Ram Mandir Ground-Breaking

Nothing to do with religion & everything to do with politics

On August 5 2020, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi marked a turning point in his country’s history when he laid the foundation stone for a new temple.

The ground-breaking ceremony for Ram Mandir took place in the city of Ayodhya in northern India.

For a country which many most commonly associate with yoga, Bollywood, and Gandhi, the event might have been expected to be a joyous occasion welcomed by all as a marvelous celebration for the world’s third-largest religion.

Yet the choice of Modi to lay the foundation stone — instead of, for instance, a priest — illustrates how the founding of this new temple has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with politics.

Rather than harmony, the event created division.

While the ground-breaking ceremony took place in India, supporters of Modi in New York City bought massive digital billboards to display the event in Times Square. Although those supporters were watching and cheering, other people gathered to protest and chant: “Modi, Modi, you can’t hide, you committed genocide.”

The protestors waved signs with slogans like “Reclaim the Republic,” “Modi = Hitler,” and “Babri Masjid demolition is a crime.”

The Babri Masjid was a 450-year-old mosque that once stood on the same exact site where Modi laid the foundation stone of the new temple. In 1992, it was destroyed by a mob of hundreds of thousands of people — a mob which Modi himself played a key role in organizing and galvanizing.

Anti-Muslim pogroms which followed killed up to 3,000 Muslims.

Ten years later, in 2002, Modi played an even more central role in another organized carnage.

While he was Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat in western India, he oversaw a three-day pogrom in which mobs slaughtered Gujarati Muslims. They were gang-raped, hacked to death, burned alive.

By the end, 2,000 (or more) Muslims lay dead.

The RSS is at the center of all of this violence.

The RSS is a uniformed and armed paramilitary which has an estimated six million members.

It was founded in 1925, the same year that Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf and founded the SS. The RSS’s founders and earliest leaders drew inspiration from and offered praise for Nazi Germany as well as Mussolini’s fascist movement in Italy.

India is one of the most colorful and diverse areas on earth. It has nearly 30 major languages and the region produced three of the five major religions in the world.

But the goal of the RSS is to destroy that diversity.

It believes that India should be officially declared a Hindu nation for Hindu people only. According to its own founders, the RSS wants to eliminate all Muslims and Christians from the land and assimilate all Buddhists and Sikhs into the Hindu religion.

That’s why the RSS organized the mob that destroyed the Babri Masjid and later led the pogrom in Gujarat.

And that is what motivates Modi, a man who joined the RSS when he was eight years old, became a full-time RSS worker when he was 21, and was assigned by the RSS to work in politics when he was 37.

After Modi was re-elected to a second term in 2019, he began implementing the RSS’s Hindu nationalist agenda with blitzkrieg speed.

His regime annexed Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in the country, stripped it of its statehood, mass-arrested all Kashmiri social, political, and religious leaders, and imposed a total lockdown for months.

Kashmir remains under extreme occupation.

In December 2019, Modi’s regime sparked a mass resistance movement after passing a controversial bill that makes religion the basis for acquiring Indian citizenship. The regime also proposed a National Register of Citizens, which would require that all residents of India prove their citizenship.

The laws have been compared to the Nuremberg Laws, the legislation passed in Nazi Germany to strip Jews of citizenship.

For months, hundreds of thousands — millions — took to the streets of India to protest. Over 20 died as police brutalized the peaceful protestors.

Then leaders from Modi’s political party began raising calls to “shoot the traitors” and, in February 2020, they partnered with the police to stage an anti-Muslim pogrom in New Delhi.

Over 50 people — mostly Muslims — were killed.

August 5 2020 — the day on which Modi laid the foundation stone of Ram Mandir — marked the one-year anniversary of the annexation of Kashmir.

This year also marks the 18th-anniversary of the Gujarat Pogrom and the 28th-anniversary of the destruction of the Babri Masjid.

Everywhere one looks in India, the only punishment the powerful receive for orchestrating the grossest of atrocities is promotion to ever higher positions of power. Modi is a premier example of that.