With the hoisting of the dharma dhwaja, the saffron flag, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the presence of the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, declared the completion of the Ayodhya Ram Temple, which was built on the Babri Masjid land after a Supreme Court order, describing the flag as the glory of Ram Rajya and tacitly portraying the Masjid as a wound that has endured for centuries and has now healed.
Modi marked the ceremony as the culmination of the decades-long movement that began with the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and continued through prolonged political mobilisation by the Sangh Parivar, and he framed the construction of the temple as the fulfilment of a civilisational aspiration that he said had remained unachieved for hundreds of years.
The prime minister, standing with Mohan Bhagwat and Yogi Adityanath, raised the triangular saffron flag bearing the word “Om” and the image of the kovidara tree, and he described it as a symbol of cultural resurgence while asserting that the moment represented the end of a long historical struggle.
He invoked the idea of Ram Rajya as the guiding principle for national development, and he urged citizens to internalise the values associated with Lord Ram while presenting this call as a path towards achieving equality and national progress by 2047, which he said required an emphasis on collective interest over personal priorities.
However, the idea of Ram Rajya invoked by Narendra Modi stood in sharp contrast to the Ram Rajya envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi, whose ideal centred on equality, moral governance and universality, and this divergence became more striking as the temple, though built after the Supreme Court’s order, continued to evoke the memory of the Babri Masjid that had been razed and the thousands of Muslims who were killed during the Sangh Parivar-led mobilisation demanding its demolition, while Modi made no reference to either the violence or the destruction, thereby distancing his interpretation from Gandhi’s inclusive ideal.
Modi did not acknowledge the loss of over 2,000 lives in the communal violence that erupted after the demolition of the Babri Mosque, and he refrained from referring to the 2019 Supreme Court judgment that deemed the mosque’s destruction illegal even as it granted the disputed land for the construction of the temple and directed that five acres of land be allotted to the Sunni Waqf Board for building a new mosque.
His address instead centred on portraying the temple as the resolution of a centuries-old grievance and as the symbolic completion of a struggle that he said had persisted unwaveringly through generations.
The event drew criticism from opposition parties, and Congress leader Rashid Alvi argued that the prime minister’s decision to hoist a religious flag on a temple breached the constitutional principle that the country has no state religion, and he said the act appeared to serve electoral considerations in Uttar Pradesh by appealing to religious sentiments.
Samajwadi Party MP Awadhesh Prasad, who represents Faizabad, alleged that he had not been invited to the ceremony because of his Dalit identity, and he argued that the exclusion reflected narrow-minded thinking rather than any connection to Lord Ram, while asserting that his concern was centred on dignity, equality and constitutional values.
As Modi referred to the need to free the country from what he termed Macaulay’s legacy of mental slavery by 2035, the ceremony became another moment in which the government and the Sangh Parivar projected Ayodhya as the focal point of a cultural renaissance.