Today, Explained - Modi’s temple grandstanding

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple in the once-sleepy city of Ayodhya on Monday. The BBC’s Soutik Biswas and The Caravan’s Hartosh Singh Bal explain how it’s the culmination of his decades-long push to remake India as a Hindu state. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over a spectacle in northern India yesterday. He opened a massive Hindu temple on the site of what used to be a mosque. It's controversial because it replaces the 16th century mosque that once stood there. And it is one of India's most controversial religious sites. What happened was that in 1992, Hindu mobs tore down what was called the Babri Mosque, claiming that it was built by Muslim invaders on the ruins of a temple. Now, this incident sparked off nationwide religious rioting, which took nearly 2,000 lives.

How a centuries-long fight over sacred land was settled and how it wasn't. It's coming up on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your

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questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. This is Today Explained. Shatik Biswas covers India for the BBC, and he's been spending time in the northern Indian city where Narendra Modi opened this enormous Hindu temple yesterday. This was a big win for India's Hindus. It was also a big win for Hindu nationalism. And because this land is contested, the event meant something very different for India's Muslims. It was also Modi's way of unofficially

kicking off his campaign. He's running to be re-elected as India's prime minister. A sea of saffron, the color sacred in the Hindu religion, has taken over the town of Ayodhya. This happened in a city called Ayodhya, which used to be a very sleepy pilgrim town but

it's been completely transformed and today some 8,000 people kind of turned up, were invited including India's top business leaders, movie actors, sports people. All have started arriving in Ayodhya. There you can see film actor Kangana Ranaut. She's arrived there in Ayodhya. There were apparently dignitaries from over 50 countries there as well. Cricketing legend Anil Kumle also arriving there in Ayodhya. The thing was televised live. It showed the Prime Minister performing religious rituals inside the temple. There was a completely festive atmosphere. Tens of thousands of Hindu devotees waved flags, beat drums.

There were military helicopters on top, you know, with shouring kind of flower petals on the temple. It is a huge one. It stretches across more than seven acres in a 70-acre complex. It's an imposing three-story structure. It costs over $200 million to make. It's fully kind of made in pink sandstone. It's built on black granite.

It boasts these towering pillars. And it rests upon about 70,000 square feet of pristine white marble. And inside the temple, there's a 51-inch idol of Lord Ram placed on a marble pedestal. Now, Mr. Modi today actually opened only the ground floor. When the temple will be completed, it is expected to greet a staggering 150,000 visitors a day.

Wow. Which is roughly seven times the current rate. Now, what happened today, quintessentially, was a ceremony called Pran Pratishtha in the Hindi language, which loosely translates into establishment of life force. Now, this ceremony lasted for an hour, and the Hindus believe that chanting mantras and performing rituals around a fire will infuse kind of sacred life in an idol or a photograph of a deity.

And some even proclaim the moment of inauguration of the temple as the start of what they call Ram Rajya or the rule of Lord Ram in India. Our dream has finally become a reality. It's like God himself has appeared before us. So as I said, it was a massive, massive spectacle of the kind India hasn't seen in a while. Okay, so this will be an enormous attraction. I wonder what this means for the people

who were living in the city of Ayodhya. How did they react to this huge development, number one, and what it's going to mean for them? Yeah, I mean, you know, Ayodhya has been a traditionally overwhelmingly Hindu pilgrim city. It's a city inspired by faith and tradition. tradition, the entire city has undergone a makeover around the temple because they want to make it a spiritual and global hub of spirituality and Hindu religion. Our government of Uttar Pradesh is highly focused on doing things for devotees. They know that the pilgrims will be from all over the country and abroad. Yes, sir.

So we have to provide facilities outside the temple to people to stay. About 3,000 houses and shops were partially or fully demolished to widen the corridors leading up to the temple. So there's a certain amount of excitement among the people

saying all this will boost tourism and also it will boost incomes for them because for so far it's been a very fragile pilgrim dependent economy. Now chains like Radisson building hotels, the luxury hotels coming up etc. Ahead of the consecration ceremony Prime Minister Narendra Modi will also be inaugurating the newly built international airport. This will actually serve as a major gateway to the entire city. But on the other side, there are also rumblings of discontent because, you know, all those people whose homes have been demolished

and shops have been demolished, they are slightly anxious, they feel disturbed. They're not very happy with the compensation that they've received from the government. Speaking to Muslims here in the town of Ayodhya, they've told us that they're hiding out and they've told us they're actually worried about what will happen in the coming days, in the coming weeks when Mr Modi and his 12,000 security forces leave. They fear that it will be dangerous for them in the weeks and years to come and that they

feel erased by this temple opening. What did Narendra Modi say as he consecrated the temple? And is there any tension between this being a religious site and the prime minister using it to kick off an election campaign? Mr. Modi said that he had a lump in his throat when he went inside the temple sanctum sanctorum and he congratulated the country on this occasion. He actually said 22nd January is, I quote, not a date on a calendar, but a dawn of a new era, close quote. And he also said that people who do not understand

the purity of India's social consciousness, they should understand the construction of this temple, in quotes, is a symbol of the Indian society's peace, patience, and mutual harmony. That this temple has not given birth to a fire, but to a certain amount of energy. This is what essentially he said today after inaugurating the temple. Siyava Ramachandra ki! Siyava Ramachandra ki!

