By Mihir Sharma<\/strong><\/p>\n New Delhi: <\/strong>This week, an Indian prime minister, dressed like a priest-king in a saffron scarf, a\u00a0silver crown<\/a>\u00a0and a lockdown-lengthened beard, performed a sacred ritual in the ancient capital of Ayodhya. Narendra Modi thus founded a new Hindu temple on a site where, for hundreds of years, a mosque had stood.<\/p>\n After decades of legal warfare and mob violence, Hindu nationalists have now effectively reclaimed the land where they believe the god Rama was born. The state-sponsored pageantry of the moment, however, proclaimed their greater victory: the transformation of India from a secular-nationalist republic into an ethno-nationalist state.<\/p>\n No mere democratic election could match the elation of this moment, as far as the Hindu revivalists were concerned; theirs was a victory not over politicians but over history itself. In their story of India, centuries of \u201cMuslim oppression\u201d persisted as long as mosques still stood on disputed land and as long as India\u2019s flawed secular leadership sought to include Muslims in a broad governing coalition. Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party effectively ended both, soundly defeating a government led by a Sikh prime minister and a Christian party president. Modi\u2019s two emphatic election victories, the nationalists\u00a0believe, have shown India that its Muslims can be safely ignored.<\/p>\n Twenty, even ten years ago, there would have been agonizing in the media and in public over an Indian prime minister presiding over such a religious-political spectacle. Certainly, when the mosque that once stood in Ayodhya was demolished by a mob, general revulsion was great enough for Modi\u2019s predecessors to claim they were ashamed. Now, Hindu nationalism\u2019s capture of the soul of India is so complete that television anchors\u00a0broke into devotional song<\/a>\u00a0and newspaper front pages\u00a0looked more like<\/a>\u00a0religious calendars than broadsheets.<\/p>\n Modi, and India, are not alone. The most ambitious and effective of today\u2019s populist-nationalists match themselves against the broad sweep of history and seek to reverse it. When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan turns the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, he wants to erase not just the legacy of Ataturk but of Ottoman Turkey\u2019s \u201chumiliation\u201d at the hands of the West after the First World War. It\u2019s no coincidence that the first prayers at Hagia Sophia were timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne that the defeated Ottomans were forced to sign.<\/p>\n Viktor Orban\u2019s Hungary mourns its \u201cdismemberment\u201d in the Treaty of Trianon a century ago \u2014 most spectacularly\u00a0through<\/a>\u00a0a new monument in the center of Budapest. As for Vladimir Putin, it is not clear which Russia he wants to celebrate \u2014 the Soviet Union that he once served, or the vast Orthodox empire it replaced. Regardless, there\u2019s no doubt that he, too, wishes to turn the clock back.<\/p>\n Yet not one of this unprecedented crop of leaders has reversed the tide of history as successfully as Modi has in India \u2014 ending, he claimed in his first speech as prime minister, \u201c1,200 years of slavery<\/a>.\u201d Certainly, none of the others, not even Orban, lead a country that seems as convinced of its leader\u2019s crusade as India does.<\/p>\n Of course, many Hindus do feel estranged from their co-religionists. In a heartfelt column, the prominent public intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta\u00a0wrote<\/a>: \u201cThis temple is the first real colonisation of Hinduism by political power. I feel chained like never before.\u201d<\/p>\n But those Indians who disapprove of their country\u2019s new orientation have been indisputably beaten in two national elections. And many of them are exhausted by the number of defeats they have suffered \u2014 on migration policy, on judicial independence, on Kashmir, on state-sanctioned Islamophobia. They remind themselves that the Ayodhya temple is but a symbol of the humiliation of Muslims and liberals and that they had better save whatever energy they have left for the additional persecution that may follow.<\/p>\n Sadly, this colonization of religion, the reduction of what is sacred into what Mehta calls a \u201cbanal and nasty \u2026 symbol of ethnic nationalism\u201d has been a long time coming. A few weeks before Modi\u2019s first election victory, six years ago, I visited Ayodhya. I walked through barbed-wire corridors reminiscent of a concentration camp, and was hustled past the small area, covered with a makeshift blue tarp, that was the sanctum sanctorum.<\/p>\n That glimpse seemed insufficient for many in the crowd of pilgrims. The real moment to savor came afterwards as they walked through the bizarre revivalist mall that Ayodhya had become, buying DVDs of the mosque\u2019s demolition and mob violence set to hymns about peace and tranquillity. They represented, I had always been told, the hate-filled \u201cfringe,\u201d not India\u2019s tolerant mainstream. Give hate enough oxygen, though, and it will inexorably spread. \u00a0<\/p>\n This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.<\/em><\/p>\n To contact the author of this story: To contact the editor responsible for this story:Legal warfare, mob violence<\/h2>\n
Hagia Sophia<\/h2>\n
Colonization of religion<\/h2>\n
Mihir Sharma\u00a0at\u00a0msharma131@bloomberg.net<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
Nisid Hajari\u00a0at\u00a0nhajari@bloomberg.net<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/cdn.siasat.com\/wp-content\/themes\/sahifa\/images\/googlenews.svg\")