MESSAGE
| DATE | 2024-02-08 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Indian response to Muslim Imperialism
|
https://www.wsj.com/articles/modi-ayodhya-and-the-fall-of-nehrus-secular-temple-election-sectarian-religious-strife-092f43a8
To Hindu nationalists, Muslim rulers such as the Mughal Dynasty
(1526-1857) weren’t fellow Indians but colonial oppressors, no different
from the British—and in many ways worse. The destruction of temples in
North India by iconoclastic Muslim kings remains a particularly sore
point. Mr. Modi speaks of throwing off the yoke of “1,200 years of
slavery,” a reference to the first Arab incursions into the Indian
subcontinent in the eighth century.
The new temple in Ayodhya is a victory for the Hindu nationalist
worldview. It stands on the site of a more than 450-year-old mosque
razed in 1992 by an enraged Hindu nationalist mob. Many Hindus saw the
mosque, built by a 16th-century Mughal general, as an affront to their
faith and a symbol of humiliation. Hindus and Muslims had skirmished at
the site since at least the 19th century, but the movement to build the
temple to Ram took center stage in Indian politics only in the late
1980s, when the BJP began to champion it.
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