India (Reuters) – A court case started by five Hindu women in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political constituency has become the latest battleground in India between the Hindu majority and minority Muslims over access to historically contested religious sites.
The women, backed by an influential hardline Hindu group linked to Modi’s party, said they were determined to secure the legal right for Hindus to pray daily to the idol of a goddess and relics that they say are inside a prominent mosque in aranasi.
Baranasi is one of Hinduism’s holiest cities, and it is also where the Gyanvapi mosque is located – a common phenomenon across India after the Mughal conquest of the region during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Disputes between religious communities over such sites have flared up ever since independence in 1947, but they have become more common in recent years. Muslims make up around 13% of India’s 1.35 billion people.
Hindu groups have submitted several cases to local courts over disputed sites in parts of India in the last few weeks. Some Muslims see this as part of an attempt to marginalise them with the tacit blessing of Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The BJP denies stoking religious tensions, and says it is a party that promotes progress for all Indians.
In baranasi, an ancient city on the River Ganges that is dotted with thousands of temples, one of the Hindu petitioners is Manju Vyas, who runs a beauty salon.
She and four friends approached the court last year to declare the Gyanvapi mosque “an illegal structure built by Islamic rulers after demolishing parts of a temple in the 1600s”.
A pre-existing legal order has allowed hundreds of Hindu women to symbolically worship the goddess Sringar Gauri once a year from the doorstep of the mosque.
