Hindutva War on Mosques Picks up Steam
Words of caution by RSS leader seemingly ignored
By: Nirupama Subramaniam
Triumphant over the construction of the temple to the god Ram in Ayodhya 31 years after the destruction of the Babri masjid and the 2024 construction of the Ayodhya temple amid some of India’s worst recent interreligious tensions, India’s Hindutva foot soldiers are again pressing ahead, swarming the lower courts with cases against significant mosques at several small towns in north India, claiming they were built over temples. At least 11 places of worship for Muslims, including the famous Khwaja Garib Nawaz at Ajmer and the dargah of Salim Chisti at the Fatehpur Sikri Jama Masjid, 35 km from the Taj Mahal, are now the subject of litigation by Hindu groups.
The flurry of lawsuits and their claims of temples purportedly buried under well-known mosques have heightened inter-religious tensions, threatening to tear more holes into India's fragile secular fabric and heightening a sense of living under siege for India’s Muslims, who form about one-seventh of its 1.4 billion population. It is no coincidence that the anti-mosque lawfare has come just as several states prepare for elections. Among the most threatened is the Gyanvapi mosque, built during the 17th-century reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, which shares a wall with the renowned Kashi Vishwanath Hindu temple in the pilgrimage city of Varanasi, located on the banks of the river Ganga and famous as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's constituency.
Since the demolition of the Mughal-era Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, Hindutva’s ominous war cry foretold the present: “Yeh toh sirf jhanki hai, Kashi Mathura baqi hai” – “Ayodhya was a trailer, Varanasi and Mathura remain.” The Gyanvapi mosque and Mathura’s Shahi Idgah mosque, another 17th-century structure, are up against lawsuits challenging their existence. In Sambhal, a small town in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state and among its least developed, where provincial elections are due in 2026, the tensions grew into a full-blown riot last December, in which five Muslim men were killed after a court ordered a survey at the 16th century Shahi Jama Masjid, listed by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as a “monument of national importance.”
Within days of the Sambhal violence, in neighboring Rajasthan, also BJP-ruled, a local court took up a petition by a Hindutva group called Hindu Sena (Hindu Army) claiming a Shiva temple inside the Ajmer Sharif, a 13th-century dargah to the Persian mystic Muinuddin Chishti who set up one of South Asia's earliest Sufi orders. The court issued notices to the custodians of the shrine and government officials.
The shrine is a huge draw for Muslims worldwide, who visit during the annual pilgrimage to pray at Chishti's tomb. Hindus also worship at the shrine, a symbol of Hindu-Muslim syncretism. A record number of pilgrims congregated at the shrine during this year’s pilgrimage in the first week of January. Considering how the Babri Masjid row ended, the new uncertainty over the fate of the shrine may be driving the rush.
In Madhya Pradesh, a large state in central India ruled by the BJP, a group called the Hindu Front for Justice, wants Muslims to be barred from praying inside a contested mosque. In the national capital, at the famous Qutub Minar, a UNESCO world heritage site, Hindu groups have claimed that a mosque on the site was built over the remains of Hindu and Jain temples. For now, Karnataka is the only southern state where a mosque in Mangalore is at the center of a legal dispute.
The sudden spate of petitions recalls how the Babri Masjid row began as an innocuous petition to the area district magistrate in 1885, and engulfed the country in anti-Muslim communal frenzy within a century. In the lighting of another slow fuse, the courts, including the Supreme Court, appear to have been a willing accessory.
Since 1991, India has had a law called the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act prohibiting the changing of the religious character of a place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947, the day India gained independence, though the law did not prevent the destruction of the Babri Masjid just a year after enaction. Three decades later, the 2019 judgment of the Supreme Court held the demolition of the mosque to be an “egregious violation of the rule of law” but permitted a temple to be built at the site anyway. In the same breath, it upheld the Places of Worship 1991 law, emphasizing its importance as a guardrail for India's secularism, and said that the Ram Janmabhoomi was an exception, and history should not be allowed to be used as a tool to rake up conflicts on places of worship.
