NOS
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NOS News•today, 06:34
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Aletta Andre
Correspondent India
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Aletta Andre
Correspondent India
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In more than ten places in India, Hindus are trying to force through the courts that often ancient mosques make way for Hindu temples. This new wave of Hindu religious zeal is straining relations between Hindus and India’s sizable Muslim minority.
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For example, tensions are rising in the Hindu city of Varanasi, one of the oldest cities in the world. At the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi, there seems to be no doubt: there are minarets, a dome, and Muslims go in to pray five times a day.
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Yet 40-year-old Sita Sahu is inexorable: “It is not a mosque and it never was a mosque”.
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It is clear that the building was at least once a temple. One of the walls of the 17th-century white mosque looks exactly like an old brown temple wall from the outside. Historians also agree that the 17th-century Muslim emperor Aurangzeb demolished a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva and built the current mosque on the temple’s foundations.
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Break things open
But does this mean that the building has always remained a temple, under the dome of the mosque? According to Sahu, yes. She and four other women are claiming in court the right to worship Hindu gods at the mosque. In the first place at that outer wall, in which, according to Sita, an image of the goddess Shringar Gauri is carved. But the women also want to investigate which gods are still present inside the mosque, by having the walls broken open.
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Sita Sahu –
Tensions around the mosque have increased since this lawsuit. A barricade has been erected up to the dome, you cannot get close without a valid ID and all gates and access roads are heavily guarded.
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The mosque administration’s lawyer Abhay Nath Yadav said the court should have rejected Sahu’s petition. He invokes the Places of Worship Act, or the Houses of Prayer Act of 1991. It states that the religious character of a place of worship must remain as it was on August 15, 1947, the day India became independent, and that this should not be legally challenged. And in 1942 a judge already ruled that the Gyanvapi Mosque and the land on which it stands are the property of the Islamic community.
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Religious riots
The law was passed at the time precisely to prevent this kind of conflict, because it can easily lead to religious riots in India. A year after the law came into effect, actual violent religious riots broke out after a mob of angry Hindus demolished Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodya. An estimated 2,000 Muslims were killed in the ensuing riots.
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The construction of a temple to the god Ram on the site of the ruined Babri Mosque has been an agenda item of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist ruling party BJP for decades. In 2019, the Supreme Court allowed this. This was possible because this case predates 1991 and was therefore mentioned as an exception in the law on houses of worship. In 2020 Modi laid the foundation stone himself.
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Also, in its 2019 ruling, the Supreme Court said that mistakes from the distant past cannot be rectified with the current legal system.
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The 1991 law is a thorn in the side of fanatical Hindus, who would like to tear down any mosque that may have been built on the ruins of a Hindu temple in the past. “It legalizes the illegal acts of barbarian invaders,” said a lawyer who is challenging the law in the Supreme Court.
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“Our constitution states that everyone, of any religion, has the right to religious freedom. One religion is not superior to another.
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Meanwhile, Hindus in more and more places are trying to challenge the existence of specific mosques or Islamic monuments. Even the world-famous Taj Mahal mausoleum in Agra and the Qutub Minar, a 12th-century complex in Delhi, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites, cannot escape this.
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Yadav, the lawyer for the mosque administration in Varanasi, believes that the secular character of India is being affected in this way. “Our constitution states that everyone, of every religion, has the right to religious freedom. One religion is not superior to another. And Sahu and others may argue that this place is important to Hindus, but the mosque is just as good important to Muslims.”
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Although Yadav has dozens of arguments ready to protect the mosque, Sahu expects the mosque administration to eventually give in. “The Muslims here know well that it is actually a temple. They will find that they should give the place to us, for our rituals.”
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