Indian Hindu group toughens stance on mosque-temple disputes
A powerful Hindu group said several mosques in India were built over demolished Hindu temples, apparently hardening its stance in a decades-long sectarian dispute just days after a huge temple was inaugurated on the site of a razed mosque.
The comments from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party, come after Modi and the RSS chief led Monday’s consecration of the temple on the site of the 16th-century Babri mosque demolished by a Hindu mob in 1992.
The fight over claims to holy sites has divided Hindu-majority India, which has the world’s third-largest Muslim population, since independence from British rule in 1947.
Four days after the temple was inaugurated in the northern city of Ayodhya, a lawyer for Hindu petitioners said the Archaeological Survey of India had determined that a 17th-century mosque in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, in Modi’s parliamentary constituency, was built over a destroyed a Hindu temple.