Ayodhya: It’s been almost five years since the Supreme Court allotted a plot of land to build a mosque in Ayodhya to replace the 16th-century Babri Masjid demolished in 1992.
And it’s going to be four years since the trust in charge of building the mosque unveiled its grand design in December 2020.
But so far not a single brick has been laid on the land while the Ram temple was inaugurated at a grand ceremony in Ayodhya at the site of the old Babri Masjid in January.
All you can see at the five-acre site for the mosque – lying amid swathes of green farmland in Dhannipur village, about 25 km from the Ram Janmabhoomi temple – is a white metal board with an image of the proposed mosque.
Five years after the top court’s landmark 2019 judgement resolving the decades-old Babri Masjid-Ram Temple dispute, the mosque still remains on the drawing board because of the Muslim community’s indifference to the new mosque, the clergy’s hostility, administrative wrangles and lack of funds.
“Last year, on Republic Day, a few maulanas came here. They clicked photographs and left. Nobody has come here since then,” says Raheel Khan, a resident of Dhannipur.
“We don’t know if a mosque will ever even be built here. Frankly, it does not matter…What had to happen is done.”
Futuristic design
The Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation (IICF) – a trust formed to build the mosque and other community facilities on the plot – unveiled its original blueprint in 2020 with an unusual design.
Unlike the more traditional three-domed Babri Masjid, the new design was modern and futuristic. The proposed mosque was an egg-shaped structure without any domes or minarets typical of mosque architecture in many parts of India.
The trust had grand plans for the mosque on the land the state allocated to the Sunni Central Waqf Board.
The new structure would be powered by renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power. And it would include not just a mosque, but also a hospital, community kitchen, library and research centre.
However, the mosque’s development committee rejected the design following objections from the community to the contemporary design.
The committee’s chief, Haji Arfat Shaikh, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader from Maharashtra, said the “earlier design looked like an eggshell, and not at all like a mosque”.
After the first plan was rejected, the trust announced a grander and bigger alternative design this year more in line with traditional Islamic mosque architecture.
Media reports said the new mosque – called the Muhammad Bin Abdullah Mosque – will have five minarets representing the five central tenets of Islam.
Shaikh said that the new mosque will be “better than the Taj Mahal” and “the world’s biggest Quran measuring 21 feet”, will be placed inside.
Construction was supposed to begin in April, but so far there are no signs of it.
Indifference of the community
One of the biggest reasons why the mosque remains elusive is the indifference of large sections of the Muslim community which is reflected in the lack of donations.
In the last four years, the foundation has received just a paltry Rs 90 lakh in donations, Zafar Faruqui, chairman of the Sunni Central Waqf Board and chief trustee of the trust, told ThePrint.
“People are not attached to the mosque; it has little meaning for them,” he said.
“We have spent a lot of time trying to make people feel an emotional connect with the mosque, but it has not been there organically. And that shows in the kind of funding we have.”
The lack of funds forced the foundation to drop the idea of building a grand complex, including a hospital, museum and research centre.
“That would require infinitely more money than we presently have. So we are planning to just go ahead with the mosque for now,” said IICF secretary and trustee Athar Hussain.
“But just the mosque construction will also cost at least Rs 6-7 crore. And we are far from that.”
The trust has applied for permission from the home ministry to get foreign funding under the Foreign Contribution Regulation (Amendment) Act, 2020, another trust member told ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
“Frankly, that is our only hope. Nobody from within the country has come forward in any significant way,” he said. “Imagine, we have not even received a crore yet.”
He added this was largely because the trust has had to fight several “internal battles” within the Muslim community.
“A lot of clerics and politicians believe that it was an acceptance of defeat and humiliation for us to accept five acres of land in a faraway, deserted place in place of Babri Masjid,” the trust member said.
“Away from the public glare, they have run negative whisper campaigns against the new mosque, and that is a huge reason why people have not attached themselves to it.”
AIMIM president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi was most vocal after the 2019 Supreme Court decision.
“We do not want this khairat (charity). Our fight was for a legal right, for a Babri Masjid. Our fight was not to get this piece of land,” he said.
Arshad Madani, one of the seniormost Islamic clerics in India, echoed the same sentiment.
“The issue is about rights not about land. We don’t want land. Muslims don’t need land,” he said.
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) too has sent out a strong message to the community against the new mosque by arguing that “bartering” a place of worship is against the tenets of Islam.
A senior Delhi-based Islamic cleric, who did not want to be identified, told ThePrint clerics weren’t against the mosque, but the Muslim community at large was opposed to it.
“We are the ones who interact with the masses, and they have no faith in that mosque…We are just here to guide them and tell them whether something is as per Islamic principles or not,” he said. “In the case of the new mosque, it is against Islamic tenets.”
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‘Step-child treatment’
If the trust has had to fight battles within the community, its experience with the state hasn’t been smooth either, trust members say.
They say the mosque’s construction has been trapped in bureaucratic delays.
“To begin with, the Supreme Court had said that the land designated for the mosque should be in a prominent place in Ayodhya,” the trust member said.
“But you see where the land we have been allotted is.”
He said the trust had submitted the design plans to the Ayodhya Development Authority (ADA) with the required fees. Some months later, ADA told them they should have applied online.
“Then, we applied online, and they said we need NOCs (no-objection certificates) from different departments. This went on for more than a year,” he said.
“This was certainly not the treatment meted out to the temple trust,” he said, referring to the Ram temple trust.
However, ADA officials say the foundation refuses to pay the developmental fee to the state government, which is a prerequisite to start the process. “The fee is just Rs 1 crore, but they keep saying they don’t have it,” an official said.
To add to the problems, a Delhi woman, Rani Punjabi, has claimed that the land allocated to the Waqf Board for the mosque’s construction belongs to her. She said she would go to the Supreme Court to “take the land back”.
Faruqui rejected her statement but another trust member said such claims undo all the efforts to convince the community.
“This has a very adverse impact on the psyche of the people,” he said. “They feel ‘Oh, it is one more disputed land…Let’s stay away from it’.”
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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