Hardline Hindu nationalists campaign against Taj Mahal

INDIA - Times are tough for India’s monument to love. Air pollution is turning its marble surface yellow. Restoration work is obscuring its famous minarets. Tens of millions of tourists still flock to Agra each year, but numbers are reportedly waning.

Critics of the Taj Mahal are also growing increasingly bold. In past months, religious nationalists in the Hindu-majority country have stepped up a campaign to push the four-centuryold Mughal monument to the margins of Indian history. One legislator recently kicked up a national storm when he labelled the tomb “a blot”. Resentment at the fact the country’s most recognisable monument was built by a Muslim emperor has always existed on the fringes of the Hindu right. But those fringes have never been so powerful. Attacks on the monument, a lifeline for its home state of Uttar Pradesh, have grown so loud that last week the state chief minister himself a critic of the Taj was forced into “a day-long exercise in damage control”, one newspaper said. Yogi Adityanath paid an elaborate official visit to Agra on Thursday to issue assurances that the Taj was a “unique gem” that his government was committed to protect. We should not delve deeper into the details of why, when and how the Taj Mahal was built,” Adityanath said. “What is important is that it was built by the blood and sweat of India’s farmers and labourers.”

At the heart of the controversy is a larger fight over India’s past and present. Hindu nationalists, among their ranks the prime minister, Narendra Modi, now wield unprecedented power across the country. Many, including Modi, believe the hundreds of years in which north India was ruled by kings who practised Islam was a period of “slavery” no different from the British Raj. “So they have a certain attitude towards any buildings that were built by Muslim rulers”, says Vishal Sharma, the secretary of the Agra Tourist Welfare Chamber. (Theguardian.com)