India’s Hindu Nationalists Reverse the Tide of History
None of the world’s populist leaders has turned back the clock as dramatically and as dangerously as Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Hindus celebrate at the Ayodhya temple ceremony.
Photographer: Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images
This week, an Indian prime minister, dressed like a priest-king in a saffron scarf, a silver crown and a lockdown-lengthened beard, performed a sacred ritual in the ancient capital of Ayodhya. Narendra Modi thus founded a new Hindu temple on a site where, for hundreds of years, a mosque had stood.
After decades of legal warfare and mob violence, Hindu nationalists have now effectively reclaimed the land where they believe the god Rama was born. The state-sponsored pageantry of the moment, however, proclaimed their greater victory: the transformation of India from a secular-nationalist republic into an ethno-nationalist state.