On Monday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the opening of the Ram Mandir—a Hindu temple—in Ayodhya, a city in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh; this has been a long-standing dream for both Modi and the Hindu-nationalist movement he leads. “It’s the beginning of a new era,” he told a crowd of thousands at the temple’s inaugural ceremony. Several decades ago, he was a young Hindu activist helping raise funds for the temple, and now he is a Prime Minister in his second consecutive term.
India’s decisive break with secularism as a semi-official state ideology could be said to have begun in Ayodhya. It was there, in 1992, that the Babri Masjid, a four-hundred-year-old mosque, was destroyed by a mob aligned with both Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a paramilitary organization he belonged to. (Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, was also a member of the R.S.S., which has been involved in numerous cases of communal violence throughout its history.)
The B.J.P. and the R.S.S. conceive of India as an explicitly Hindu nation, despite the fact that the country has a population of more than two hundred million Muslims. (Both the B.J.P and R.S.S. consider the Congress Party, which ruled India in the decades after its 1947 independence from the United Kingdom, as overly committed to secularism.) In 2019, several months after Modi’s reëlection, the Supreme Court of India—after a prolonged legal dispute—allowed for the construction of a Hindu temple on the site, which many Hindus believe is the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. (Many Hindu nationalists also claim that the mosque was built on the ruins of a previous temple to Ram.) The conclusion of the saga this month, highlighted by Modi’s remarks, will almost surely be a centerpiece of the Prime Minister’s campaign in the spring, when he is expected to win a third term.
I recently spoke by phone with Mukul Kesavan, an essayist and historian who lives in New Delhi. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the roots of Modi’s popularity, the violent history of the Ayodhya dispute, and what makes India different from other countries experiencing right-wing political movements.
Do you think it’s overstating things to say that what we saw this week is the most important symbolic moment in the past several decades in India?
No, no, it’s not overstating things. Basically, there is and was a nationalist project other than the anti-colonial one that began in 1925 with the foundation of the R.S.S., an organization which explicitly had a kind of Hindu majoritarianism at the center. The R.S.S. always felt alienated from the Congress Party and anti-colonial nationalism, because it tried to create a unifying ideology for what is essentially a subcontinent that’s as large as Europe. And it did so by standing European nationalism on its head. Instead of arguing that there’s a kind of prior homogeneity which constitutes the nation, the Congress Party nationalism argued that the Congress represents the Indian nation because it represents its diversity. It’s a kind of zoological nationalism that says, Look, India is a human jungle. We are the zoo. We, in a sense, are representative of all these different communities.
It’s this peculiar, pluralist nationalism that’s detested by the R.S.S. and Hindu-majoritarian movements, which actually wanted to model themselves on a certain kind of conservative mid-European nationalism based on notions of homogeneity.
The reason that this is symbolically so important is that the Ram Mandir was the ramp which brought the B.J.P. to power. It allowed them to create this astonishing mobilization of Indians for political purposes. It helped the B.J.P. get into government, in the late nineteen-nineties, and then Modi ran with it. And, while he has achieved and consolidated his political power through two elections and an absolute majority, I think it’s always been the larger ambition of the R.S.S., which is in a sense Modi’s progenitor, to literally reconstitute the Indian Republic. There is a sense in which they think of the period between 1947 and 1950, when the constitution was written, as one where the soul of India was suppressed, and they would like to do it over again.
Can you take us back to the early nineties and the destruction? My sense, at least from reading about it, is that it truly constituted a shock. And now if you follow news in India, something like this would not seem shocking at all.
The Ram-temple movement was activated in the eighties. The idea that the site of the temple was the birthplace of Ram, that there was a temple buried underneath it, that Hindus should be allowed to worship here, is an old argument going back to the nineteenth century. The organizations that lead the Ram Mandir movement are all formally affiliated with the R.S.S. And this includes the B.J.P., which was invented in the late seventies. And the history of the Ram-temple campaign is basically the history of provocations that aren’t addressed by the state either because dealing with them seemed to be too much trouble, or the matter seemed too sensitive.
In 1992, when the building is in fact demolished, it’s a shocking business because nobody actually thinks it’s going to happen. And, in any case, nobody actually knows what will bring down a large mosque. As it happens, it’s incredibly efficiently demolished with people using the crudest of tools. Essentially, it is brought down by hand, as [the B.J.P. co-founder] L. K. Advani and other luminaries of the B.J.P. and its affiliates watch. It’s a massive communal shock because the kind of violence it unleashes, both in North India and in Bombay, is just massive. It’s a shock to the extent that the principal perpetrators of this, the leadership of the B.J.P., all sort of fake shock that they didn’t want to do this because it was clearly a criminal act and none of them actually want to go to jail. But, historically, the shock is that its resonances are so deep.
Several decades later, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to the building of the temple. What did that ruling do, and what do you think it says about checks and balances in India today?
There were two separate legal disputes about Ayodhya. One was the criminal action for the destruction of the mosque. But the dispute that was settled in favor of the Hindu party by the Supreme Court a couple of years ago was what is called a title suit. There were Hindu and Muslim parties who sued for control of the site where the mosque was. This pre-dated the demolition of the mosque, and it went on rumbling through. The title suit was decided by this unanimous verdict by the Supreme Court, and, in the course of their judgment, interestingly, the justices say that the destruction of the mosque is a criminal act and, therefore, it’s to be condemned and so on. But then, through a series of not-so-legal arguments, they came to the conclusion that all of the land of the temple of the mosque should be given to the Hindu party. Essentially, they make some of the right noises about the demolition of the mosque being a bad thing. But, nonetheless, they say, For the following reasons, we think that it should all go to the Hindu party, and we’ll give the Muslims five acres elsewhere. I think it’s basically the court capitulating to Modi and the movement. And, also, courts often think, What if we give a judgment that’s unenforceable? What if there is a sense in which what is just will not apply?