Wearing her hijab, Yusra Hussain stood in the queue to enter a makeshift temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, the northern Indian city believed to be his birthplace. What followed is etched in her mind.
“I was jeered [at] and taunted,” the 32-year-old said. “And people started chanting Jai Shree Ram [victory to Lord Ram]. I got a sense of aggressive triumphalism.”
That was eight years ago. On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate an incomplete Ram temple built in place of the makeshift shrine Hussain had visited, amid a nationwide frenzy over the consecration that has brought the country of 1.4 billion people, and a nearly $4 trillion economy, to a virtual standstill.
The stock market is shut, government offices are working only half the day and movie halls are offering live screenings of the religious ceremony that Modi’s opponents say he has hijacked ahead of national elections that are expected to begin in March.
Major public hospitals announced reduced services for the day to allow staff to soak in the celebrations, though some have since retracted those announcements.
Missing from news channels and popular discourse is any reference to the fact that the temple is coming up at the very spot where the 16th-century Babri Masjid was torn down by a Hindu nationalist mob on a grey winter morning in December 1992.
Hussain, a freelance journalist based in the city of Lucknow, 120 km (75 miles) east of Ayodhya, said she fears that the “triumphalism” she witnessed on what was her first visit to the temple town “might just get worse in the coming days”.
“In fact, after Ayodhya, there might be a snowballing effect on other disputed places like Mathura and Kashi,” she said. Mathura and Varanasi – Modi’s parliamentary constituency also known locally as Kashi – are also home to historic mosques that the prime minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu majoritarian allies say were built on demolished temples.
For many among India’s 200 million Muslims, the state-sponsored pomp and ceremony around the temple’s launch is the latest in a series of painful realisations that – especially since Modi took office in 2014 – the democracy they call home no longer appears to care about them.
Increased religious polarisation in the country affects not just their safety and security but also their political influence in the upcoming national vote. Muslims constitute more than 20 percent of the population in 101 of India’s 543 directly elected parliamentary constituencies. Indian secularism has been premised on Hindus and Muslims – the country’s two-largest communities – voting primarily on economic or non-religious issues.
