Hindu nationalism reigns supreme in India, where even large groups are minorities
National Post, 29 November 2019
That India’s most famous monument is a magnificent example of Islamic art and architecture rankles some in the governing Bharatiya Janata Party.
AGRA, INDIA • Sociologists have long considered India the world’s most religious country. The growing significance of religion in public policy here suggests that what was true in the 20th century remains true in the 21st. At the very least, India indicates that religion and broader questions of national identity are still potent in the world’s largest democracy.
Like most tourists in Agra, I visited the Taj Mahal, presented to all as the world’s greatest “symbol of love,” the homage of a mourning husband for his beloved late wife. Certainly, but imperial projects of that size are rarely launched for only sentimental reasons. A Muslim emperor built a massive Islamic mausoleum, with accompanying mosque, on the banks of the Yamuna River — second in holiness to the Ganges for India’s Hindus — with unfulfilled plans for a matching onyx Taj Mahal on the other bank. Might this have been aimed at inspiring awe and fealty to an Islamic ruler in what is not a majority Muslim country?
Several centuries later, that India’s most famous monument is a magnificent example of Islamic art and architecture rankles some in the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a force for Hindu nationalism that has some rather sharp words for India’s religious minorities. At about 180 million, India’s Muslims would themselves constitute one of the larger countries in the world, but in India, they remain very much a minority, about 14 per cent of the population.
One occasionally hears sniping from the BJP about the Taj Mahal itself, with local BJP officials going so far as to remove it from some tourist guides. A sound-and-light history pageant I attended in nearby Jaipur painstakingly rehearsed a millennium of local history but somehow managed to leave out entirely the emperor of the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan. Not by accident, I expect.
Muslim monuments and mosques are not a matter of history alone. Consider the case of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, some 470 km east of Agra. The 16th-century mosque was built by a previous Muslim emperor, Babur, on a site held by Hindu tradition to be the birthplace of Rama, one of their more important deities. The place has been one of religious dispute, and in 1992 Hindu nationalist fanatics demolished the mosque, setting off lethal riots throughout India. Some 2,000 were killed, most of them Muslim.
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