TheEconomistAugust 8th 2020 171T
hirty yearsago a thrusting activist
called Narendra Modi helped to organ-
ise a month-long political procession
across northern India. The Ram Rath Yatra
began at the city of Somnath, in his home
state of Gujarat, and snaked up and down
the country on its way to a mosque in the
city of Ayodhya in the state of Uttar Pra-
desh, at the spot where many Hindus be-
lieve the god Ram was born. Mr Modi had
recently joined the national campaign
team of the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Ja-
nata Party (bjp), which was agitating for the
demolition of the mosque and the con-
struction of a temple in its stead.
The cavalcade vaulted the bjpinto the
top ranks of Indian politics. At the next
election its share of the vote nearly dou-
bled, making it the biggest opposition
party. And even though the mosque was de-
stroyed in 1992 after a bjprally at its gates
descended into a riot, the courts dithered
for decades about what should become of
the ruins, leaving the party with a perenni-
al campaign issue. The fact that the demoli-
tion sparked nationwide violence that
claimed over 2,000 lives only helped the
bjp, by heightening sectarian tensions.
The episode also accelerated the career
of Mr Modi, whose efficiency and drive
earned the admiration of the bjp’s top lead-
ers. He received a further boost when a fire
aboard a train in his home state of Gujarat
killed 59 Hindu pilgrims returning from
Ayodhya. Local Muslims were accused of
arson, and in the ensuing pogrom at least
1,000 people, the vast majority of them
Muslim, died. Although the courts have
cleared Mr Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister at
the time, of complicity in the violence, he
has been lauded by Hindu extremists eversince for putting Muslims in their place.
On August 5th Mr Modi, now prime
minister, returned to Ayodhya—for the
first time since 1991, according to some re-
ports. He was there to lay the foundation
stone of the temple for which he and his
party have campaigned for his entire ca-
reer, and for which the Supreme Court had
at last cleared a path in November. Mr Modi
(pictured) prayed and chanted in religious
garb and a medical facemask alongside
Yogi Adityanath, a firebrand Hindu cleric
whom he elevated to chief minister of Uttar
Pradesh, and Mohan Bhagwat, the head of
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a
goose-stepping Hindu paramilitary group
with perhaps 5m members. Then he helped
manoeuvre a 40kg silver brick into place
before declaring, “The wait of centuries is
ending.” He did not mention, much less la-
ment, the vandalism that had cleared the
way for the temple’s construction.
Although India is officially a secular re-
public, the barrier between faith and state
has never been absolute. The state has even
abetted the construction of a Hindu temple
on a site occupied by a mosque before—in
the 1950s, at Somnath, the starting point of
the Ram Rath Yatra. But previous govern-
ments concentrated on reforming Hindu-
ism, weeding out practices deemed back-
ward, such as discrimination on the basis
of caste. In that vein, in 2018, the Supreme
Court ruled that women must be allowed to
enter the Sabarimala temple in the south-Hindu nationalism
India shrining
DELHI
The ruling party fulfils a decades-long campaign by building a Hindu temple
where a mosque once stood
Asia
20 Banyan:LeeTeng-huiandTaiwan18 Australia’sself-isolatingstates
19 CorruptioninUzbekistan
19 Hair and freedom in ThailandAlso in this section