I mean, it's quite clear that this is an informal start to his election campaign. The elections are in a few months' time. And a lot of critiques have said that this party is mixing religion and politics. And it has been on the election manifesto since 1996. As I said, this has been brewing for a very long time. This dispute has been really brewing actively since 1990, when the Hindu Nationalists began an agitation. Two years later, the mosque came down.

So he kind of completed it on the back of a very important Supreme Court judgment. This whole ownership dispute between the Hindus and Muslims over this mosque ended only in 2019 when the Supreme Court granted the site to Hindus. Despite explicitly stating that the demolition of the mosque was, in quotes, a greasiest violation of the rule of law.

Having said that, the court also gave Muslims another plot of land in Ayodhya, but this is the bigger plot, and this is the bigger shrine, in a sense. That was the BBC's Shatik Biswas. Coming up, how a Hindu god and a Muslim mosque ended up in India's Supreme Court. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained. Ramp.com slash explained.

R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from the ACLU. The ACLU knows exactly what threats a second Donald Trump term presents. And they are ready with a battle-tested playbook. The ACLU took legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times.

And they will do it again to protect immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The opening of the Ram Temple yesterday was a very high-profile affair. India's stock market closed for the day. Movie theaters screened the whole thing live. And a lot of people wondered, because of this land's bloody history,

would there also be big protests as the day unfolded? In fact, there were not. I asked Hartoosh Singh Bal, the executive editor of The Caravan, a long-form culture and politics magazine, why not? And he told me it's more complicated than just purely good news? Well, I think you have to place in context the history of the last eight or 10 years of the Modi government, because the people who were to contest it, who have been affronted and humiliated by what has happened, are in no position to actually come out on the streets and protest. The entire establishment of the state is reined against them. They are today politically second-class citizens. They have no control over power. Mr Modi has proven that you can make Muslims invisible from Indian politics and still get 306 Lok Sabha seats on the basis of the majority community order.

Previous protests have been, they've faced clampdowns, they've faced lynchings, they've had their homes bulldozed. It doesn't leave you much space to actually protest. This week, a Muslim man was once again murdered while transporting cattle in the southwest of the country. One thousand miles away, another huge crowd in another Muslim area. As the police stood by, they screamed insults that had two wishes to broadcast. It probably is more indicative of the kind of democracy we've become, where really what should have been taken for granted is no longer possible for a huge number of citizens.

So let's go way back in history. Can you tell me about the origin of the dispute over this land? Where does this start? It's very difficult to separate myth from history in India. In this context, Ayodhya, the city where this temple has been built, is considered the birthplace of Ram. Ram is the eponymous hero of the great Indian epic, the Ramayana. It is named after him in some senses. It's the story of Ram. In the deities of Hinduism, maybe among the foremost,

he's seen as a reincarnation of Vishnu, probably the most important or one of the two most important reincarnations. And the idea of a birthplace implies a certain historicity of which we have no proof at all. We have no idea whether there was ever any historical figure called Raam. But so there is faith associated with this place in Ayodhya. In the 16th century or 1500 something, the Mughal Emperor Babur built a mosque in Ayodhya. And the claim is that this was built over an existing temple. No proof has ever been found that a temple was demolished to construct this mosque.

Through the 20th century, there have been contestations over the site to claim it back. In 1949, the idol of Ram is supposed to have manifested itself at the mosque site. Of course, we now know the full history of this, that it was deliberately placed there. How members of a Hindu right-wing organization clambered over the walls, took the idol, placed it there. The local administration did not take the action it should. And this was the first supposed proof that this was in any way connected to a Hindu monument. And this dispute lay sort of in a stasis after the placing of the IOD for maybe good 40 years before in the late 80s, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is ruling the country now, took it up as a cause and started what is called the Ram Janmabhoomi

movement to reclaim the land where Ram was born. A looter destroyed our temple 462 years ago. That's a stain on our honor. If the Babri mosque remains, this stain will remind us of our slavery. We won't rest until we've destroyed this symbol of slavery with blood or with bullets. In 1992, a gathering organized by Hindu right-wing organizations, most prominently the RSS, which is the parent organization of the Bharatiya Janata Party which is ruling today. Narendra Modi the Prime Minister himself started his public life in the RSS for a decade before he joined the BJP. He was deputed to join the BJP by the RSS. Organized by them where the mosque was illegally

demolished after commitments had been given to the central government that no such thing would happen there has been a betrayal of every commitment by the leaders of the hindu right which led to the demolition of a mob by this collection of right-wing nationalists who had spades who were had instruments who clambered across the monument, brought it down. And ever since then, there has been a legal dispute at the site. And then in 2019, this dispute goes before the Supreme Court. There were litigants basically from both people who were Muslims and they were the Hindu right and they were asking for possession over the land. The Muslim argument was basically that this has always

been a mosque, the right to continue to worship and to rebuild the mosque and claim the land on which the mosque was built because this was what is called Waqf land, land belonging to the Muslims is rightfully theirs. Everyone is carrying the grief of the mosque being demolished. Each and every one of us is saddened by it. If you take someone's home, they would be upset, wouldn't they? And the argument made on behalf of the Hindu nationalist organizations was that this is a matter of faith. This is what the land should belong to.

