Religion Meets Politics at Temple in India
AYODHYA, India — They fanned out across the vast country, knocking on doors in the name of a cause that would redefine India.
These foot soldiers and organizers, including a young Narendra Modi, collected millions of dollars for a long fight to build a grand Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in northern India. Across 200,000 villages, ceremonies were arranged to bless individual bricks that would be sent to that sacred city, believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the deity Ram.
The bricks, the campaign’s leaders declared, would not just be used for the temple’s construction on land occupied for centuries by a mosque. They would be the foundation for a Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation, that would correct what right-wing Hindus saw as the injustice of India’s birth as a secular republic.
Nearly four decades later, on January 22, Mr. Modi, now the country’s prime minister, inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya — the crowning achievement of a national movement aimed at establishing Hindu supremacy in India by rallying the Hindu majority across castes and tribes.
“After centuries of patience and sacrifice, our Lord Ram has come,” Mr. Modi said during the ceremony. “It is the beginning of a new era.”
The moment is both one of triumph for Hindu nationalists and one of jubilation for many others who care little for politics. Ram has a wide following in India; excitement around the temple’s consecration had been building for weeks, with saffron-colored pennants strung across a million streets and markets, and posters of Ram advertising the event everywhere. But for the country’s 200 million Muslims, the Ram temple has reinforced a sense of despair and dislocation.
The Babri Mosque, which the Hindu side argued was built after Muslim rulers destroyed an earlier Hindu temple in the spot, was brought down in 1992 by Hindu activists, unleashing waves of sectarian violence that left thousands dead. The manner in which the mosque was razed set a precedent of impunity that reverberates today: lynchings of Muslim men accused of slaughtering or transporting cows, beatings of interfaith couples to combat “love jihad” and “bulldozer justice” in which the homes of Muslims are leveled by officials without due process in the wake of religious tensions.
The Hindu right wing has ridden the Ram movement to become India’s dominant political force. The opening of the temple, built over 28 hectares at a cost of nearly $250 million, marks the unofficial start of Mr. Modi’s campaign for a third term, in an election expected in the spring.
That it was Mr. Modi who was the star of the inauguration of the temple in Ayodhya — which Hindu nationalists have compared to the Vatican and Mecca — captures the right’s blurring of old lines.
India’s founding fathers took great pains to keep the state distanced from religion, seeing it as crucial to the country’s cohesion after the communal bloodletting wrought by the 1947 partition that cleaved Pakistan from India. But Mr. Modi has normalized the opposite.
After completing the consecration rituals alongside priests, Mr. Modi prostrated in front of the Ram idol, carved with a warm smile and lucid eyes in black stone and bedecked in jewels. The prime minister then emerged at the edge of the temple steps in his signature style for big moments: the powerful leader, alone in the frame, striding forward and bowing to the thousands of handpicked guests — celebrities, seers and business leaders — seated below.
Mr. Modi’s party chief recently described him as “the king of gods.” Ahead of the inauguration, the town was covered in posters and billboards, of Ram and of Mr. Modi.
The omnipresent leader, in mixing religion and politics, has achieved what his predecessors could not: turning a diverse and argumentative Indian society into something resembling a monolith that falls in line behind him. To question him is to question Hindu values, and is akin to blasphemy.
Manoj Kumar Jha, an opposition lawmaker, said that while Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., might be toppled someday, the transformation of the state and society would take decades, at least, to undo.
“Winning elections could be arithmetic,” Mr. Jha said. “But the fight is in the realm of psychology — the psychological rupture, the social rupture.”
Just as Muslim Pakistan was founded as a state for one religious group, he said, India is “now emulating Pakistan, a little late.”
“The toxic mix of religion and politics is idealized,” Mr. Jha added. “Nobody is bothered to see what such a toxic mix has done.”