India
An Indian court on Monday banned large gatherings of Muslims from praying at one of northern India’s most prominent mosques, a lawyer said, after a survey team found traces of the Hindu god Shiva and other Hindu symbols at the mosque’s site.
Lawyer HS Jain added that the judge of the court in Varanasi, the holiest city in Hinduism where the historic Gianvapi Mosque is located, ruled that Muslim gatherings there be limited to 20 people.
The court ordered a survey at the mosque after five women, represented by Jains, sought permission to perform partly Hindu rituals. The women said that a Hindu temple once stood there.
The Gyanvapi Mosque, located in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s circle, is one of several mosques in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh that Hindu hardliners believe were built on top of demolished Hindu temples.
Police said the court’s decision would help maintain law and order as hardline Hindu groups linked to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stepped up their demands to dig inside some mosques and allow searches at the Taj Mahal.
India’s Muslim leaders, who number about 200 million, view the moves as attempts to undermine their rights to freedom of worship and religious expression with the tacit approval of the BJP.
Keshav Prasad Moriah, Uttar Pradesh’s deputy chief minister, who is a BJP member, told a local TV station that the government welcomed the court’s order and “we will implement it”.
In 2019, the Supreme Court allowed Hindus to build a temple on the site of the disputed 16th-century Babri Mosque, which was demolished by Hindu mobs in 1992, believing it to be on the site where the Hindu god Ram was born.
The incident caused religious riots that killed nearly two thousand people, mostly Muslims, across India.