They cited both history and faith. The legal dispute consisted of two portions. One was the criminal trial of whether there were people guilty of doing an illegal act and the second was actually who owns the site. And finally when the verdict was pronounced as far as the criminality of the act, the courts have ruled that it was a criminal act. The second part, which was finally settled in 2019 by India's Supreme Court, basically held that while there is no proof that this is actually the birthplace of Ram, while there is no proof that this is where a temple stood before the mosque was constructed. Since the vast

majority of Hindus have such great faith in the idea that this is the birthplace of Ram, this should be handed over to the Hindus and temple should be constructed there. Which in some ways is a pretty startling conclusion. If enough people believe something, then that must be done. It seems to be the judicial basis of what has been done. Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed the verdict and says it brings a new dawn for India. Every class, every community, people of every sect, the whole country has accepted the verdict with open hearts. It reflects on the ancient culture, traditions, and sense of harmony in India. This ruling is handed down in 2019. How did Muslims in India react to this decision?

Negatively, badly, I think the real trauma was at the time of the demolition of the mosque itself. There was religious violence at that time, clashes between Muslims and Hindus, killings of hundreds of people across the country. That violence and that targeting of Muslims in some ways is what propelled the BJP to national prominence and I would say to power. And in some senses, Narendra Modi's own political persona was created in the aftermath of the violence as this great champion of Hindus. Prime Minister Modi himself has been accused of sanctioning the massacre of more than 2000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002 when he was chief minister there. But no case against Modi has been successful so far.

He strongly denies any wrongdoing, though he once said he regretted Muslim suffering as he would a puppy being run over by a car. So the connection from the demolition of the Babri Masjid to the rise of the Hindu right to the building up of Narendra Modi culminates in his election as Prime Minister in 2014. I think his election itself was a huge setback. So this has already preceded what has happened today. It does not leave the Muslims in any state to come

out in public. In fact, quite the contrary, across the Hindi belt, which is where the BJP draws power, where the Muslims are located in the state of Madhya Pradesh, where Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, where Ayodhya is, instructions have been given within the community by religious leaders, political leaders. Stay in your homes, do not come out, do not aggravate the situation, do not give the government or the Hindu right an excuse for violence today. Because if there is violence, the Hindu right again gains from that. There are elections due in India in another two, three months. The temple is also, apart from this long history that I've drawn from you, directly linked to the politics of that election. India, by its constitution, is a secular country, correct? There's a separation ostensibly of religion and politics, church and state. Everything you've just said suggests that's

not actually the case in India anymore. Is there anything that brings this situation back from the brink? And if Narendra Modi is elected in a few months, is there a way back from the brink here? I am very pessimistic. By origin, I am not a believer in any real sense. From the Sikh faith, the Sikhs are a population concentrated in one state, the northern state of Punjab.

Hindu nationalists see the Sikhs as a light to them. They see them, for them, faiths which have drawn their origins in India, faiths like Buddhism and Sikhism are part of the Hindu fold. Their real problem is with the alien intrusion of Islam and Christianity. Despite this belief of the Hindu right, there is no taker among the Sikhs for the Hindu right as well. What it means is that every minority today lies outside this majoritarian consensus that has been built by Narendra Modi. Apart from that, there are people like me, a huge number who have faith or had faith in the idea of India because of its constitutional provisions, because of the values that hold

this republic together. We were a republic which had actually agreed to come together on the basis of a constitution with a certain set of shared values of religious tolerance. It is the most diverse place on earth today. There are 30 different languages, there are people of various ethnicities, every religion is represented here. It is the last sort of place where the sort of virus of nationalism that sprung up in the 19th century in Europe has come and taken root. And so we have a particular sort of nationalistic formation trying to impose the unity of blood soil which may have worked for a tiny nation state and I from the Indian perspective something like Netherlands are tiny little pockets that are smaller than most provinces of India

to apply that idea to something as large as India, so diverse, is, I think, in the long term, a potential for disaster. But is it going to roll back democratically with the kind of support Narendra Modi has? No, it doesn't seem that is possible today. That was Hartosh Singh Ball of The Caravan. Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and edited by Aminah El-Sadi. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard. Rob Byers is our engineer.

We also relied on some reporting from the BBC's Yogita Lamai, and we thank her. Before we go, remember when Defense Secretary General Lloyd Austin vanished for a while and it turned out that he'd been treated for prostate cancer and he didn't really want anyone to know? That incident got us thinking about why so many men are so uncomfortable talking about their prostate stuff. to know if you have a story you want to tell about getting screened, about getting bad news or good news, or even about just getting shy regarding your prostate. We may use it on the air. Give us a call at 844-453-4448. That is 844-453-4448. And thank you. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you