The long-awaited consecration of the Ram Mandir, a grand Hindu temple in Ayodhya, northern India, will take place on 22 January, in an enormous ceremony due to be attended by many of the nation’s highest ranking officials. The temple is being built on the site of the former Babri mosque, which was controversially demolished by a mob of Hindu extremists in 1992. They were led by individuals affiliated to the far-right paramilitary organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organisation, RSS) and its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP), which now helms the country’s union government. Since the Hindu-nationalist BJP came to power in 2014, communal tensions in the country have intensified. Other mosques in India are increasingly facing the threat of destruction as well.
“The demolition of the Babri mosque was illegal and immoral,” says Anand Patwardhan, a documentarian whose 1992 film, Ram Ke Naam, charts the movement to demolish the mosque. He refers to the events in Ayodhya as an attempt to reimagine India. “Nobody is crying about the loss of a building structure,” he says. “It is the loss of our secular ethos.”
The Babri mosque was a three-domed monument built in 1528, purportedly on the instructions of the Mughal king Babur. Since the 19th century, Hindus have claimed that the mosque was constructed atop a temple, on land that was the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. Members of the Hindu Mahasabha, a Hindu nationalist political group linked to the RSS, smuggled an idol of Ram inside the mosque in December 1949. Shortly after, the mosque was sealed by the government. In later years, members of RSS-affiliated groups led a campaign to erect a temple on the site. Finally, on 6 December 1992, the mosque was razed during an event in which leaders of the BJP and the RSS-affiliated organisation Vishva Hindu Parishad gave divisive speeches. At least 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in the outbreak of intercommunal rioting that it sparked—one of modern India’s worst chapters of sectarian conflict.
‘The politicisation of archaeology’
Over the following decades, the site of the razed mosque has been the subject of a complicated and much publicised legal battle—one that has been instrumentalised by India’s shifting political leadership. The BJP has long promised to build a Ram temple on the site, reiterating this aim in its manifestos for the 2014 and 2019 general elections. On 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court, India’s apex judicial institution, gave its final verdict in the case. The judgement was criticised by certain commentators as it deemed the acts of planting the idol in the mosque and demolishing the structure to be illegal but ruled in favour of the Hindu groups to build a temple on the site.
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