On the afternoon of February 10, Samira Ali was alone at home when the doorbell rang. A group of 15 men stood outside her apartment, chanti...
On the afternoon of February 10, Samira Ali was alone at home when the doorbell rang. A group of 15 men stood outside her apartment, chanting “Jai Shri Ram”.
Ali (name changed), a 21-year-old student, was taken aback by the size of the group. But she was not surprised. Local members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, had informed her housing colony earlier in February that they would be conducting a door-to-door drive to collect donations for the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh.
The temple is coming up at the site where the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 by Hindutva mobs mobilised by the BJP through its Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. In November 2019, the Supreme Court held the demolition was illegal but awarded the disputed site to Hindu litigants. In August 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the temple.
“My father and I had an argument about it just the other day,” Ali recalled. She believes that the temple’s foundations lie on “majoritarian politics of intimidation”.
“I felt that on principle, we should not donate, but he said we would have to, because we have...
