On Monday, millions of people across India celebrated the opening of Ram Mandir – a massive new temple to Ram, one of Hinduism's holiest figures, built in the city of Ayodhya, where many Hindus believe he was born.
The celebration in Ayodhya, presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attracted some of India's richest and most famous citizens. But given the pomp and circumstance, few explicitly addressed Ram Mandir's dark origins: It was built on the site of an ancient mosque that was demolished by a Hindu mob in 1992.
Many of the rioters belonged to the RSS, a militant Hindu supremacist group that Modi has been a member of since he was eight years old. Since coming to power in 2014, Modi has worked tirelessly to replace India's secular democracy with a Hindu, sectarian state.
The construction of a temple in Ayodhya is the exclamation point on an agenda that also includes revoking the autonomy long granted to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, imposing new anti-Muslim citizenship and immigration rules, and the Rewriting textbooks to gloss over Hindu violence against Muslims from Indian history.
Modi has also waged war on the fundamental institutions of Indian democracy. He and his allies have consolidated control over much of the media, suppressed critical speech on social media, jailed protesters, pressured independent government agencies and even prosecuted Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi on dubious charges.
For many Hindus, the inauguration of Ram Mandir was a significant religious event. But from a political perspective, the event looks like a grim portrait of Modi's India in miniature: a monument to an exclusive vision of Hinduism, built on the ruins of one of the world's most remarkable secular democracies.
Therefore, it is important to understand the history of the temple in order to understand one of the most important issues of our time: how democracy in its greatest stronghold faces an existential threat.
How the Ayodhya Temple dispute led to Modi's India
The Ayodhya dispute has become a flashpoint in modern Indian politics because it raises a fundamental ideological question: Who is India for?
The relevant story here begins in the early 16th century, when a Muslim descendant of Genghis Khan named Babur invaded the Indian subcontinent from his small base in Central Asia. Babur's conquests founded the Mughal Empire, a dynasty that would rule for generations in what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. At least a remnant of the Mughal state survived until the British conquered India in the 19th century.
The mosque in Ayodhya was a product of the early Mughal Empire. Some evidence suggests that it was built almost immediately after the conquest of Ayodhya by Babur's troops in 1529. It was called Babri Masjid – literally “Babur's Mosque” – and was a testament to the influence of the Mughal dynasty and its Muslim rulers had an impact on Indian history and culture.
During the British colonial period, there were major disagreements between various Indian factions over how the Mughal Empire should be remembered.
For Mahatma Gandhi, who led the mainstream independence movement, the Mughal Empire was a testament to India's history of religious diversity and pluralism. Gandhi praised the Mughal dynasty, particularly its early leadership, for adopting religious tolerance as a central state policy. “They were then [Hindus and Muslims] “They were not known to quarrel at all,” he said in 1931, blaming British colonial policy for current sectarian tensions.
But the leadership of the Hindu nationalist RSS organization saw things differently. They focused in particular on the late Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who imposed a special tax on non-Muslims and demolished Hindu temples, and argued that the Mughals were more similar to the British than Gandhi allowed. In their opinion, the Muslim dynasty was not an authentic Indian regime at all; it was just another colonial conquest of an essentially Hindu nation. Muslims could not and should not be viewed as full and equal members of the community.
The Babri Mosque quickly became the focal point of this historical and political dispute. Since Ayodhya was widely regarded by Hindus as the birthplace of Ram, the presence of a prominent Mughal mosque there was viewed as an affront by Hindu nationalists. In 1949, soon after independence, a statue of Ram was discovered in the mosque itself. Hindu nationalists claimed this was a divine manifestation, evidence that the mosque itself was the place where Ram was born.
But according to Hartosh Singh Bal, editor-in-chief of Indian news magazine The Caravan, the historical record tells a different story.
“Members of a right-wing Hindu organization climbed over the walls, took the idol with them, [and] put it there,” Bal told Vox’s Today Explained. “This was the first alleged evidence of this [site] was in some way connected to a Hindu monument.”
This manufactured conflict over Mughal religion and heritage did not play a major role in Indian politics for years. The Congress Party, the political offspring of Gandhi's secular-liberal vision for India, dominated Indian politics and won every single national election in India's first 30 years of independence.
But in the 1980s, as the public grew weary of Congress party dominance, Hindu nationalists' efforts to stoke tensions around the mosque intensified – and came under political fire. The BJP, the political arm of the RSS, made the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri Mosque a central part of its political agenda. The party, which won only two seats in the Indian Parliament in the 1984 elections, won 85 seats in 1989.
Indian police guarding the Babri Masjid in 1990. Robert Nickelsberg/Liaison
The RSS and the BJP continued to put pressure on the issue and helped organize a series of yatras (pilgrimages) to Ayodhya demanding the demolition of the mosque. These became huge, unruly and even violent. In 1992, an out-of-control Hindu nationalist mob armed with hammers and pickaxes stormed the Babri Mosque. They tore it down by hand, which terrified many Indians and sparked religious riots across India that killed thousands.
