They fanned out across the vast country, knocking on doors in the name of a cause that would redefine India.
These foot soldiers and organizers, including a young Narendra Modi, collected millions of dollars to be socked away for a long fight to build a grand Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in northern India. Across 200,000 villages, ceremonies were arranged to bless individual bricks that would be sent to that sacred city, believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the deity Ram.
The bricks, the campaign’s leaders declared, would not just be used for the temple’s construction on land occupied for centuries by a mosque. They would be the foundation for a Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation, that would correct what right-wing Hindus saw as the injustice of India’s birth as a secular republic.
Nearly four decades later, the cornerstone of that sweeping vision has been laid.
Mr. Modi, now the country’s prime minister, inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya on Monday — the crowning achievement of a national movement aimed at establishing Hindu supremacy in India by rallying the country’s Hindu majority across castes and tribes.
“Today, our Ram has come. After centuries of patience and sacrifice, our Lord Ram has come,” Mr. Modi said during the ceremony. “It is the beginning of a new era.”
While a moment of triumph for Hindu nationalists, it is a source of jubilation for many others who care little for politics. Ram has a wide following in India; excitement around the temple’s consecration had been building for weeks, with saffron-colored pennants strung across a million streets and markets, and posters of Ram advertising the event everywhere.
But for the country’s 200 million Muslims, the Ram temple has reinforced a sense of despair and dislocation.
The Babri Mosque, which once stood on the site, was destroyed in 1992 by Hindu activists, unleashing waves of sectarian violence that left thousands dead. The manner in which the mosque was razed set a precedent of impunity that reverberates today: lynchings of Muslim men accused of slaughtering or transporting cows, beatings of interfaith couples to combat “love jihad” and — in an echo of Ayodhya — “bulldozer justice” in which the homes of Muslims are leveled by officials without due process in the wake of religious tensions.
The Hindu right wing has ridden the Ram movement to become India’s dominant political force. The opening of the temple, built over 70 acres at a cost of nearly $250 million, marks the unofficial start of Mr. Modi’s campaign for a third term, in an election expected in the spring.
That it was Mr. Modi who was the star of the inauguration of the temple in Ayodhya — which Hindu nationalists have compared to the Vatican and Mecca — captures the right’s blurring of old lines.
India’s founding fathers took great pains to keep the state at arm’s length from religion, seeing it as crucial to the country’s cohesion after the communal bloodletting wrought by the 1947 partition that cleaved Pakistan from India. But Mr. Modi has unabashedly normalized the opposite.
After completing the consecration rituals alongside priests on Monday, Mr. Modi prostrated in front of the Ram idol, carved with a warm smile and lucid eyes in black stone and bedecked in jewels. The prime minister then emerged at the edge of the temple steps in his signature style for big moments: the powerful leader, alone in the frame, striding forward and bowing to the thousands of handpicked guests — celebrities, seers and business leaders — seated below.
Mr. Modi’s public image is simultaneously one of statesman and god-man. His party chief recently described him as “the king of gods.” Ahead of the inauguration, the town was covered in posters and billboards, of Ram and of Mr. Modi.
Just as they did in the 1980s, volunteers from right-wing Hindu organizations went door to door across hundreds of thousands of villages in the days before the temple’s consecration. This time, the effort was a reminder of the immense network Mr. Modi has at his disposal, one that the political opposition can come nowhere close to matching.
In preparation for his role in Ayodhya, Mr. Modi embarked on an 11-day Hindu purification ritual. The prime minister was seen temple-hopping across the country, and when his office put out pictures of him at his residence feeding cows, which are seen as holy by many Hindus, fawning television channels ran them as breaking news.
In between his expressions of religious devotion, Mr. Modi attended to the work of the state, inaugurating huge projects that perpetuate his image as a champion of development.
The omnipresent leader, in mixing religion and politics and tapping into the vast resources at his service, has achieved what his predecessors could not: turning a diverse and argumentative Indian society into something resembling a monolith that falls in line behind him. To question him is to question Hindu values. And that is akin to blasphemy.
