Republic of Ram: India's Modi lays foundation for Hindu state with grand temple

Indian news channels had buzzed with anticipation since Wednesday morning. Within hours, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was to arrive at the ancient temple town of Ayodhya to lay the foundation stone for a grand temple to Hindu warrior-god Ram. Talking heads analysed the significance of the day. Reporters on the ground relayed the mood across the nation. News anchors provided constant updates on the prime minister's journey from the capital New Delhi to Ayodhya. As the countdown began for his arrival, one anchor broke into devotional songs in praise of the lord. Other channels had priests and sadhus reading out holy scriptures. Even as the audience waited for Modi's touchdown, a new Hindu order seemed to have already arrived.

The breathless media coverage of a religious programme by the leader of a multi-religious, secular state marked the apogee of a calibrated blurring of the line between faith and governance in Modi's India. The much-celebrated launch of the Ram temple capped an ongoing process of establishing Hindu primacy through political messaging, propaganda, government policy, brute force, legislation, popular culture, rewritten history, compliant media and an acquiescent judiciary.

The venue - the site of a Muslim place of worship whose violent erasure paved the way for the grand Hindu temple - invested the day with the additional symbolism of triumph of militant majoritarianism over secularism and rule of law. Modi compared it with India's Independence Day, no less.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the groundbreaking ceremony of a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram, in Ayodhya. Photo: AP alt=Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the groundbreaking ceremony of a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram, in Ayodhya. Photo: AP

The Ram temple will be built where a 16th-century Mughal mosque once stood. The site has long been a religious flash point. The Hindus in the area held that the mosque had been built by the Muslim rulers by razing a Hindu temple in the area, which, they believe, is the exact spot where lord Ram was born. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took up their cause in the mid-1980s, converting the local dispute into a national cry of Hindu assertion. The successful campaign transformed the BJP from a fringe north Indian party into a dominant, national political force but injected a poisonous dose of religious polarisation into Indian politics.

The Ram temple movement culminated in a mob frenzy in 1992 in which Hindu activists tore down the mosque, followed by sectarian riots nationwide. A government-appointed commission of inquiry subsequently found senior BJP leaders guilty of instigating the demolition. The litigation over the disputed land between Hindu and Muslim parties continued in the courts, until the Supreme Court in November awarded the site to the Hindu side. It ordered the federal government to set up a trust for overseeing the construction of a Ram temple and gave Muslims a separate site to rebuild the mosque. The verdict led to Wednesday's groundbreaking ceremony, in which Modi, in the manner of a modern-day Hindu king, led the ritualistic worshipping of the ground and laid the foundation with a silver brick for what he called a "golden chapter" for India.

A Hindu mob celebrates the destruction of the 16th Century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. Photo: AFP alt=A Hindu mob celebrates the destruction of the 16th Century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. Photo: AFP

Much water has flowed down the Sarayu river - on whose banks Ayodhya stands - between the ending of the mosque and the beginning of the "golden chapter". Opposition parties, which once saw the demolition as independent India's most shameful moment, now prefer silence or seek to join in the festivities over what is to replace the debris. The Congress, a sorry shadow of its former self and unsure where it fits in this "golden chapter", has even been trying to claim credit for the temple to out-Ram the BJP. The media, which then couldn't hide its horror at the razing of the mosque, now can't hide its relief at the raising of the temple.

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All of this has become possible as the BJP has, under Modi, attained semi-hegemonic political status in recent years, forcing an ideological remoulding of India's politics and democratic institutions, from the media to the judiciary. After his first successful bid for national power in 2014, Modi last year became the first prime minister in India's history to return to power with a full majority since Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. But unlike centrist parties, for the BJP, the electoral success is more than a mere strong hand to rule. Its Hindu nationalist project, its open grievances against constitutional secularism and Modi's own record of unabashed Hindu supremacism mean that the party sees the back-to-back victories as a referendum of sorts for its majoritarian project of remaking India as a Hindu state.