Andrea Malji, a scholar of Indian religious nationalism at Hawaii Pacific University, describes the Babri Masjid movement as a kind of “feedback loop.” By drawing widespread attention to a source of Hindu-Muslim conflict, the movement actually caused more fear of each other among Hindus and Muslims – leading to more intergroup conflict and thus increased support for Hindu nationalism among Hindus. This was very good for the political fortunes of the BJP.
“Mobilization around identity – especially when you make up 80 percent of the country [as Hindus are] is an effective political strategy,” she tells me.
The Ayodhya dispute was not the only reason why the BJP would displace the Congress as the dominant party in Indian politics in the coming years. Modi's first national victory in the 2014 elections was largely due to economic problems and the numerous corruption scandals in Congress.
But Ayodhya was the crucible in which the BJP's modern political approach emerged. Modi's political innovation has refined this approach, developing a brand of Hindu identity politics that has greater appeal to lower castes than the BJP had previously achieved with the historically upper castes. Over time, he became increasingly aggressive in pushing his ideological agenda.
Despite all this, the Ayodhya issue remained a key priority for both Modi and the BJP. In 2019, just months after Modi's re-election, India's Supreme Court ruled that construction of Ram Mandir could begin on the former Babri Mosque site. His inauguration this week is a declaration of victory for Modi and the BJP on one of their most important issues – one of the most visible in a long line of successes.
Hindu nationalism versus democracy
The Ayodhya dispute helps us understand a deeper connection between the rise of Modi-style populism and the erosion of Indian democracy – that anti-democratic politics is not a flaw in BJP rule, but an essential feature.
India's constitution and founding documents clearly declare the country to be a secular nation for all its citizens. This universalist vision permeates Indian law and government; it lies in the heart of the Indian state. India's founding fathers believed that this was essential to making the Indian state a viable democracy: There is no world in which the citizens of so large and astonishingly diverse a country could work together unless they were guaranteed certain fundamental equality .
“We must keep it clear to ourselves and the country that the alliance of religion and politics in the form of communalism is a most dangerous alliance,” Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, said in a 1948 speech. “The only right path for us is to abolish communalism in its political aspect in every shape and form.”
In contrast, Modi's Hindu nationalism assumes that legitimacy rests not on the consent of all citizens, but on the consent of the true people of India. This means Hindus in general and Hindu nationalists in particular. Because they believe they represent the true nation, Modi and the BJP have no problem suppressing the rights of those who disagree – including not just Muslims but also Hindu critics in the press and controls in the Indian state.
“I find it very difficult to reconcile Hindu nationalism and democracy,” says Aditi Malik, a political scientist at the College of the Holy Cross who studies Indian politics.
In theory, there is nothing undemocratic about building a Hindu temple on a recognized holy site, especially if the construction is duly approved by the judicial authorities. But when it is built on the ruins of a mosque demolished by a Hindu nationalist mob allied with the ruling government, it sends not only a signal of Hindu joy but also a signal of Muslim submission by any means necessary. What is noteworthy is that at no point during the ceremony did Modi apologize to Indian Muslims for the violent manner in which the road to Ram Mandir was paved.
Devotees line up to take a look at a Ram statue a day after the Ram Mandir's consecration ceremony on January 23, 2024 in Ayodhya, India. Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images
Milan Vaishnav, India expert at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, sees this as an example of the BJP's general approach to wielding power. In his view, the party has brought about a gradual collapse of the norms of restraint in Indian politics, adopting an “end justifies the means” approach to pushing the Hindu nationalist agenda because it believes it speaks for the true majority.
“You get the feeling that everything it does has a democratic imprimatur because this government is democratically elected,” he says.
Modi's war on the free press — which has included fellow oligarchs buying up independent media outlets, pressuring auditors at critical media outlets and even jailing reporters on terrorism charges — is a case in point.
Attempting to force the media to adopt a friendly line is undemocratic in every sense, even if the measures are approved by a legislative majority. But the BJP believes that it, and it alone, speaks on behalf of the Hindu nation – and that critics in the press have no more right to challenge it than Muslims.
There is every reason to believe that India will continue on this anti-democratic path in the years to come.
Across India, the inauguration of Ram Mandir was widely seen as the start of Modi's re-election campaign. With elections set to begin sometime in mid- to late spring, Modi is preparing a campaign focused on his appeal as an almost godlike champion of Hindus.
“[The temple inauguration] strengthens Mr Modi's image as a champion of Indians abroad and Hindus at home; as someone who keeps his promises,” Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a senior fellow who studies South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells me. “Expect a lot more of this as election season begins.”
Indian observers agree that Modi will win comfortably. The BJP won three victories in December's local elections and the prime minister himself has an approval rating somewhere in the 70s. Whatever one thinks of Modi's Hindu nationalism, there is no doubt that he is genuinely popular among hundreds of millions of Indians.
While evaluating India, we need to keep two thoughts in mind at the same time. First, Modi and his agenda are really popular with the Hindu majority. Second, this popularity has given him space to pursue an ideological agenda that threatens the long-term viability of Indian democracy.
When Modi said in his speech in Ayodhya that this day marks “the beginning of a new era”, that could well be true. India could be entering a long illiberal night – a night in which its democracy may not survive.
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