Why the new Ram temple in India is so important

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate a massive new temple in the Indian city of Ayodhya on Monday, capping a largely 20th-century odyssey in which Hindu nationalists finally tore down a centuries-old mosque that has now been replaced by a structure dedicated to the Hindu god Ram.

In the run-up to the temple's dedication, public spaces in India were buzzing with excitement. Ram is one of the most revered gods among India's Hindus, who make up about 80 percent of the country's total population of 1.4 billion people. As the hero of the Ramayana epic, he is a king and a paragon of virtue, exiled from his native Ayodhya, who returns home to a jubilant coronation.

Islam does not appear in the Ramayana as it arrived in India only 1000 years ago. But it is portrayed as the main villain in the Hindu nationalist narrative of India's history. Now, with a spiritual and political homecoming of sorts for Mr. Modi, the Ram campaigners have the temple they have sought for decades.

What sets this temple apart?

First, the theological reason. Ayodhya is the original home of Ram. The spot on the Sarayu River was where his righteous rule began. Diwali, India's biggest holiday, marks the end of its 14-year ordeal of separation from the place.

Then there is the more historical answer. In the area around Ayodhya, it was long believed that a Hindu temple had once stood on the land where the Babri Mosque was built in the 16th century. In 1949, shortly after the British left and India gained independence, Hindu activists smuggled idols representing Ram into the mosque, court documents show.

That intensified the battle over the site, with Hindus and Muslims feuding over access to it and police suppressing both sides. In the 1980s, reclaiming the site became the main goal of the Hindutva movement, which for a hundred years has sought to identify multi-ethnic India with Hinduism and vice versa.

As a fledgling political leader, Mr. Modi took part in the Ram Temple campaigns, which at times led to clashes with police and Hindu-Muslim riots. Tensions ran high in 1992, when around 2,000 people were killed in sectarian violence.

What happened in 1992?

The political party representing Hindutva, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and its affiliated groups organized nearly 100,000 of their volunteers to meet in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.

The party led the local government; When young men surrounding the mosque finally stormed it, the police stood idly by. By noon the crowd was tearing apart the mosque. By evening, all three domes had been flattened. The demolition crew set up a makeshift temple where the idols had surfaced in 1949.

People in India's cities were particularly shocked by the destruction and deadly violence that followed. Many associated the rioters with a former Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Godse, who killed Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1948 out of devotion to Hindutva ideology.

Today, the BJP appears to hold national power. But until the Ram temple movement, it was a marginal player. The opposition Congress Party, which until then enjoyed virtually unchallenged power, never made a decision on whether to support or oppose the temple.

What has happened since then?

With the unfulfilled prospect of the Ram Temple in the background, the political strength of the BJP, buoyed by both its pro-Hindu goals and its pro-business orientation, grew at a time when the Indian economy was beginning to open up to the rest of the world. .

After the demolition of the mosque, the Indian legal system tied up the disputed land in a tangle of legal decisions. It remained there until shortly after Modi won his second term as prime minister in 2019. Shortly afterwards, the Supreme Court cleared the way. It insisted that the destruction of the mosque was an illegal act, and then issued an inconvenient judgment that allowed the entire claim to be transferred to a Ram Temple Trust anyway. Muslim claimants were offered an empty plot of land miles away.

The trust raised about $400 million, and construction began in 2020. That money was raised privately, but in many ways the dedication of the Ram Temple became an undertaking of the Indian state.

About 70 percent of the temple has been built. Ayodhya itself has received a new airport, train services and major urban upgrades. The government declared January 22 as a half-day national holiday so that Indians around the world could celebrate the installation of the official Ram idol at the new facility.

The bosses of some political parties, as well as some Hindu religious leaders, objected to the blurred boundaries between church and state and refused to attend the ceremony.

How do Indians view the temple?

Hindu nationalist allies of Mr. Modi tended to look to Jan. 22 as a day of ultimate vindication, or even revenge — against India's medieval Muslim rulers, and against the country's independence leaders, who sought to remain neutral with regarding religion.

Naturally, Indian secularists see the emergence of a Ram temple on the site of the Babri Mosque as confirmation of their own defeat, if not as a blasphemous conflation of Mr Modi with Ram. India's 200 million Muslim citizens generally feel alienated, and that may be the intention.

But many Hindus, especially in the so-called cow belt in the north of the country, are just happy that Ram is finally getting a temple on the holy place where he was born. They celebrated its inauguration during live screenings, such as during a once-a-millennium holiday.

The memory of 1992 is dim among younger Indians, who could watch the spectacle of that day without thinking of the Babri Mosque. The timing seemed designed to strengthen Modi's campaign for a third term; the elections are only a few months away. Some of the partygoers will think he deserves that much, and others won't care much either way.