister, the BJP politician Pramod Sawant, earmarked $2.5 million for renovations to Hindu temples destroyed by the Portuguese. Goa legislators Vijai Sardesai and Altone D’costa accused the state government of trying to “rewrite history” for political gains.
Tariq Anwar, a longtime and high-ranking INC member of parliament, has argued that the battle of archaeological sites is used by the BJP to divert public attention from rising poverty, unemployment, corruption, and inflation.
“The 1991 Places of Worship Act was created to draw a line and say whatever existed at Independence, apart from Ram Janmabhoomi case, be maintained as is,” he told ARTnews. “Otherwise there would be no end to such issues. Amending or removing this law could only prove detrimental and enflame Hindu-Muslim divide.”
This story was originally published in artnews.com . Read the full story here