Harmony please | Mint

In 2019, India’s Supreme Court awarded an Ayodhya site on which a Mughal-era mosque stood to Hindu litigants for a temple to be built there, with a “preponderance of probabilities” on Hindu occupation over the centuries as the settler of that politically fraught dispute. Since then, litigation initiatives over two other mosques that were part of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s agitational politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s, in Varanasi first and then Mathura, have been taken up by local courts. Given the unedifying role played by much of the television coverage this summer of events in Varanasi, the Hindu-Muslim tension that ensued, and the wisdom of an Indian law that freezes the religious status of such monuments as it was in 1947, it would be best for India if public sentiments are not fanned over disputes of this kind. Discord over matters of faith could weaken the unity on which we must rely for a layer of insurance against the designs of external adversaries. With the value of ground intelligence fast rising in a weblinked world and Indo-Pacific geopolitics in for some flux, we should place extra emphasis on internal harmony. Let the law discreetly prevail.