Senior BJP leaders have in the past waded into controversy by declaring the party's intent to rewrite the secular constitution. The party's opposition to India's secular polity stems from the core beliefs of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a giant right-wing Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organisation, of which the BJP is the political wing. The ruling party's ideological parent has never tried to hide its contempt for the constitution that the leaders of the Congress, which led India to independence, chose for the country.

Temples on the bank of the Sarayu river in Ayodhya, India. Photo: Reuters alt=Temples on the bank of the Sarayu river in Ayodhya, India. Photo: Reuters

Even though independent India was born in a frenzy of religious violence accompanying the partition of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan in 1947, the founding leaders gave India the character of a secular republic in which people of all religions would have just as much rights as Hindus. The inclusive vision of India was articulated by leaders such as Nehru, the first prime minister, who believed it was "entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture" and that only "a secular India is an India that can survive".

The early ideologues of the RSS, inspired by the ideas of late-19th-century European ethnonationalism, saw this as a grave mistake. The constitution, they complained, was a pathetic imitation of Western ideas by Anglophile leaders like Nehru who thought all who lived in the territory of India were equal constituents of the nation. It should, instead, have embodied the "Hindu culture", creating a country in which Hindus would be more equal than others.

The RSS, of which Modi was a long-time activist, hence wants to redefine India according to the majority Hindu faith. The existing pluralistic democratic model has allowed "appeasement of Muslims" and the treatment of Hindus as "second-order citizens", says its mission statement. In Modi and his sweeping majority that pre-empts the compulsions of coalition compromises, it sees the best chance to correct this historical "injustice".

In both its electoral victories under Modi, the BJP has established that its anti-Muslim posturing has consolidated the Hindu vote, with no need to appeal to other religious groups. Hindus constitute roughly 80 per cent of India's population. Muslims are the largest minority group, constituting 14 per cent of the population, which has traditionally made them an important electoral bloc for all political parties. The BJP has turned this logic on its head. In both 2014 and 2019, the BJP came to power with just 8 per cent of the Muslim vote. In 2019, it received 37.4 per cent of the popular vote, roughly 36 per cent being the Hindu vote.

Muslims demonstrate against the Supreme Court verdict on the disputed religious site in Ayodhya, India. Photo: AFP alt=Muslims demonstrate against the Supreme Court verdict on the disputed religious site in Ayodhya, India. Photo: AFP

The BJP has thus, for all practical purposes, rendered the Muslim vote inconsequential. One natural fallout of this is the fading Muslim representation in India's politics. Of the BJP's 303 members in the directly elected lower house of parliament, not one is Muslim. The token Muslim in Modi's cabinet holds the portfolio of "minority affairs". At the state level, Muslim exclusion from politics is similarly stark. Of the 1,418 BJP members of state assemblies in 2018, only four were Muslims.

Modi himself perfected the art of restricting Muslim representation in his 12-year reign of the western state of Gujarat before his rise to national power. Ever since he became the state's chief minister in 2002, the BJP has fielded no Muslim candidate either in state or national elections. Gujarat currently has just three Muslim lawmakers (none from the BJP) in a state assembly of 182, or 1.6 per cent of the total, even as Muslims comprise 9 per cent of Gujarat's population. It's a similar story in most other states.

BJP supporters hold an image of Narendra Modi during a campaign meeting ahead of a Gujarat state assembly election in 2017. Photo: Reuters alt=BJP supporters hold an image of Narendra Modi during a campaign meeting ahead of a Gujarat state assembly election in 2017. Photo: Reuters

The political obliteration is matched by an organised invisibilisation of Muslims from history, public spaces and apolitical spheres of public life. Hindu nationalist scholars have been advising the government on rewriting history. The aim is to fix what they see as flaws in the existing historical narrative of India as a melting pot of multiple cultures and religions and, instead, stress the Hindu-ness of the land from the Vedic times. The 800-odd years of Muslim rule, in this retelling, are a period of humiliating subjugation by outsiders, rather than an integral part of indigenous heritage. As part of this larger project, Muslim names of railway stations, street signs, neighbourhoods and cities are being replaced by more Sanskritised words.

