By Azad Essa
The inclusion of a float depicting a replica of the Ram Temple at next week’s India Day Parade in New York City would be tantamount to celebrating violence against Muslims and other minorities in India, human rights activists and scholars have said.
The partially completed Ram Temple, a sprawling new temple complex being built over the destroyed 16th-century Babri Mosque in the north Indian city of Ayodhya, was inaugurated earlier this year as a means to further consolidate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image among his base and revive what they consider India’s heritage as a homeland of Hindus, say activists.
“[The temple] is widely understood as a monument to Hindu supremacist ideology, one that highlights Modi’s goal of creating a Hindu ethno-state, and reinvigorates the Indian right’s goal of taking over and destroying mosques across the country,” Mohammed Jawad, president of the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), told Middle East Eye.
“It is an anti-Muslim symbol, and those who celebrated the Ram Temple’s consecration are very much aware of this … we can’t allow this to slide in a city like New York, where diversity is cause for celebration and communities of all backgrounds coexist,” Jawad added.
Jawad’s comments follow a stream of condemnation from human rights groups and calls for its removal from the parade scheduled for 18 August.
This story was originally published in middleeasteye.net. Read the full story here.
