India's Hindu nationalists are petitioning courts to tear down mosques and replace them with temples

As day breaks on the Ganges, a dozen Hindu devotees slowly dip in the river’s holy water and quietly chant. This is Varanasi, the ancient spiritual centre in India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state, considered the holiest of cities.

It’s also where a bitter legal dispute over a 17th-century mosque is increasing religious tensions between the city’s Hindus and Muslims.

“The friction has already been caused,” said Varanasi resident Vijay Dutt Tiwari. “The fight will continue.”

Gyanvapi mosque, which has stood on the banks of the Ganges for more than 300 years, is the subject of around two dozen legal challenges that assert the structure was built on ruins of a temple devoted to the Hindu god Shiva.

An aerial view shows Gyanvapi mosque, left, and Kashiviswanath temple on the banks of the river Ganges in Varanasi, India, in 2021. (Rajesh Kumar Singh/The Associated Press)

Many of the petitioners want the entire mosque, constructed by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, torn down and replaced with a temple.

The mosque is heavily guarded by police and fenced off with concrete barriers and barbed wire. Muslims, who still pray at Gyanvapi five times a day, need to go through strict security before entering the compound.

That security is even tighter in the midst of India’s general election, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is vying for a third straight term, and following a January court ruling that allowed Hindu worshippers access to the contested mosque’s cellar to pray.

Tight security surrounds the Gvanvapi mosque in Varanasi and has ramped up during India’s general election, in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is running for a third term. (Salimah Shivji/CBC)

The decision came after a court-ordered archeological survey concluded there was evidence of a “large Hindu temple prior to the construction of the existing structure.”

The legal battle is the latest religious flashpoint in an India increasingly divided along communal lines. But there are others brewing.

Hindu nationalists target hundreds of mosques

Gyanvapi mosque may be the most high-profile case, but it’s only one of hundreds of Muslim sites targeted by Hindu nationalist groups, who some historians accuse of aggressively attempting to rewrite India’s history.

Dozens of petitions have been filed, with varying arguments, against mosques and Muslim structures across the country. Judges have allowed the cases to be lodged despite the fact that India has a law that freezes places of worship as they were when India became independent in 1947, protecting them from any changes or disputes.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, second from left, attends the opening of the grand temple of the Hindu god Lord Ram in Ayodhya, India, on Jan. 22. (India’s Press Information Bureau/Reuters)

Another mosque built by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Shahi Eidgah in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, is facing more than a dozen lawsuits.

Even iconic monuments such as south Delhi’s Qutub Minar, a heritage site with its imposing red sandstone brick minaret, and Agra’s world-famous Taj Mahal have been mentioned in court.

Those legal arguments are getting louder after Modi, who specifically chose the holy city of Varanasi as the constituency he wanted to represent when he first ran for office 10 years ago, inaugurated a new temple in the city of Ayodhya, devoted to the Hindu deity Lord Ram.

“After decades of waiting, our Ram has arrived,” Modi told the assembled crowd and the millions of others watching the live feed of the lavish inauguration ceremony.

It was the fulfilment of a decades-long promise made by Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has pushed Hindu nationalism to the forefront during the prime minister’s decade in office, at the expense of the secularism enshrined in India’s constitution.

The new Ram temple is built on the ruins of a mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992, an illegal move that sparked riots across India and left 2,000 people dead, mostly Muslims.

Hindus say the site was the birthplace of Lord Ram and that a temple was there before the mosque was built.

Shortly after Ayodhya’s temple was inaugurated, two of India’s mosques were demolished within days of each other by authorities who cited “illegal encroachment.” One was a centuries-old mosque in south Delhi and the other was a mosque and madrasa, or Islamic school, in Haldwani, a city in the northern state of Uttarakhand.

Dispute over holy site’s history

The heightened dispute over Gyanvapi has put Varanasi’s Muslim community on edge, according to Syed Mohammad Yaseen, 78, who’s been a caretaker of the mosque for decades.

“The situation is going from bad to worse,” he said. “Here we are offering namaz [prayers] and on the other side of the barricades, some people are chanting [anti-Muslim] slogans.”

Syed Mohammad Yaseen, 78, an advocate for Gyanvapi mosque and joint secretary of Varanasi’s local mosque management committee, shows a cabinet containing legal documents that he claims are related to protecting the mosque. (Joseph Campbell/Reuters)

He called the claims from petitioners that Hindus prayed inside the mosque’s basement until the 1990s a complete fabrication.

“This never happened,” Yaseen said.

