When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the consecration of an unlimited new Hindu temple atop the ruins of a demolished Muslim mosque within the city of Ayodhya in northern India final week, it confirmed how far he’ll go to safe his reelection this 12 months.

Not that stoking spiritual strife is a brand new tactic for the 73-year-old Modi. He rode to energy, and clings to it now, on the again of militant Hindu nationalism and the menace of anti-Muslim violence.

In 2005, Modi, then the highest official within the Indian state of Gujarat, grew to become the primary and solely particular person ever barred from getting into the United States underneath just a little identified immigration legislation that makes international officers ineligible for visas if they’re answerable for “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”

U.S. officers had decided that Modi stood by throughout Hindu riots that killed greater than 1,000 Muslims in Gujarat state in 2002. The visa ban was lifted only when he became prime minister in 2014.

Today Modi’s model of militant Hindu supremacy has changed political pluralism as India’s dominant ideology, threatening the nation’s standing as a secular republic.

As a international correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, I noticed the beginnings of India’s anti-democratic slide on a sunny day in December 1992, on contested floor in Ayodhya.

Thousands of Hindu pilgrims, white-bearded monks, dhoti-clad holy males and different devotees who had gathered for a political rally instantly stormed the historic Babri mosque, constructed within the sixteenth century by Babur, the primary Mughal emperor, on the location of the supposed birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram.

The Hindu mob tore the mosque apart, brick by brick, with pikes, pickaxes and their naked palms. They pulled down guard towers with grappling hooks and climbed barefoot over barbed wire barricades. Foreign journalists have been chased and clubbed. I used to be whacked with bamboo and hit with a brick.

The destruction of the mosque set off a few of its worst spiritual pogroms in India since independence in 1947. Entire Muslim neighborhoods have been torched and households slaughtered. Anti-Hindu riots broke out in response in Pakistan and Bangladesh, India’s Muslim neighbors. A Newsweek cowl famously warned of “Holy War” on the subcontinent; its rival Time deemed the communal violence an “Unholy War.”

Three-plus many years later, a lot of India got here to a standstill Jan. 22 to observe as Modi consecrated Ram Mandir, a richly embellished $220-million temple constructed over the destroyed Babri mosque. In many Indian states, it was a public vacation. Stock markets and most colleges and places of work have been closed. Government places of work shut for half a day.

Nonstop TV protection confirmed the prime minister putting a lotus flower by the jet-black Ram idol within the temple’s internal sanctum, prostrating himself earlier than it and all however declaring Hinduism a state faith. An Indian air power helicopter dropped flower petals outdoors, monks blew conches and chanted, however Modi was the star.

“Ram is the faith of India, the foundation of India,” he advised a rapt crowd in Hindi, according to the Times of India. “Ram is the thought of India, Ram is the law of India. … Ram is the policy [of India].”

Modi has turn into the “high priest of Hinduism,” the prime minister’s biographer, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, told the Indian website Rediff.com after the ceremony. “We are very close to becom[ing] a theocratic state.”

Such a notion can be anathema to India’s as soon as revered founding leaders, Mohandas Okay. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Government ought to embrace all religions, not impose one over the others, they argued. Those secular values are enshrined within the Indian structure.

But secularism has waned as Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party has steadily gained energy by blurring the traces between Hinduism and the state. Muslims have their very own nations, Modi’s supporters argue. Why shouldn’t we?

Here’s why: Although 80% of India’s 1.4 billion folks determine as Hindu, 200 million Muslims and tens of tens of millions of Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and others don’t. Human rights teams say non-Hindus are more and more handled like second-class residents.

Modi’s “government has adopted laws and policies that discriminate against religious minorities, especially Muslims,” Human Rights Watch warns on its web site. “This … has emboldened Hindu nationalist groups to target members of minority communities or civil society groups with impunity.”

In the times since Modi presided over the the temple rituals in Ayodhya, Hindu mobs rampaged in a number of cities and cities. News studies tallied the harm: Muslim-owned outlets destroyed in Mumbai, Muslim college students overwhelmed in Pune, a Muslim graveyard burned in Bihar and so forth.

Modi doesn’t have to inflame anti-Muslim prejudice to win reelection. He has a 76% approval rating in the latest polls and is on monitor to turn into the primary Indian prime minister since Nehru to win three consecutive phrases.

But the hazard of extra clashes is rising.

Hindu nationalists have filed lawsuits to take away a whole bunch of Mughal-era mosques that they declare have been erected over different historical Hindu temples. Their high targets embrace a mosque supposedly built over the birthplace of Krishna, the Hindu god of compassion, and a second in Varanasi, said to be the sacred abode of Shiva, Hindu god of destruction.

“People will always remember this date, this moment,” Modi mentioned in Ayodhya final week, hailing the beginning of a “new era.”

I worry he could also be proper.

Bob Drogin is a former reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Times.