The Indian Supreme Court has stopped the registration of cases, for the time being only, of all suits under the Places of Worship Act, 1991, under its provision that prohibits conversion of places of worship as it existed on 15 August 1947. This is the proviso under which the Babri Mosque was demolished in 1992, and under which the Supreme Court in 2019 ordered the construction of a temple on the site. When the mosque was demolished in 1992, there was a section of Muslim opinion in India that felt the demolition meant that no more mosques would be destroyed. Unfortunately, it seems, a precedent has been established. One result has been a rash of suits filed alleging that Mosques have been built atop a Hindu Mandir. There is the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi, the Jamia Masjid Delhi, among others. Then there are other Muslim sites, which are not mosques. There is a suit asking for an investigation of the dargah of Hazrat Moeenuddin Chishti in Ajmer, and there is a claim of the Taj Mahal having been built on top of a Hindu temple.
The path taken by Hindu extremists is a dangerous one for them. What will happen if some Dravidian activist was to claim that some mandir was built by the Aryans on top of a Dravidian temple? The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, had fallen in with the BJP’s Hindutva project, in giving the Baabri Mosque’s demolition legal cover, and accepted the Ramayan as an authentic source of information. Will it do the same for Dravidian claims? There are no Dravidian claims at present, but as the Babri Mosque example shows, manufacturing claims is not all that difficult. Some Dravidian pushback should be anticipated, especially s the BJP pushes its Aryanist version of Hinduism in a push in the South.
One of the issues that has arisen is that all of this extremism is being carried out by an elected government. It becomes clear that if the Indian government is Hindu-extremist, it is because this stance is popular. It is not that Congress was particularly secular or good for Muslims. However, it still retains some shreds of the Nehruvian secularism that India was built on. The BJP is bent on reversing that. The Indian Supreme Court may have acted too late to stem the saffron wave.
