An Indian court has ruled that Hindus can worship inside a contested mosque, a verdict that it is feared will increase religious tensions and galvanise further claims against other Muslim places of worship.
Gyanvapi mosque, in the holy city of Varanasi, was built in the 17th century by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and has been in use by Muslims for prayer ever since.
Since 2021 the mosque has been subjected to dozens of legal petitions by Hindus who are fighting for the right to pray there, claiming it is the site of an ancient Hindu temple and Hindu deities were present there. They also claimed Hindu priests had worshipped in the mosque cellar until 1993.
The mosque committee has been fighting the case, arguing that it has been used solely by Muslims for hundreds of years and is protected by the Places of Worship Act. The law, enacted shortly after India’s independence, froze the status of all religious places of worship as they existed on 15 August 1947 and prohibits their conversion to any other faith.
As the legal disputes against the mosque reached 24 petitions, a judge ordered the site to be surveyed, during which it was claimed a religious icon of the Hindu god Lord Shiva was found in the mosque, and that area was sealed off. However, the mosque committee has argued it is not a religious icon but part of a fountain for washing feet.
Last week, a court-ordered archaeological survey released a report saying it had found evidence “there existed a large Hindu temple prior to the construction of the existing structure” in the 17th century.
On Wednesday, the Allahabad high court ruled the Hindu petitioners could worship in the basement of the mosque. The judge said the barriers around the mosque should be removed by the end of the week to make way for Hindu devotees.
Syed Mohammad Yaseen, 77, who has been the caretaker of Gyanvapi mosque for more than 32 years, said the order was “disappointing” for the Muslim community.
“The Hindus are saying that they used to pray inside the mosque campus until 1993 but this is completely untrue,” he said. “In its over 350-year history, Hindus had not prayed inside the mosque. All the claims of presence of Hindu iconography, idols etc inside the mosque are not true at all.”
Yaseen claimed the legal processes had been biased against the Muslim petitioners: “All agencies, including the surveying agency and judiciary, have been on the side of our opponent. We have no hope for justice in this country.”
Hours after the order came through, the local administration removed part of the barricades surrounding Gyanvapi and made way for the Hindu priests to perform a prayer in the cellar, after which lamps were lit around the southern wall of the mosque, with dozens of Hindu devotees present.
In Varanasi, many road signs showing the way to the mosque were defaced by activists on Thursday, who pasted papers printed with “temple” over the word “mosque”.
Sita Sahoo, one of the Hindu petitioners, said she was overjoyed to be able to pray at the site and expressed her belief a temple would soon be built in place of the mosque.
“Now we are eagerly waiting for the day a grand Vishweshwara temple will be constructed at the site,” she said. “I am confident that the day when we will see the temple standing there is not that far.”
Last week, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the Ram Mandir temple in Ayodhya, built on the site of a former mosque that had been similarly contested as a holy site for Hindus. The mosque was illegally torn down by a rightwing Hindu mob in 1992 and a Hindu temple later constructed in its place.
The success of the campaign to build a temple in Ayodhya has been seen as galvanising Hindu claims for a growing number of mosques across India to be demolished to make way for Hindu temples, with Gyanvapi one of the most high-profile cases.
The Gyanvapi mosque committee’s lawyer, Akhlaque Ahmed, said Wednesday’s court order would be challenged in the high court, but he was not optimistic about the outcome.
“The government belongs to them. The entire system belongs to them. We do not have any power,” said Ahmed.
