Indian Hindu nationalists are asking courts to demolish mosques and replace them with temples

As day breaks on the Ganges, a dozen Hindu devotees slowly immerse themselves in the river’s sacred water and chant softly. This is Varanasi, the ancient spiritual center in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh, considered the holiest city.

It’s also where a bitter legal dispute over a 17th-century mosque is increasing religious tensions between the city’s Hindus and Muslims.

The friction has already been caused, said Varanasi resident Vijay Dutt Tiwari. The battle will continue.

The Gyanvapi Mosque, which has stood on the banks of the Ganges for more than 300 years, is the subject of about two dozen legal challenges that claim the structure was built on the ruins of a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva.

Many petitioners want the entire mosque, built by Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, to be demolished and replaced with a temple.

The mosque is heavily guarded by police and cordoned off with concrete barriers and barbed wire. Muslims, who still pray five times a day at Gyanvapi, must pass through tight security before entering the compound.

That security has become even tighter with the general elections underway in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is vying for a third straight term, and following a court ruling in January that allowed Hindu worshipers access to the basement of the disputed mosque to pray.

The decision came after a court-ordered archaeological investigation concluded there was evidence of one large Hindu temple prior to the construction of the existing structure.

The legal battle is the latest religious flashpoint in an India increasingly divided along communal lines. But there are others brewing.

Hindu nationalists target hundreds of mosques

The Gyanvapi Mosque may be the most high-profile case, but it is just one of hundreds of Muslim sites targeted by Hindu nationalist groups, which some historians accuse of aggressive efforts to rewrite India’s history.

Dozens of petitions have been filed, with varying arguments, against mosques and Muslim structures across the country. Judges have allowed the cases to proceed despite India having a law that freezes places of worship as they were when India gained independence in 1947, protecting them from changes or disputes.

Another mosque built by Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, Shahi Eidgah in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, is facing more than a dozen lawsuits.

Even iconic monuments such as South Delhi’s Qutub Minar, a heritage site with its imposing red sandstone minaret, and the world-famous Taj Mahal of Agra have been mentioned in the court.

These legal arguments are growing louder after Modi, who specifically chose the holy city of Varanasi as the constituency he wanted to represent when he first ran for office a decade ago, inaugurated a new temple. (new window) in the city of Ayodhya, dedicated to the Hindu god Lord Ram.

After decades of waiting, our Ram has arrived, Modi told the gathered crowd and the millions of others watching the live feed of the lavish inauguration ceremony.

It was the fulfillment of a decades-long promise by Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who pushed Hindu nationalism to the fore during the prime minister’s decade in power, at the expense of the secularism prevalent in India. constitution is enshrined.

The new Ram temple is built on the ruins of a mosque that was destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992, an illegal action that sparked riots across India and killed 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.

LOOK | Politics and religion on dsiplay as Modi inaugurates a new Hindu temple:

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Politics and religion collide at the opening of the Ram Temple in India

Politics and religion collided in India when Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the opening of a Hindu temple. The Ram Mandir Temple was built on the site of a 16th-century mosque that was destroyed by a mob in 1992.

Hindus say the site was the birthplace of Lord Ram and that a temple existed there before the mosque was built.

Soon after the Ayodhya temple was inaugurated, two of India’s mosques were demolished within days of each other by authorities citing illegal infringement. One was a centuries-old mosque in south Delhi and the other was a mosque and madrasa, or Islamic school, in Haldwani, a city in the northern state of Uttarakhand.

Dispute over the history of the holy site

The increased dispute over Gyanvapi has put Varanasi’s Muslim community on edge, said Syed Mohammad Yaseen, 78, who has been the mosque’s caretaker for decades.

The situation goes from bad to worse, he said. ‘This is what we offer namaz (prayers) and on the other side of the barricades some people are chanting (anti-Muslim) slogans.”

