A man with a silver bowl on a pillow walks through a temple decorated with flowers. He walks straight towards the photographer, who prints exactly at the moment when a kind of aura seems to arise, thanks to the light in the background. The photo was taken on Monday, January 22, at the opening of a Hindu temple in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya.
The man in the photo is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (73). Without much exaggeration you can say that the multimillion-dollar complex itself plays a supporting role, and mainly functions as a backdrop for the ambitions of Modi, who wants to be elected Prime Minister of India for the third time this spring.
The image here is the whole thing: proof of Modi’s power and a moment when religion and state merge utterly. The headline in this newspaper above a piece by foreign editor Ben van Raaij: ‘Opening of a megalomaniacal Hindu temple in India is a holiday for Hindus, but saddens Muslims.’
The shortest possible summary of an endlessly complex and charged history: in 1992, a mob of Hindu extremists destroyed the 16th-century Babri Masjid mosque on this site. The mosque is said to have been built on Hindu holy ground. An estimated two thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed in subsequent fighting. The outbreak of violence marked the beginning of the rise of the Hindu nationalist party (BJP) that brought Modi to power. And the opening of the temple is the preliminary culmination of this power. Everywhere in India, mosques are being replaced by Hindu temples or there are lawsuits claiming historic ‘Hindu territory’.
The ‘megalomaniac’ in the headline in this newspaper was partly due to the billion-dollar project to build a pilgrimage industry around this temple. Thousands of homes have now been demolished to make way for boulevards; the 42 temple doors are covered with more than 100 kilos of gold.
But the megalomania also lies in this inflated press moment while the temple is far from finished. You can’t inaugurate something while the cranes and bulldozers are still working – another year and a half, in fact, by some estimate. The religious timing was wrong, but the political timing in the run-up to the elections could not be better from Modi’s perspective.
Back to the photo. Modi is on his way to the statue of Lord Rama, one of the most important gods in Hinduism, who is said to have been born on this spot. Modi will lay a lotus flower at the statue as a dedication. Then he will kneel. The long walk from Modi to Rama is captured here in a perfect combination of religious humility and worldly omnipotence. ‘A monument to the peeling secularism in India’, say Modi’s critics.
The photo comes from the PIB, the Press Information Bureau of the Indian government. The image was made available (in a so-called ‘handout’) to international news agencies, who were only allowed to cover the event from outside the temple. The PIB’s generally anonymous photographers are deployed to assist the press (8,400 newspapers and news organizations in India alone) in their work to inform the public about the results of government policies.
In any case, this is the wording on the PIB site, where you can also find this interesting quote: ‘The PIB also provides feedback to the government about the reactions of the population to the government as can be found in the media. ‘ Sounds just vague and ominous enough that as an Indian medium we might perhaps apply some self-censorship here and there.
After the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque, the Indian Supreme Court awarded the land to the Hindus. Muslims were allocated a site elsewhere to build a new mosque. This has still not started.