73 years after Partition, places of worship remain ideological battlegrounds
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Faiz Khan decided to walk 800 km across India to reach Ayodhya on Aug. 5 and lay foundations at the inauguration of the new Ram Mandir, a Hindu temple to be built on the site where the Babri Mosque was demolished in 1992.
Finally, a Muslim seems to be on the side of the Hindus. A Muslim who respects Hindu traditions and beliefs, instead of seeing the destruction of the mosque as something akin to cultural genocide. Yet, as he walks, thousands of Hindu nationalists trend #GoBackFaizKhan on social media, subjecting him to a campaign of online hate. They claim that he cannot be both Muslim and Hindu at the same time. He must choose.
In Pakistan, the choice is clear. In July, Islamists protested against the government’s plan to build a Hindu temple in Islamabad, and the boundary walls were vandalized. The Pakistani government cowed to the protestors. Two weeks later, an ancient Buddhist statue was smashed in Mardan by a man who claimed that idols are un-Islamic.
These cases are not isolated incidents. Across the subcontinent, religious sites and markers of shared cultural heritage are increasingly being reinterpreted to serve populist religious nationalism. This allows the majority to assert dominance without resorting to the brutalism of physical violence all the time. India and Pakistan’s minorities now risk a loss of their cultural heritage.
Muslims and Hindus across both borders have not forgotten the Babri Mosque’s demolition, and it continues to color their relationships. In 1992, when Hindu nationalists rallied to tear down Babri, they were merely fringe organizations. Yet 150,000 volunteers heeded their call, claiming the mosque was built on the land of a former Hindu temple. The demolition sparked months of Hindu-Muslim riots across South Asia, especially in Pakistan where 30 Hindu temples were attacked in retaliation. In a landmark verdict last November, the Indian Supreme Court awarded the disputed land to the Hindu community. Any history or association Muslims have had with this site is being removed from the public consciousness.
A hundred years ago, Faiz Khan wouldn’t have been out of place as a Muslim paying respects to a Hindu deity. For much of its history, South Asia has seen interfaith harmony, despite dispersed incidences of conflict. Indeed, the foundation of the Sikh Golden Temple was laid by none other than Sufi saint Mian Mir. Today, however, populist governments sway to the drum of religious hardliners, who too happily deny minorities access to their own artifacts and practices.
In India and Pakistan, a false dichotomy now exists between “their” religious heritage and “ours,” and one must give way to the other, creating only mistrust for minorities. If South Asia’s religious nationalists are left unchecked, more religious sites will be revised, demolished and rewritten.
The decay of South Asia’s syncretism began with British colonial rule and peaked at the Partition of 1947. In colonial India, places once shared became contested, often violently. In 1859, the British demarcated physical spaces for Hindus and Muslims to pray in the Babri Mosque. Soon after, pockets of separate Hindu and Muslim areas sprung up when the Raj permitted Muslims to slaughter cows, sacred to Hindus, in certain quarters of towns. Even before a border divided India and Pakistan, British legislative practices amplified internal divisions between Muslims and Hindus.
But if the British created boundaries, India and Pakistan failed to make bridges. After all, the Indian state promised to be secular, while Pakistan only became constitutionally theocratic in 1956. Somewhere over the last 73 years, the leaders and people made the choice to equate religion with country. As a result, Indian Muslims and Pakistani Hindus seem to be the most harassed when it comes to places of worship, despite not being the only minorities in their countries.
India and Pakistan’s religious fault lines continue to deepen. Hindu nationalists now form India’s ruling party, and while their means may have become more subtle, they continue their campaign to shed India of its Islamic heritage. Prominent cities in India with Islamic names are being renamed to “Hinduize” them, and, in a brazen move harkening back to 1992, party members have even called for the replacement of the Taj Mahal with another temple.
Across the border, Pakistan’s ruling party is not outwardly religious, yet it routinely capitulates to the demands of Islamist hardliners. The presence and preservation of non-Islamic architecture is not a right of its minorities, but a privilege that Pakistan can give or take away at any time.
In 1946, Indian Congress activist Abul Kalam Azad warned that the division of the Raj would lead to the persecution of minorities. He claimed that Pakistan would mete out the same treatment to Hindus as India would to its Muslims. Others optimistically argued that this equilibrium would keep minority “hostages” safe, for presumably neither country would want to take any action that would harm its brethren in the other. Deterrence could soon dissolve into mutually assured destruction. With just two weeks until the 73rd celebration of the Independence of India and Pakistan, Azad’s warning has proved timely.
In India and Pakistan, a false dichotomy now exists between “their” religious heritage and “ours,” and one must give way to the other, creating only mistrust for minorities. If South Asia’s religious nationalists are left unchecked, more religious sites will be revised, demolished and rewritten.
– Sparsh Ahuja and Saadia Gardezi are co-founders of Project Dastaan and make films about the journeys of 1947 Partition survivors.
Twitter: @saadiagardezi and @photosparsh