Why then did the Supreme Court accept petitions challenging the constitutional validity of this law is anyone's guess. And if the lower courts have accepted petitions against mosques as if this legislation has already been struck down, many are holding the Supreme Court responsible for this too.
Here's why. In 2022, while upholding a lower court’s order for a survey of the Gyanvapi mosque by the ASI, Justice D Y Chandrachud, the former Chief Justice of India, observed that there was nothing in the Places of Worship Act that prevented such a survey. This is why the language in many of the petitions against mosques is couched in demands to include pleas for “scientific surveys” by the ASI to ascertain their claims that underneath each structure lie temple ruins.
As more cases targeting mosques began surfacing in the final weeks of 2024, the Supreme Court, now headed by a new chief justice, finally acted to put a lid on such litigation. It barred courts from accepting new petitions or passing any orders in the cases already before them until it had decided on the petitions challenging the Places of Worship Act.
But an atmosphere of communal anticipation has already been built up. It appears that the Hindutva rank and file want more, not less action.
Back in 2022, Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Hindutva’s mother ship, Bhagwat's remark created a sensation by making a reasonable appeal for an end to shivling hunting.
“Why create a conflict a day?” he asked. “Let there be no more hunts in mosques for shivling (a symbolic stone representation of the god Shiva).” His words conveyed the impression that after winning a long battle in India's Supreme Court to construct the Ayodhya temple, Hindu nationalism's mothership wanted to stop the growing clamor against other mosques.
His remarks came at a time when claims of a shivling inside the Gyanvapi mosque had just surfaced.
If Hindutva groups ignored him then, his more recent remarks in a similar vein seem to have brought about a rift within the RSS.
In December, speaking a month after the Sambhal riots, Bhagwat once again made a plea for communal peace. “Extremism, aggressiveness, forcefulness, and insulting other gods are not like our country and this is unacceptable,” he said. If India had to be accepted as ‘Vishwa Guru’, it could not forget its “nature of accommodation of all.”
Pointing to “a growing tendency” of disrespect to other religions, Bhagwat said India needs to show the world that it can live in harmony, and return to its “true nature, that is of kindness and spirituality”.
“The Ram temple [at Ayodhya] was a matter of faith for the entire Hindu community... it was built and is now the center of faith. But raking up new issues every day for disdain, doubt, and enmity will not work,” he added.
Bhagwat's remarks were criticized by Hindu leaders and contradicted by the RSS mouthpiece Organizer, which carried an editorial justifying the anti-mosque campaign, saying that understanding the “truth” and history of the disputed structures was not for religious supremacy but for seeking “civilization justice” for Hindus. It later put out that it had no disagreement with the RSS leader and published his speech in full to provide “context.”
Bhagwat's remarks may be more a tactical shift than a change of heart towards Islam and Muslims. Still, he won praise from anti-RSS and liberal Indians, especially as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his customary signature style, has been silent during the surge in the display of anti-Muslim sentiments. Perhaps it was Bhagwat's words or the Ajmer dargah's international fame – heads of state of many Muslim countries have made a pilgrimage to the shrine – and the potential diplomatic fallout of the brewing dispute around it, that Modi decided to send a cabinet minister to Ajmer with the customary offering of a chaadar, a spread for Chishti's tomb at the shrine.
Meanwhile, in Uttar Pradesh, a communal cauldron in the best of times, Sambhal may not calm down any time soon. The saffron-robed Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who is not affiliated to the RSS but belongs to an order of Hindu monks at a temple in northern Uttar Pradesh, and is preparing for the 2026 elections, is determined to provide “civilizational justice.” Adityanath, who is popular across India for being openly anti-Muslim and is even seen by some as a likely successor to Modi, recently described the contested mosques as a “cancer that needs surgery”.