Policemen stand guard ahead of the groundbreaking ceremony of the Ram temple. Photo: AP alt=Policemen stand guard ahead of the groundbreaking ceremony of the Ram temple. Photo: AP

Hindu domination is also enforced through violent foot soldiers of the supremacist project. Online, they operate a concerted campaign of misinformation that demonises Muslims as beastly undesirables with extraterritorial loyalties, as jihadis and suchlike. A vicious troll army silences non-Hindu public intellectuals who do not echo the regime. Offline, they lynch and intimidate Muslims for dating Hindu women and eating beef or transporting cows, considered sacred by some Hindus. The increasingly religious partisanship of local bureaucracies come in handy. In lynching cases, for example, it has become common for police and local administrations to fuss over the nature of meat involved rather than bringing to book the culprits. The subtext of the police procedure is that if you have beef in your fridge, you are asking to be lynched.

If Modi's first term saw a gradual pushing of the envelope on Hindu primacy through these methods, his emphatic re-election put the project into high gear. Soon after returning to power, a law was passed that criminalised the abandonment of wives, but only by Muslim men. His government then pushed through another law that explicitly excluded Muslim refugees from applying for Indian citizenship. The government also pushed for a countrywide citizen verification drive, a localised version of which had already disenfranchised 1.9 million people in the north-eastern state of Assam. While all Indians will be assumed outsiders until they are able to establish their Indianness with documented proof in the verification drive, non-Muslims will have the escape route of claiming refugee status in case they fail the test. This raised the spectre of disenfranchisement for millions of Muslims if they fail the verification test and are unable to use the refugee filter in defence. When protests broke out across India against the government's move, they were squashed with a combination of misinformation, violence and a police crackdown. Peaceful protesters who had been organising candlelight vigils and mass readings of the constitution found themselves thrown into jail under charges of sedition and threatening national security. India's constitution never looked this powerless.

Indian women and children protest against the new citizenship law in Bangalore. Photo: AP alt=Indian women and children protest against the new citizenship law in Bangalore. Photo: AP

It doesn't help that India's Supreme Court, the highest authority in the land tasked with upholding the constitution, has wilted before the might of the Modi government. The day for the Ram temple groundbreaking was chosen carefully to coincide with the anniversary of the dismemberment of Jammu and Kashmir, which was India's only Muslim-majority state. On August 5 last year, Modi revoked Kashmir's constitutionally mandated autonomous status, split it into two federally administered units without any consultation with locally elected representatives, suspended fundamental rights, put all local political leaders in detention, and imposed an information blockade with the longest internet shutdown ever in a democracy. The Supreme Court looked away.

As petitions piled up before the apex court on the constitutional validity of the government's action, it told the litigants that it didn't have time for Kashmir as it was too busy working on the Ayodhya dispute. It was working to a deadline as the then-chief justice had taken it upon himself to gift Modi with a resolution before he retired. He delivered. The judgment ended a seven-decade old religious dispute, but it also announced the arrival of the Hindu state. The court called the destruction of the mosque in 1992 illegal, yet awarded the same people who vandalised it the right to build a temple in its place. The court demanded proof that Muslims had exclusive control of the property in the past, but did not press Hindus for the same. For it, the Hindu belief that a temple existed at the site was more important than the material proof that a mosque existed there for 450 years.

In multi-religious democracies, faith-neutral legal procedures are the strongest protection for minorities as their insubstantial numbers may not be an incentive for the government or political parties to rally to their support. The interests of the majority are naturally protected in democracies because of their numerical strength. It is the secular workings of the courts that protect minority rights. By essentially ordering Hindu beliefs and might above minority rights, India's highest court had already consecrated a Hindu state.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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