Controversy over an India Day Parade float is a slur on Hindu pride

(RNS) — The India Day Parade marched down Manhattan’s Madison Avenue last week, as it has every August for more than four decades, celebrating India’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Thousands of New Yorkers lined the parade route adorned in orange, green, and white, the colors of the Indian flag, munching on samosas and loudly cheering floats representing a mosaic of Indian culture gliding by.

One float, however, a 9-foot-by-6-foot model of the newly opened temple to Ram in Ayodhya, India, became the center of controversy. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, among other Muslim advocacy groups, signed a letter asking that the float’s sponsors, two American Hindu temples and a Hindu American cultural nonprofit, be investigated by the Department of Justice and the FBI.

As anyone who has followed the long saga of Ayodhya’s Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Tirth (Rama birthplace temple) knows, the temple has been mired in contested narratives about the history of its site. The temple to Lord Rama, one of the Hindu Dharma tradition’s most revered deities, is situated in the northern Indian city where, according to the Hindu sacred text the Ramayana, Rama’s life began. 

In the 16th century, one of India’s Islamic conquerors and founder of the Mughal Empire, Babur, built a mosque in Ayodhya known as Masjid-e-Janmasthan, or Mosque of the Birthplace, referring to the site’s connection to Rama. Since at least 1885, Hindus have attempted to negotiate the return of the site, where they hoped to rebuild a temple to Rama. In 1992, this long struggle culminated in the destruction of the mosque by an agitated crowd, sparking riots in which thousands died.

That a temple was destroyed by a conqueror to build monuments of domination is hardly surprising. In Mexico City, Metropolitan Cathedral is located on the site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple of the Aztecs. The Byzantines’ Hagia Sophia in what is now Istanbul was converted into a mosque, just as the Cordoba mosque was forcibly converted into a church by Ferdinand in 1236.

A regional Indian High Court put a legal stamp on the disputed site, ruling in 2010, after a court-ordered archaeological study confirmed the existence of a Hindu temple under the site of the erstwhile Babur mosque. The Indian Supreme Court affirmed the dig’s finding in 2019, condemned the mosque’s destruction and held that a fair resolution was for Hindus to be allowed to build a temple at the disputed site and that equal land be provided to Muslims to build a mosque at a “prominent location in Ayodhya.”

The Ram temple became a reality last year and quickly became one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in India. Ram devotees from around the world — the Ramayana is a national treasure in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, among other places — thronged to worship at what was to them hallowed ground.

Despite the controversy over the temple, the parade’s volunteer organizers, members of a venerable longtime community consortium, the Federation of Indian Associations, were stunned at the response to the float. The replica had already appeared at Hindu temples throughout the United States so that Hindus unable to travel to Ayodhya could glimpse the new home of a deity who commands enormous faith for so many.

When CAIR, the Indian American Muslim Council and some of its affiliated groups held a news conference demanding that the temple float be pulled, organizers were caught flat-footed. CAIR’s network began a campaign to force sponsors to pull their support from FIA. New York Mayor Eric Adams was peppered with questions at a news conference as to whether he would skip the newly deemed “controversial” parade. Indian Muslims pulled their float out of the parade the day before it marched due to sustained community pressure and bad press, they wrote. 

Even if the 3-decades-old wound of 1992 hasn’t healed, escalating a dispute over a float into a demand that the FBI and DOJ investigate Hindu groups only exacerbates historical trauma. Muslims suffered enhanced surveillance by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies after 9/11, an ordeal CAIR knows well. Prompting the FBI to scrutinize another community of recent immigrants is a Machiavellian move in a decades-old grievance. For its part, IAMC deployed a truck with a billboard at the parade condemning “Hindutva,” a term loosely associated with Hindu nationalism but which many scholars consider identical to Hinduism, and Islamophobia. 

Falsely targeting the largest Hindu temple in America as an outpost of the Hindu nationalist Indian government amounts to a slur of dual loyalty, one often aimed at American Jews accusing them of putting loyalty to Israel over their own homes in the U.S.

History has vicious beginnings and violent middles, and the Ram temple’s continuum was no doubt contentious. But the end can and should be celebrated as one of restoration and resolution rather than a moment to invoke old grudges and sic federal agencies on fellow travelers over that contested past.

(Suhag Shukla is executive director of the Hindu American Foundation. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)