In his view, the courts are biased against the Muslim side.

“We are not being heard at all,” he said. “Decisions are being taken, but justice is not being done.”

But those fighting for the mosque to disappear are adamant that they are the ones who have been treated unfairly after having been robbed of their holy site in the 17th century.

“Arungzeb razed our temple,” said Sita Sahu, 46, one of the group of women who filed the first court challenge against Gyanvapi mosque in August 2021.

“It was an attempt to destroy our culture, so, it was in all of our hearts that we wanted to reclaim it.”

‘We want to reclaim our temple,’ said Sita Sahu, second from the left, one of the five women who launched the initial court challenge over Varanasi’s Gyanvapi mosque. Also pictured, from left, are Laxmi Devi, Manju Vyas and Rekha Pathak. (Salimah Shivji/CBC)

As she sat with the other women who filed the lawsuit alongside her, talk veered to their disappointment over the recent ruling allowing access to the mosque’s basement only.

“It was a moment of happiness” that faded quickly, said a fellow petitioner, Manju Vyas.

“Since we started praying [inside the mosque], we have not been satisfied in our hearts at all,” she told CBC News, calling it “unfair” that they weren’t awarded the whole area.

Modi’s party pushing Hindu nationalism

During this election, Modi’s party, the BJP, has leaned into the messaging of Mughal Muslim invaders destroying temples.

In a campaign video posted to Instagram this week, but later pulled down after the social media site received complaints, the BJP paired anti-Muslim rhetoric with attacks on Modi’s main opponent, the Congress party’s Rahul Gandhi.

The Muslim “invaders, terrorists, robbers and thieves used to come again and again, used to loot all our treasures,” the animated video said. “And on top of that, they used to ruin our temples.”

That message resonates with 72-year-old Sohan Lal Arya, a longtime activist pushing for the Gyanvapi mosque to be razed to the ground.

Sohan Lal Arya holds the brick he kept as a memento from the day the Babri mosque in Ayodhya was torn down by a Hindu nationalist mob. (Salimah Shivji/CBC)

He’s also a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist volunteer group described by some observers as a paramilitary organisation, which works to spread the political ideology that Hinduism is India’s dominant religion. Modi’s ruling BJP emerged from the RSS, and they are still closely linked, although the party has repeatedly said that it does not discriminate against minorities.

Arya proudly showed off the brick he took home from Ayodhya in 1992, a piece of the Babri mosque that he helped destroy along with the rest of the mob.

“Ayodhya was a fulfilment of one of the main efforts of my life,” he told CBC News in an interview.

“That goal was successful, but two more goals are still pending,” Arya said, referring to the Gyanvapi mosque and the one in Mathura.

He said he’s keen to see all of the mosques that he believes were built on the grounds of former temples destroyed, but the list is longer for some than others.

Historians question BJP narrative

A senior BJP leader, K.S. Eshwarappa, has claimed the Mughals destroyed 36,000 temples and that they would “reclaim all those temples one by one.” Many historians, however, scoff at that assertion.

“History is being replaced by myths,” said Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, a professor of history specializing in the Mughal Empire, at Aligarh Muslim University.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi is a professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University specializing in the Mughal Empire. (Salimah Shivji/CBC)

The destruction of places of worship in the name of religion did take place under the Mughals, Rezavi said, but cited another historian’s extensive research while saying the BJP’s numbers were highly exaggerated.

According to Richard Eaton, an Indian history professor at the University of Arizona who’s written reports on the topic, inscriptions and other records over five centuries suggest the Muslim rulers desecrated about 80 temples, not thousands.

Rezavi said the ruling BJP has cynically worked to “twist the narrative” and rewrite India’s past to bring it in line with the Modi government’s Hindu-first ideology.

He also pointed to recent edits to India’s high school textbooks that removed chapters on Mughal history and the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat as another example of attempts to obscure historical facts.

“[It’s] just playing to the gallery to garner the votes of those who are illiterate, those who are swayed only by the appeal of religion,” Rezavi said.

Hindu priests perform a nightly fire ritual on the banks of the holy Ganges river. (Salimah Shivji/CBC )

For some Muslims in Varanasi, the fear is that India’s current political climate will embolden more attacks on disputed mosques — legal or otherwise.

“The situation will get very bad,” said Yaseen, the caretaker of Gyanvapi mosque. “Our prime minister has already shown us this by talking about Hindus and Muslims [on the campaign trail].

“What kind of behaviour awaits us Muslims has been made very clear by him.”