LUCKNOW, India — Tens of thousands of Hindus gathered in northern India on Sunday renewing calls to build a Hindu temple on a site where a 16th-century mosque was attacked and demolished by Hindu hard-liners in 1992, sparking deadly Hindu-Muslim violence.
The demonstrators chanted slogans demanding the building of the temple and waved a banner that said, “No more requests, now it will be battle.”
The Hindu hard-liners are building pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to move quickly on the issue. Modi had promised to build the temple in the 2014 national elections that brought him to power. The next national elections are due before next May.
Security was stepped up for the rally, with thousands of police and paramilitary forces deployed in and around Ayodhya, a town 350 miles east of New Delhi, to prevent any attacks on Muslims, who comprise 6 percent of the town’s more than 55,500 people.
The gathering brought Hindu holy men and activists to the town where the Hindu god Ram was believed to have been born.
“Hindus have waited for a long time. They are losing patience,” Mahant Nritya Gopal Das, who heads the committee on the disputed land, told the crowd. “The time has come for the government to take a call.”
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s ally in the federal government, the Shiv Sena party, asked Modi’s government to bring legislation to build the temple, as India’s top court is taking time to settle a land title dispute between Hindus and Muslims.
Shiv Sena’s chief, Uddav Thackeray, said if construction of the temple does not start, Modi’s government would not return to power. “The prime minister has to choose between the temple and the government,” he told reporters.
Hindu fundamentalists with pickaxes and crowbars razed the 16th century Babri Mosque to the ground in December 1992.
A Section on 11/26/2018