The Hindu temple central to Narendra Modi’s vision for India

Three decades after Hindu zealots tore down a mosque at Ayodhya, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the consecration of a massive Hindu temple on the same site, setting the tone for an election campaign in which religious nationalism will play an influential role.

About 4,500 workers have been toiling day and night for months to complete the first stage of the three-storey Ram Mandir shrine, dedicated to one of Hinduism’s most revered deities Lord Ram, in time for a visit by the prime minister on January 22.

Modi, who has ruled India since 2014, is hoping to return for a third term with a big enough majority to sideline his political opposition and continue his Bharatiya Janata party’s project of restoring the country’s majority religion to a central place in public life. 

Rebuilding the temple, where Hindus believe Ram was born — one of three main holy sites that have been a point of contention with minority Muslims — is a core BJP project. Analysts say the temple, once completed, will secure a powerful and enduring legacy for India’s most powerful leader since Indira Gandhi. Modi rose to power on a wave of Hindu revivalism stoked by the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the right-wing nationalist movement behind the ruling party. 

“What Modi is trying to do by developing Ayodhya is [make this] . . . Hinduism’s Vatican,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of a book on the prime minister and an expert in Hindu nationalist politics.

“He has always been driven by this desire to be a very important personality in history, talked about in centuries to come with the same kind of reverence with which the other national icons are.” 

In keeping with a Modi government that styles itself as both uplifting majority Hindus and developing the world’s fifth-largest economy, the creation of a major new pilgrimage site has been accompanied by a big infrastructure push.

The construction of the 161ft tall pink sandstone shrine has been accompanied by the building of a new airport, wider roads and pink and saffron building facades on the approach to the temple. Real estate prices have soared in Ayodhya, located in the Hindi heartland and Uttar Pradesh state, a BJP stronghold.

“I think every citizen of India — I am including everyone, I am consciously using the word — would like to see and visit this temple at least once in a lifetime,” Nripendra Mishra, chair of the construction committee and a former Modi adviser, told the Financial Times.

The temple’s holy of holies and five mandaps or enclosures, along with a temple boundary allowing pilgrims to circumambulate it, will be opened on January 22, with the second and third floors to be completed later, he said. 

Officials said they expected about 200,000 to 300,000 people to come to Ayodhya every day after the temple’s consecration. “Ayodhya clearly reflects the mood of the nation,” Modi said at a recent public rally there. “No country can progress without securing its heritage along with development,” he told crowds.

The Indian leader’s opposition, bound together last year in an alliance with the acronym INDIA, have accused the BJP of undermining India’s secular foundations, and exploiting religion for political gain in underwriting the project. The temple, funded by donations from Indians and the diaspora, is expected to cost about Rs32bn ($386mn), but the central and state governments are spending millions more on developing the pilgrimage city and its infrastructure.

“Temples are not the government’s business; unemployment, inflation, public welfare and national security are,” Shashi Tharoor, an MP with the Indian National Congress, which was swept aside by the BJP in 2014 elections, wrote in a post on social media platform X last month. Senior members of Congress, including Sonia Gandhi, have declined to attend the ceremony.

Politicians representing India’s roughly 200mn Muslims say the temple project is part of a drive by Modi’s BJP government to push their own mosques and history aside, along with their status as fellow Indians.

Ayodhya’s neighbouring city Faizabad has been swallowed up as part of the redevelopment, losing its name. “This is a symbolic celebration of showing Muslims their place in today’s India,” said Asaduddin Owaisi, an MP and head of the All India majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen party. “This has opened the floodgates for many more masjid (mosque) issues to be reopened.”

Ayodhya is the most prominent of several contested religious sites, where Hindu nationalists have been fighting to demolish or demote mosques built during India’s centuries of Muslim domination. Some of the disputes predate India’s independence; others are more recent and rode on India’s wave of Hindu nationalism.

In 1992, Hindu hardliners demolished the 16th century Babri Mosque built by the Muslim ruler Babar on what they believed was the site of a temple in Ayodhya destroyed by India’s Mughal rulers. The demolition ignited Hindu-Muslim communal violence across India in which about 2,000 people were killed. 

After years of litigation, the Supreme Court in 2019 approved the construction of Ram Mandir, despite a lack of conclusive evidence that there had ever been a Hindu temple on the site. Building work began in August 2020. 

At a second, contested religious site in Varanasi, Hindu nationalists are seeking a legal green light for a potential construction project. A decision on the Gyanvapi mosque, which sits alongside the Hindu Kashi Vishwanath temple, is expected by June.

At Mathura, a third site in Uttar Pradesh, Hindus and Muslims are locked in a legal dispute over a mosque that Hindus allege was built after demolishing a temple at the birthplace of the Hindu God Krishna. 

Analysts said the push was central to Modi’s core appeal to aggrieved Hindu voters who feel their religious identity has been suppressed by India’s secular state. 

“The narrative which has never really died down, even after partition, is that this is our country,” said Mukhophadyay, the author. “The Muslims wanted a separate nation, we gave it to them” in Pakistan.

In Ayodhya, along with the din of jackhammers and dust of construction, the trappings of a major pilgrimage site are forming. Munna Kumar, a migrant worker from the poor state of Bihar, has been selling a dozen or more miniature models of the Ram Mandir per day for the past three months, earning up to Rs1,000 a day.

“It’s important to build this temple,” Kumar said. “Our culture was vanishing,” he said, adding that he intended to vote for the BJP. 

“Modi is working for the nation,” he said. “His work shows on the ground.”

Letter in response to this article:

What a new temple tells us about a ‘sec­u­lar’ India / From Priyanjali Malik, London NW6, UK