The as yet unfinished Ram Mandir (temple of Ram) in Ayodhya is being built on the ruins of the Babri Masjid, a mosque that was destroyed by right wing fanatics in 1992. They claim that the mosque was built at the birthplace of the Hindu God Ram and accept the 2000 people that died in the ensuing violence – most of them Muslim – as a fair price to pay for clearing the area. After almost three decades of legal and political battles, the Indian Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that a temple should be constructed on the land. The judgment more than anything else reflected the decay of the Indian judiciary – the executive by then had long stopped even pretending it follows the secularism enshrined in the Indian Constitution. To quote Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s words from the temple inauguration ceremony: “Ram is the faith of India, Ram is the foundation of India. Ram is the idea of India, Ram is the law of India”. Defying Hindu tradition and angering more than a few senior priests, Modi chose to place statues of gods and perform the consecration rituals before the temple’s construction was completed, determined to milk the issue to the last drop in his bid for re-election in the general parliamentary elections in spring this year.
In the last general election in 2019, 37% of voters gave their vote to Modi’s party BJP, but with India’s first-past-the-post system this translated into a landslide victory of 56% of seats in parliament. With the state institutions firmly in his hand, the opposition bogged down with in-fighting or jailed, and any notion of an independent media gone for good, some polls predict Modi might score up to 10 percentage points more this time around.
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“You shouldn’t have invested all that money into the house,” says Mahi* matter-of-factly, pointing to the air conditioner that’s proudly attached to the raw brick walls of the single room that forms Nadiya’s home. “The elections are coming, they will tear down your house and all the money will be lost. What’s the use?”
I have to blink, blink again, and stop for a moment. The year is 2024, the country India, and this is a normal Tuesday afternoon conversation between two of my friends. Welcome to Modi’s Amrit Kaal, the golden era that will supposedly see the country transform bottom-up.
Nadiya lives in a predominantly Muslim, informal and low-income neighbourhood not far from a busy metro station in South Delhi. There is a dispute as to whose land the houses are built upon. The state claims it belongs to the archaeological survey of India while the residents, some of whom have lived there for more than 30 years, who have seen children born, marry, and in turn give birth, claim it for themselves. In 1995, the government demolished the neighbourhood. The residents rebuilt their houses brick by brick, just to see them demolished again in 2012, and then once more in December 2022, with hundreds of families becoming homeless overnight each time. It was due to mere luck that Nadiya’s house was left standing this time around, and there is no way of knowing when the bulldozers will come back. While these demolition drives are not a unique feature of Modi’s government, they have intensified under his rule and are usually conducted in poor and/or Muslim neighbourhoods, often following rallies of the Hindu far right. They are indeed common enough to have earned themselves the nickname ‘bulldozer politics’.