Ghosts of Ayodhya

When a right-wing group in India razed down Babri Masjid in the 1990s, many analysts had thought that the incident was an unwanted patch on India’s shining example of a secular democratic state and that the country would take measures to restore communal harmony within. For many years, the dispute remained political, occasionally exploited by far-right politicians to get people to vote for them but India’s secular credentials remained intact – at least until the popularity of the BJP. Today, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will arrive in Ayodhya to inaugurate Ram Mandir. In 2019, in an unprecedented move, the Supreme Court of India handed over the land to a trust to build a temple and so the long weaponized slogan of making a temple on the ruins of Babri Masjid finally turned into reality. The 2019 decision, however, was not isolated. It came at a time when India increasingly showed itself as a terrible place for minority communities.

The India of today is starkly different from what its founders had imagined. While India has always remained a Hindu-majority state, both the Indian government and its people kept religion and the state separate. But over the recent past, India has focused more on becoming a majoritarian state, with no respect to the country’s minorities. The annexation of Occupied Kashmir is also a part of India’s goal of turning the once secular state into a state dominated by Hindutva ideology. Ever since the demolition of Babri Masjid, most people were of the view that the Indian Supreme Court itself could not decide on the fate of the land and that the Indian parliament would have to pass laws to allow the construction of the temple on the disputed land. But the BJP government proved everyone wrong.

The Modi government has comfortably built itself a state that bears no dissent. The team of online trolls that are glaringly pro-BJP and pro-RSS launch online attacks against people who dare question the government’s tactics. The Modi government has already silenced the media. Digital outlets that cropped up to challenge the government’s narrative are slapped with long, complicated FIRs, with their founders and editors imprisoned. The Indian diaspora, in its search for its lost identity, often ends up amplifying the government’s voice abroad, leading to little protest by international organizations against India. This authoritarian rule, under a veneer of democracy, has brought India to a point where its mistakes of the past are being celebrated, with absolutely no dissenting or critical voice.