Is it a temple or a mosque? Hindus go to court in India

In more than ten places in India, Hindus are trying to force the courts to often pass off ancient mosques as Hindu temples. This new wave of Hindu religious zeal is straining relations between Hindus and India’s large Muslim minority.

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 come to pray five times a day.

However, Sita Sahu, 40, is inexorable: “It is not a mosque and it has never been a mosque”.

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 foundations of the temple.

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 claim in court the right to worship Hindu gods at the mosque. In the first place to this outer wall, in which, according to Sita, an image of the goddess Shringar Gauri is carved. But the women also want to investigate the gods still present inside the mosque, by breaking down the walls.

Tensions around the mosque have increased since that trial. A barricade has been erected up to the dome, you cannot approach it without a valid ID and all gates and access roads are heavily guarded.

The mosque’s administration lawyer, Abhay Nath Yadav, said the court should have dismissed 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 should remain as it was on August 15, 1947, the day India became independent, and that it should not be legally challenged. And in 1942, a judge has already ruled that the Gyanvapi Mosque and the land on which it stands are the property of the Islamic community.

The law was passed at the time precisely to prevent this kind of conflict, as it can easily lead to religious riots in India. A year after the law came into force, serious religious riots broke out after a mob of angry Hindus demolished the Babri Mosque in the town of Ayodya. An estimated 2,000 Muslims were killed in the riots that followed.

The construction of a temple dedicated to the god Ram on the site of the ruined Babri mosque has been on the agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, for decades. In 2019, the Supreme Court authorized it. This was possible because this case predates 1991 and was therefore mentioned as an exception in the law on places of worship. In 2020, Modi himself laid the foundation stone.

Moreover, in its 2019 decision, the Supreme Court said that the mistakes of the distant past cannot be rectified with the current legal system.

The 1991 law is a thorn in the side of Hindu fanatics, who would like to demolish any mosque that might have been built on the ruins of a Hindu temple in the past. “It legalizes the illegal acts of the barbarian invaders,” said a lawyer challenging the law in the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Hindus in more and more places are trying to dispute the existence of specific mosques or Islamic monuments. Even the famous Taj Mahal mausoleum in Agra and the Qutub Minar, a 12th-century complex in Delhi, both UNESCO World Heritage sites, cannot escape it.

Yadav, the lawyer for the administration of the Varanasi mosque, believes that the secular character of India is thus affected. “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 equally important to Muslims.

Although Yadav has dozens of arguments ready to protect the mosque, Sahu expects the mosque administration to eventually relent. “The Muslims here know well that this is in fact a temple. They will find that they should give way to us, for our rituals.”