Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday took center stage at a ceremony laying the foundations for a temple at a flashpoint holy site exactly a year after imposing direct rule on Muslim-majority Kashmir — twin triumphs for his Hindu nationalist government.
The site at Ayodhya, and Kashmir, have been two of the most divisive communal issues of the past 30 years in India, and Modi has attempted to draw a line under both.
For his fans, both steps confirm Modi — elected to a second-straight term in a landslide victory last year — as a decisive, visionary and heroic leader, and India’s most important in decades.
Photo: Reuters
His critics see him as remolding the officially secular country of 1.3 billion as a Hindu nation at the expense of India’s 200 million Muslims.
“Modi has certainly been India’s most transformative leader in recent memory,” making him “wildly popular, but also highly controversial and quite divisive,” said Micheal Kugelman, deputy director and senior associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center.
The holy city of Ayodhya in the state of Uttar Pradesh has long been a religious tinderbox, providing the spark for some of its worst sectarian violence.
Photo: AFP
In 1992, a Hindu mob destroyed a centuries-old mosque there that they believed had been built on the birthplace of Ram, an important deity. This triggered religious riots that killed 2,000 people, most of them Muslims.
A lengthy legal battle ensued, but in November last year — in a major victory for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — India’s top court awarded the site to Hindus, allowing a temple “touching the sky” to be built.
Yesterday’s elaborate religious ceremony was shown live on television and was reportedly set to be beamed in Times Square in New York City. Small celebrations also took place across India.
A masked Modi, 69, shared the stage with the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a militaristic hardline Hindu group that is parent to the BJP and which Modi joined as a young man.
“Not only mankind, but the entire universe, all the birds and animals, are enthralled by this golden moment,” the main priest chanted.
Modi “is going to make his position permanently in history purely on the strength of this temple,” his biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay said.
Further cementing Modi’s place in his country’s annals is Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan since 1947 and the spark for two wars and the source of much bloodshed.
The BJP had long seen the special status enjoyed by the part of Kashmir controlled by India as a historical wrong, and on Aug. 5 last year, Modi abolished it.
An accompanying security operation turned the region into a fortress for weeks, with telecommunications cut and thousands taken into custody.
Even now, India has “maintained stifling restraints on Kashmiris in violation of their basic rights,” Human Rights Watch has said.
Fearing protests ahead of the anniversary, thousands of Indian troops on Tuesday imposed a tight curfew in Kashmir.
In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan — who on Tuesday released a new map showing all of Kashmir as part of Pakistan — led a protest march in Muzaffarabad.
“We will never accept, and neither will the Kashmiris, the illegal Indian actions and oppression of the Kashmiri people,” Khan said in a statement.
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