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Hindu supremacists are turning to the courts to demolish mosques in India
We need to talk about Ajmer.
In late November, an Indian court issued notices to the Union Ministry of Minority Affairs, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the Ajmer Dargah Committee over a petition seeking a survey of the renowned Ajmer Sharif Dargah in Rajasthan. The matter in question? To find out if the country’s oldest Sufi shrine was built over an ancient Hindu temple. The move has predictably sent shockwaves across the Indian Muslim community. The Ajmer Sharif Dargah is a beloved institution and revered as one of India’s holiest Muslim shrines, attracting devotees of all faiths. But Indian Muslims should brace themselves. This is merely an introduction to what is to come. MSK reports.
Every year, the 800-year-old revered shrine of Ajmer Dargah in India’s western Rajasthan state is visited by millions of people of all religions. The Dargah Sharif itself is the burial site of the great Sufi saint Khwaja Moin-Ud-Din Chishti, who died in 1235. He is also known as ‘Gharib Nawaz’, or friend of the poor.
But today none of that matters.
Hindu nationalists and supremacists are out to tear down the shrine.
News that the local court asked for an investigation into claims the shrine sits on top a destroyed Shiva temple is only the latest in a string of attempts to show how disposable Muslim history has become in India.Indeed, the path to the Ajmer Sharif Dargah in Rajasthan is littered with the rubble and debris of a shattered, divided country.
Just days prior, on 25 November, a local court in the Sambhal district of Uttar Pradesh, similarly ordered the survey of a 250-year-old Mughal-era mosque to find out if it, too, had been built over a Hindu temple.
The survey sparked protests during which at least five Muslims were killed.
Shamsi Jama Masjid in Sambal Earlier in the year, in February, Hindu worshippers began praying inside a designated section of the Gyanvapi Mosque, another Mogul-era mosque, in Varanasi, following a court order that gave them the go-ahead to do so.
This came after the the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) said a survey of the site appeared to corroborate Hindu claims that the mosque had been built on top of temple dedicated to Lord Shiva.
These are just some of the examples of mosques under attack in India.
Muslims and other activists say the judicial affirmation of Hindu claims over mosques has set a dangerous trend and is a violation of the Places of Worship Act.
The law, which was passed in 1991 prevents any changes to religious places as they existed on 15 August 1947.
Nonetheless, several hundred, perhaps thousands of mosques across India are said to be marked by Hindu nationalists to be torn down in the years to come.
The role of the media
Vast swathes of the Indian mainstream media have amplified the Hindu far-right agenda – painting Muslims as criminals, temple grabbers, and as hateful towards the Hinduism.
Muslim kings from the medieval era have been projected as anti-Hindu tyrants who destroyed thousands of temples and mass converted Hindus to Islam, even as historians have debunked these claims as falsehoods.
Though it true that Mughal rulers did destroy temples, these were not widespread. Historians says these may have amounted to around two dozen temples.
They add that these incidents had little to do with a hatred of Hinduism.It is documented that temples were often destroyed by other Hindus, too, when land and territory was captured by rivals, which is what happened during the period.
“Claims of many thousands of such instances are outlandish, irresponsible and without foundation,” Richard Eaton, a professor of Indian history at the University of Arizona, told the Guardian.
In January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a temple over the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, which was demolished by Hindu mobs in 1992.
The inauguration of the new temple has only served to embolden Hindu supremacists towards further erasing Muslim symbols from public spaces.
This sort of effort has only escalated since Narendra Modi took power in 2014.
Muslims have faced attacks on their cultural symbols, diets, and history.Government textbooks are being rewritten to edit out Muslim history which dates back to the 10th century.
Scores of Muslims have been lynched on mere suspicion of eating beef or slaughtering cows.
Naturally, Indian Muslims are alarmed; their most sacred spaces are under attack from the state itself. It would appear the attempt to “other” them has become state policy.
Now, the courts seem to be turning against them, too.
With the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the right-wing paramilitary group, increasingly holding the reins to India’s democratic institutions, it seems clear where the supremacists are headed next.
The constitution.Modi has already started to chip away at the purported secular values of the constitution, which, with all of its failures, stipulates equal rights to all its citizens irrespective of faith.
But this may be on the way out, too.
And then what?