AYODHYA TEMPLE VERDICT RAISES FEARS IT MAY BE USED AS A PRECEDENT

▶ India’s Supreme Court awarded site of demolished mosque to Hindu groups seeking to build a temple there, writes Samanth Subramanian

Niaz was eight years old when riots broke out in Mumbai n December 1992. He did not understand them fully at the time. He just knew that a mosque had been torn down somewhere up north, and that the riots between Hindus and Muslims were a result of that demolition.

On Saturday, when India’s Supreme Court awarded the site of the demolished Babri Masjid in the town of Ayodhya to Hindu groups, Niaz understood much more. “By then, I knew all about how these Hindu groups wanted a temple to [the deity] Ram where the mosque was,” said Niaz, who asked to be identified by just one name.

He does not know how to feel about the verdict. On the one hand, he sees it as unfair – as if the court had rewarded the Hindu mobs that tore down the mosque. “But honestly, I was also afraid that if the decision went against the Hindu groups, there would be riots again,” he said.

Niaz lives in the Mumbai neighbourhood of Mahim, where he works as a mathematics tutor. “This is where I was when I was a boy, and I remember how scared we all were when there were crowds on the streets nearby. I didn’t want to feel that again.”

No violence broke out after the court ruled that a Hindu temple be built on the 1.1-hectare site of the demolished mosque, and that Muslims be given an alternative two-hectare piece of land in Ayodhya. But the verdict’s reception has mirrored the political divide in India between supporters and critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.

Critics of the BJP – Muslim and non-Muslim – disparaged the court’s decision. Writing in the Hindustan Times, Syeda Hameed, the president of the Muslim Women’s Forum, questioned the verdict. “If breaking the [mosque] was illegal, why has the 2.77 acres been gifted to the very elements who were party to this?”

In Hyderabad on Saturday evening, Asaduddin Owaisi, a member of parliament, said that he found the verdict flawed for similar reasons. “If a person demolishes your house and if you go to an arbitrator and he gives your house to the person who demolished it and tells you that you will be given land at some other place, how would you feel?”

But Zafar Farooqui, the chairman of the Sunni Waqf Board in the state of Uttar Pradesh, said his organisation “humbly accepted” the verdict. “I want to make it clear that we won’t file for a review of the judgment,” he told The National.

Mr Farooqui refused to comment on whether he considered the court’s decision fair.

The ruling has triggered worries that it may be used as a precedent to claim the land under other mosques. In the 1990s, after the Babri Masjid was razed, the BJP and other Hindu nationalist groups cast that event as merely the start of a wider campaign. There are mosques in Mathura, Varanasi and dozens of other towns that Hindus deem holy for one reason or another. These too would be destroyed, a slogan chanted by these groups promised.

Kapil Komireddi, the author of the book Malevolent Republic, about the rise of Hindu majoritarianism, said the verdict marked “the beginning of a calamitous phase” of history.

“What they did in Ayodhya they will seek to replicate in a dozen other places. And the horror of Ayodhya will seem trivial as they go about avenging history,” he wrote on Twitter.

But on Saturday, Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the BJP, said that they would not target mosques elsewhere. The Babri Masjid, he said, was “an exception … this movement will not remain of concern to us”.

In its judgment, running to more than 1,000 pages, the court implicitly urged the protection of other mosques by endorsing the Places of Worship Act. The act, passed in 1991, preserves the status of all places of worship – temples, mosques or churches – as it was on August 15, 1947, when India became independent. Only the Babri Masjid was cited in the act as an exception.

At least one Hindu group, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, signalled its intention to defy the law.

Alok Kumar, the president of the VHP, said: “The Supreme Court judgment is not the end of the story. It is the beginning.”