The Mosque and the Temple

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Today, everywhere one looks in India one sees political deterioration and religious turmoil. In the northeast, in the state of Assam, the Hindus are trying to expel hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants who have been streaming in from impoverished Bangladesh; and, in other parts of the northeast, for some time the Nagas, the Gurkhas, the Mizos, and the Jharkhands have all had secessionist movements afoot. In the northwest, the government has turned Kashmir, which has a predominantly Muslim population, into a virtual police state, thereby stoking its secessionist movement. Similarly, Indira Gandhi's 1984 attack, in Amritsar, on the Golden Temple, the Sikhs' holiest shrine, and the government's military suppression since then of the violent Sikh movement for an independent homeland in Punjab have created an apparently insoluble religious conflict between the Hindus and the Sikhs there, turning that state into an Indian version of Northern Ireland. Throughout the country, in all the major religions, extremism has been steadily on the rise over the last decade.

The Mosque's Destruction

The most egregious example of Hindu extremism concerns Babari Masjid, a mosque built in Ayodhya in 1528 by a lieutenant of the Mogul Emperor Babar in what is now the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. In 1987, the Bharatiya Janata Party, in concert with several private extremist Hindu organizations, embarked on a campaign to demolish the mosque and erect in its place a temple to Ram, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu and the protagonist of the great Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. The BJP and its allies could not have chosen a more effective image and symbol than Ram to promote their cause among the people. For centuries, his exemplary life has been a model for Hindus, especially in northern India. His name is known to every child and is constantly invoked as a symbol of love and peace, unselfishness and renunciation, suffering and endurance. The recitation of his name is to most Hindus a little like what making the sign of the cross is to Catholics. Although only the town of Ayodhya is associated with Ram, the BJP and its allies claimed--on the strength of some dubious legendary sources--that the very site of the mosque was the birthplace of Ram. They called for its liberation from Muslims and for the establishment of Rama Rajya, a sort of "God's kingdom," throughout India...