As Hindus prepare to open a massive temple in Ayodhya, India, the Muslim minority in India plans to begin construction of a new mosque in the same city later this year, hoping to turn a new page after a bloody dispute that has lasted for decades. Sheikh Arafat, head of the development committee of the Indian Islamic Cultural Foundation overseeing the mosque construction project, stated that construction will begin in May after Ramadan and is expected to take three to four years.
In 1992, Hindu extremists demolished the Babri Mosque, which dates back to the 16th century in Ayodhya, North India, claiming it was built over an ancient temple on the site believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. The dispute has deteriorated relations between the two communities for decades, and the mosque's destruction triggered riots across the country that resulted in the deaths of 2000 people, most of whom were Muslims.
In 2019, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the demolition of the mosque was illegal, but it concluded that evidence showed a non-Islamic structure underneath the mosque. It ordered the site to be granted to Hindu groups for temple construction and provided Muslim community leaders with land elsewhere in the city for building a mosque.
While the construction of the $180 million temple began within months and the first phase is set to open on Monday, Muslims are struggling to raise funds and initiate work at an abandoned site approximately 25 kilometers away. Hindu groups allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party, to which Prime Minister Narendra Modi belongs, have been fundraising for more than three decades, raising over 30 billion rupees ($360 million) from more than 40 million Indians. Sheikh Arafat stated that a fundraising website is expected to launch in the coming weeks.
