In the year 2000 riots destroyed a mosque in the city of Ayodhya, where Modi will open a Hindu temple

India Ayodhya’s Temple: Why a Demonstration Destruction destroyed a Mosaic?

Do they mind that their homes are now out of sight, presumably so tourists flocking to the temple won’t see a slum? A person shrugs. “No,” she said with a smile. It is nice and we have flowers near our house.

Pandey gestures to the newly refurbished railway station nearby and the new bridge that links to the new airport. She says, “Before Modi, Ayodhya was a dump.”

But she says all this development hasn’t benefited residents like her. She says she struggles to earn $10 a day as a laborer for hire, digging roads and bricklaying. She hopes Modi will be interested in creating good jobs for workers like her.

Source: India’s Modi to inaugurate Hindu temple in Ayodhya, where rioters destroyed a mosque

A Hindu temple to the prime minister: “What does that tell us about Indian nationalism and racial segregation?” Comment on Modi’s declaration at the temple consecration

Analysts say that goodwill for the Indian prime minister and the way he is seen as upholding the Hindu faith and identity of so many Indians are what will likely carry his party to victory in upcoming elections.

But Modi’s presence at the temple consecration “essentially means a political declaration in favor of Hindu supremacy,” argues Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and co-author of a recent essay comparing India’s Hindu nationalism to Jim Crow racial segregation policies in the United States.

Zya Us Salam, a veteran journalist and author says the idea of asserting Hindu supremacy is what it’s about. “There is one religion which is supreme in the country, and everybody else who is a non-follower of that religion is reduced to the status of a second-class citizen.”

Some of the Muslim residents in the city seem to agree with that sentiment. Reuters reported last month that a dozen Muslim men planned to send family members away before Jan. 22, fearing violence at the hands of Hindu visitors.

Thousands of Muslims live near the new Hindu temple. Down the road from Pandey and her family, Mohammad Azem Qadri and his friends sit outside a crumbling mosque, warming themselves at a fire built of wood and plastic.

He refers to the 5 acres of land that the Indian Supreme Court ordered the government to give the Muslim community to build another mosque after rioters destroyed the Babri Masjid. The land was supposed to be a prominent location in the city and near the new Hindu temple. The court did not explain why, but it was presumably to offer the Muslim community a new focal religious site after the iconic three-domed mosque was destroyed.

The temple is still not finished. The official says it will require another year and a half to finish. Political analysts say the consecration was performed so the prime minister could show it off as an achievement ahead of national elections set for this spring. Modi’s party had long promised to construct a temple to Ram on this spot.

The temple of the slum pandey (Kadri) — a national event of the birthplace of the Lord Ram

Qadri, his friends, and his family are unlikely to ever go there. They’ll stick to their local small mosques, tucked between homes and shops in Muslim-dominated areas.

A barrier made of orange fabric and marigold garlands appears to be concealing the view of the slum where Pandey and her family live.

The temple consecration has become a national event. Around 8,000 dignitaries are invited and are expected to arrive on dozens of chartered planes. The ceremony will be livestreamed, and the government has announced a half-day holiday for employees. Striking orange flags and bunting can be found in Mumbai and New Delhi.

“It’s a very big, actually, launchpad for upcoming elections in May,” Singh says. The temple is not fully complete, so they are in a rush to get it up and running.

“Opening this in January is critical for [the BJP] to go to elections with this feather in their cap and saying: ‘I did this,'” says Valay Singh, an independent journalist and author of Ayodhya: City of Faith, City of Discord.

Critics of the Indian prime minister say the real reason for the rushed ceremony is to allow Modi to participate in the process of consecration ahead of this year’s parliamentary elections.

The temple will take a year and a half to finish, says the woman standing on the walkway. But the trust is impatient to see the Ram idol consecrated, a ritual he describes as an “invitation to the Almighty, the formless Almighty, to come and start living in that form.” Modi and 21 priests will be in charge of the ritual.

The monkeys were playing off of the scaffolding that surrounds the temple when foreign journalists were invited to the site. It’s built to inspire awe, with dozens of columns and cascading arches, approached by stone stairs. Large cranes hefted heavy stones, including intricately carved sandstone, into place.

The temple inauguration marks the culmination of a decades-long dispute over a site that Hindus believe is the birthplace of their Lord Ram. In 1992, a mob egged on by leaders of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, now led by Modi, tore down a 16th century mosque. Riots that followed killed over 2,000 people, most of them Muslim.

Three decades ago, a historic mosque was destroyed in a city sacred to Hindus, and critics say it’s still helping transform India from a secular democracy into a Hindu nationalist state.

The workers shouted “Victory to Lord Ram!” as they entered, one of the most revered deities of the Hindu pantheon. Over the years, the chant has become a rallying cry of Hindu nationalists, who believe India should serve its Hindu majority instead of being a secular, constitutional democracy that promises equal rights to all.

A Hindu Temple demolished by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb is a Mosque in Ayodhya

On a late-December day, during a tour of the compound arranged for foreign journalists, dozens of workers in bright-yellow hard hats walked past police in green fatigues sporting assault rifles. They traveled past a police checkpoint that guarded the entrance to the construction site, surrounded by high walls of corrugated tin. Facial recognition cameras registered the men, who then ducked through metal detectors.

Two more legal cases have been filed in Hindu pilgrimage sites in northern India where Hindu nationalists are trying to take ownership of land that currently houses mosques. Ranjana Agnihotri, a Modi supporter and lawyer contesting one such site in Mathura, says Hindu nationalists are focusing on a mosque there that they believe is built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Krishna, and another in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, which they claim was home to a temple demolished by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who ruled in the 17th and 18th centuries.

They were not allowed into the temple on Monday. Thousands of security forces kept devotees behind barricades, while folk dancers and musicians performed on the pavement.

On Monday morning, saffron flags billowed and devotional songs blared on loudspeakers on Ayodhya’s streets. The local administration had put up hundreds of billboards bearing images of Modi to welcome over 8,000 dignitaries, including film actors, cricket players, industrialists and Hindu seers.

Many Indian public schools and colleges declared a holiday on Monday, causing civil servants in the central government to take a half-day off. People were encouraged to light lamps in celebration, and the saffron-clad volunteers handed out rice to honor Lord Ram.

“Lord Ram is our god, our ancestor, our king,” says Pooja Kashyap, a 28-year-old from Ayodhya, who spoke with NPR before performing Hindu rituals at Ayodhya’s Sarayu river. He needs to be in his temple.

Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of the temple’s construction in February, an swastika symbol of Lord Ram has been removed from a tent near the site of the temple.