He termed the petitioners’ claims that Hindus used to pray in the basement of the mosque until the 1990s as a complete fabrication.

This never happened Yaseen said.

According to him, the courts are biased against the Muslim side.

We are not heard at all, he said. Decisions are made, but justice is not done.

But those fighting for the mosque’s disappearance are convinced they are the ones who were treated unfairly after being deprived of their holy site in the 17th century.

Arungzeb has razed our temple to the ground, said Sita Sahu, 46, one of the group of women who filed the first lawsuit against the Gyanvapi Mosque in August 2021.

It was an attempt to destroy our culture, so it was deep in our hearts that we wanted to reclaim it.

Sitting next to her with the other women who filed the lawsuit, the conversation turned to their disappointment with the recent ruling that allowed access only to the mosque’s basement.

It was a moment of happiness that disappeared quickly, said a fellow petitioner, Manju Vyas.

Since we started praying (in the mosque), we are not satisfied in our hearts at all. she told CBC News, calling it unfair that they were not allocated the entire area.

Modi’s party promotes Hindu nationalism

During these elections, Modi’s party, the BJP, joined reports of Mughal Muslim invaders destroying temples.

In a campaign video posted to Instagram this week but later removed after the social media site received complaints, the BJP combined anti-Muslim rhetoric with attacks on Modi’s main opponent, the Congress party’s Rahul Gandhi.

The Muslim invaders, terrorists, robbers and thieves came again and again, plundering all our treasures, said the animated video. And besides, they ruined our temples.

That message resonates with 72-year-old Sohan Lal Arya, an activist who has been pushing for the Gyanvapi Mosque to be razed to the ground for years.

He is also a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist volunteer group described by some observers as a paramilitary organization dedicated to spreading the political ideology that Hinduism is India’s dominant religion. Modi’s ruling BJP emerged from the RSS, and they remain closely linked, although the party has repeatedly said it does not discriminate against minorities.

Arya proudly showed off the stone he brought home from Ayodhya in 1992, a piece of the Babri Mosque that he helped destroy along with the rest of the crowd.

Ayodhya was the fulfillment of one of the most important endeavors of my life, he told CBC News in an interview.

That goal was successful, but two more goals await, Arya said, referring to the Gyanvapi Mosque and the one in Mathura.

He said he would like to see all the mosques he believes were built on the sites of destroyed former temples, but for some the list is longer than others.

Historians question the BJP narrative

A senior BJP leader, KS Eshwarappa, has claimed that the Mughals have destroyed 36,000 temples and that they would recapture all those temples one by one. However, many historians scoff at this claim.

History is replaced by myths, said Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, a professor of history specializing in the Mughal Empire, at Aligarh Muslim University.

The destruction of places of worship in the name of religion took place under the Mughals, Rezavi said, but citing the extensive research of another historian, said the BJP’s figures were greatly exaggerated.

According to Richard Eaton, an Indian history professor at the University of Arizona who has written reports on the subject, inscriptions and other documents (new window) more than five centuries suggest that Muslim rulers desecrated about 80 temples, not thousands.

Rezavi said the ruling BJP has been working in a cynical manner twist the story and rewriting India’s past to align it with the Modi government’s Hindu-first ideology.

He also pointed out recent changes in Indian secondary school textbooks (new window) in which chapters on Mughal history and the 2002 Gujarat communal riots were removed as another example of attempts to obscure historical facts.

(It’s) just playing in the gallery to gather the votes of those who are illiterate, those who are influenced only by the pull of religion, Rezavi said.

Some Muslims in Varanasi fear that the current political climate in India will encourage more attacks on controversial mosques – legal or otherwise.

The situation will become very bad, said Yaseen, the caretaker of the Gyanvapi Mosque. “Our Prime Minister has already shown us this by talking about Hindus and Muslims (on the campaign trail).

He made it very clear what kind of behavior awaits us Muslims.

Salimah Shivji (new window) · CBC News