India’s Ayodhya/Lucknow Yusra Hussain, a Muslim woman, waited in line to enter a temporary shrine dedicated to the Hindu deity Ram in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, which is thought to be his birthplace. She will never forget what happened next.
The 32-year-old claimed that she was taunted and jeered at. “And the people began to chant Jai Shree Ram, which means “victory to Lord Ram.” A feeling of aggressive triumphalism struck me.
It was eight years in the past. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will dedicate an unfinished Ram temple on Monday, replacing the temporary shrine Hussain had visited. The consecration has sparked a national frenzy that has virtually stopped the nation of 1.4 billion people and its nearly $4 trillion economy.
Ahead of the anticipated March national elections, the stock market is closed, government buildings are only open for business for half of the day, and live screenings of the religious ceremony that Modi’s opponents claim he has appropriated are being shown in movie theaters.
Large public hospitals made the announcement that they would be offering fewer services on the day so that the staff could enjoy the festivities, but some have since taken that statement back.
Any mention of the fact that the temple is being built on the exact site where a Hindu nationalist mob destroyed the 16th-century Babri Masjid on a gloomy December morning in 1992 is conspicuously absent from news outlets and popular discourse.
Based in Lucknow, 120 km (75 miles) east of Ayodhya, Hussain is a freelance journalist. She expressed concern that the “triumphalism” she saw during her first visit to the temple town “may just get worse in the coming days.”
“In fact, there could be a snowball effect on other disputed places like Mathura and Kashi after Ayodhya,” the speaker stated. Modi’s parliamentary constituency, Mathura and Varanasi, also known as Kashi locally, is home to historic mosques that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu majoritarian allies claim were constructed on top of demolished temples.
