To be a Muslim in an increasingly militant Hindu India is to feel alienated and dejected. There may be 200 million of us, but Muslims are being made invisible in India today. It’s not safe to be a Muslim in parts of North India, and certainly not safe to look like one in several others.
Only one conversation dominates village chaupals and city squares these days. It is the loud, triumphant announcement of the Ram Temple consecration, the Pran Pratishtha, or “establishment of life force,” of the Hindu deity on Jan. 22 in Ayodhya, at the exact same spot where the Babri Masjid stood from 1527 to 1992 when it was brought down, brick-by-brick, by karsevaks, or “faith volunteers,” drunk on hardcore Hindutva. The policemen and the State stood aside as the mosque was reduced to rubble. More than 2,000 people died, most of them Muslim, in communal riots in various cities in the days that followed. It was never restored, though the Supreme Court in its 2019 judgment called the demolition an “egregious violation of the rule of law.”
Now a grand temple dedicated to Lord Ram is being readied atop the ruins of the mosque. Hindu nationalists have justified this based on the shaky claim the Hindu god was born there, and that Muslims had destroyed an earlier Hindu temple when the Mughals ruled much of India from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
This story was originally published in time.com. Read the full story here .