Modi opens contentious Ram temple at one of India's 'most vexed religious sites'

"Politics and religion cannot be mixed," ruled India's Supreme Court in 1994. This, said The Economist, was subsequently "considered a decisive elucidation of the country's secular constitution". 

But tell that to the world's most populous nation, said the newspaper, millions of whose citizens will watch Prime Minister Narendra Modi preside over the consecration of a "controversial" $217 million (£170 million) Hindu temple dedicated to the god Ram. 

The ceremony "marks the informal launch" of his campaign for a third term in office, ahead of May's election, as well as "the high point of a decades-long Hindu-nationalist project to dominate India", alarming the country's 200 million Muslims. 

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The grand temple is in the "flashpoint" city of Ayodhya, northern India, said the BBC, and replaces a 16th-century mosque that was "torn down by Hindu mobs in 1992", sparking the riots in which nearly 2,000 people died. 

But although "top film stars and cricketers" attended the consecration event, "some Hindu seers and most of the opposition boycotted it", accusing Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of using the project for "political gain" to court votes from the 80% Hindu population. 

'A sense of despair and dislocation'

Excitement around the temple's consecration "had been building for weeks", reported The New York Times (NYT) from Ayodhya, with "saffron-colored pennants strung across a million streets and markets", and the town "covered" in posters and billboards of both Ram and Modi. This was a moment of "triumph" for Hindu nationalists, and of "jubilation" for those who "care little for politics" but a great deal for Ram. 

But for the country's Muslims, the temple "has reinforced a sense of despair and dislocation". The way the original mosque was destroyed "set a precedent of impunity that reverberates today": lynchings of Muslim men, beatings of interfaith couples and so-called "bulldozer justice", in which homes of Muslims are demolished "without due process". 

The "nationwide frenzy over the consecration" has brought the country of 1.4 billion people, and a nearly $4 trillion economy, "to a virtual standstill", said Al Jazeera. For many Indian Muslims, the "state-sponsored pomp" is the latest in "a series of painful realisations that – especially since Modi took office in 2014 – the democracy they call home no longer appears to care about them." 

"Today's date will go down in history," Modi said after the event. "After years of struggle and countless sacrifices, Lord Ram has arrived [home]."

'A monolith that falls behind Modi'

Increased religious polarisation affects the "political influence" of Muslims as well as their safety, said Al Jazeera.

The country's secularism allowed Hindus and Muslims to vote "primarily on economic or non-religious issues", which gave Muslims "the limited but definite ability to affect electoral outcomes", particularly in states with larger populations. But if the majority Hindu vote "consolidates" behind the BJP, "this equation no longer holds". 

"The 2024 elections could be a one-sided affair in favour of BJP," Hussain Afsara, a Lucknow-based journalist, told Al Jazeera.

India's founding fathers "took great pains" to keep the state secular after the "communal bloodletting" wrought by the 1948 partition from Pakistan, said the NYT. 

However, Modi "has unabashedly normalised the opposite". Mixing religion and politics has allowed him to turn "a diverse and argumentative Indian society into something resembling a monolith that falls in line behind him". 

Ultimately, Modi "wants to be India's most consequential leader since Jawaharlal Nehru", said The Economist. The danger "is that a hubristic Hindu chauvinism undermines his economic ambitions".