Supporters of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in Ahmedabad celebrate the Supreme Court's verdict on disputed religious site in Ayodhya awarded to Hindus on November 9.
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Sam Panthaky/AFP
Faizan Mustafa and Aymen Mohammed of the NALSAR University of Law write in the Indian Express that the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya judgement “will be remembered for the victory of faith over the rule of law” since “despite conceding that faith cannot confer title, it still went ahead to give property to worshippers on the basis of faith”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was part of the Ram temple movement that culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid, writes Liz Matthews in the Indian Express. In 1990, as a member of the BJP’s national executive, he was tasked with coordinating party president LK Advani’s Rath Yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Mumbai.
In the Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta draws on the epic Ramayana to argue that Ram’s political triumph was not a moment of moral redemption and hopes the future Ram temple at Ayodhya would mark “a new kind of holiness not predicated on the revenge of history”.
Hilal Ahmed, associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, offers two readings of the Ayodhya judgement in The Print, concluding that it is problematic in the way it establishes the dispute as a historical conflict between “Hindus as a faith community and Muslims as a historical entity of ‘outsiders’”.
In The Wire, journalist Harish Khare, media advisor to former prime minister Manmohan Singh, asks the Supreme Court to oversee the working of the trust for the construction of a Ram temple to ensure the trustees “do not become agents of political triumphalism”.