Reclaiming Heritage
"The whole country is thrilled, the wait of centuries is ending." "See the amazing power of Lord Ram. Buildings were destroyed, there was a lot of effort to eradicate his existence, but Ram remains in our mind even today." Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ayodhya, India
"Usurpation of the land by an unjust, oppressive, shameful and majority-appeasing judgement can't change its status." "Babri Masjid was and will always be a Masjid." All India Muslim Personal Law Board
"[The timing of Modi's visit to Ayodhya, on the Kashmir anniversary, is] deeply symbolic." "What is being founded on the 5th August in Ayodhya is not merely a Ram temple but a new republic which is going to stand on the remnants of constitutional democracy in India." Pragya Tiwari, writer with roots near Ayodhya
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (center) performs the groundbreaking ceremony of a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Lord Ram in Ayodhya, India, on Wednesday. Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP |
Last year the Supreme Court of India ruled that Hindus believing the site in the northern town of Ayodhya to be the birthplace of Lord Ram, be permitted to build a temple there. With that ruling years of litigation ended. Lord Ram in Hindu lore is a physical incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, sacred and immutable. And finally a site contested by Muslims in a dispute lasting decades, one that was responsible for inciting some of India's most bloody communal violence, was formally and legally designated Hindu heritage.
India by heritage is Hindu, though within its huge population there is a diversity of peoples and religions. Among them Islam, giving India the third largest Muslim population in the world. Hindu and Muslim Indians have lived together for well over a millennia; aspects of their variant cultures have enriched the whole in a long history where once Islam became dominant and for centuries Mughal India was ruled by Muslim Sultans.
Until, just as Europe where parts of Spain, Portugal and Sicily were invaded and ruled by Muslims, both Hindu India and Christian Europe threw off the Islamic yoke.
In that time of rule Muslim art and architecture also ruled. And in the town of Ayodhya where once a Hindu temple dedicated to Ram had existed, it was replaced by an Islamic mosque. The Babri Mosque had been built in 1528 on the site of the original Hindu temple. Hindus claim the site was sacred to them long before the entry of Islam into India. In 1992 Hindu protesters brought down the mosque.
That event led to massive riots, ending after about two thousand mostly Muslims were killed. In Ayodhya at the present time many Muslims living there feel relief in news of the temple construction, hoping that years of acrimony and tension between Muslims and Hindus will come to an end, and economic growth furthered, even as an influential Muslim group denounced the building of the temple.
As far as many of India's Muslim minority -- 182 million people, in a country whose entire population rings in at 1.3 billion -- is concerned the court ruling awarding Hindus the site acknowledging its heritage priority, demonstrates a pattern established by the Hindu-nationalist government of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of which Narenda Modi is head, to deprive Muslims of their rights.
The construction launch itself arrived on the first anniversary of the Indian government's scrapping of special privileges for the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, an incendiary issue between India and its Muslim populations, one in which Pakistan, which claims part of Kashmir itself, has violently intervened and over which a war between the two was once fought.
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| Credit...Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse — Getty Image |
Labels: India
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 08, 2020
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