In India, Hindus are engaged in a coordinated effort to take control of several mosques and Muslim buildings, claiming that they were built on Hindu religious structures centuries ago. They thus seized the courts, which began to investigate these cases.
With our correspondent in New Delhi,
The main case concerns a mosque in the city of Benares. In this sacred city, Hindus have been claiming for years that the Gyanvapi Mosque, built in the 17th century by Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, was built on a Shivaite Hindu temple. They therefore demand that this land be returned to them to correct the past and restore Hindu worship.
Such “reparation”, four centuries after the fact, seems obsolete and legally prescribed. Above all, a law prohibits changing the nature of a religious building, based on facts from before 1947. But a court has just accepted the complaint, and sent a lawyer to film different parts of the mosque. Immediately, information leaked that the team saw a Shaiva symbol in the mosque’s ablution bath. Without any further archaeological evidence, part of the mosque was immediately sealed off, and the investigation is ongoing.
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The famous Taj Mahal in the sights of Hindus
This case is far from isolated since in the city of Mathura, not far from there, another Mughal mosque is threatened, because a court has just accepted to hear the request for restitution of land by Hindus. In New Delhi, Hindus are reclaiming the famous minaret of the Qutub Minar, one of the city’s 12th-century World Heritage-listed symbols, after undated idols of the god Ganesh were found at the site .
Finally, this revisionism affects the architectural jewel of India: the Taj Mahal, also built by the Mughals. A member of the ruling BJP Hindu nationalist party has called for an investigation to prove the outlandish claim that the Taj Mahal, which includes a mosque, was in fact a Hindu temple by the name of Tejo Mahalaya. However, this request was rejected by the judges.
Fueling Hindu Fear of Muslims
The purpose of these proceedings against Muslim buildings is to portray Hindus as perpetual victims of Muslims. The Prime Minister regularly attacks in his speeches the Emperor Aurangzeb, who died three centuries ago, as if he were a current political opponent. In fact, he thus attacks the Muslims of today, presented as the descendants of the Mughals, and who must therefore be seen as the oppressors of the Hindus. This historic fight is therefore a political project that aims to fuel the fear of Hindus towards Muslims, in order to capture their votes.
The last similar case, in the city of Ayodhya, ended in the illegal destruction of the mosque by Hindu militants in 1992, leading to the worst religious violence of the decade and the death of more than 2,000 people. By fanning the flames of religious division in this way, Hindu nationalists run the risk of seeing this grim scenario repeated.
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