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Hardline Hindu nationalists campaign against Taj Mahal
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Contributor | IndyGeorgia |
Last Edited | IndyGeorgia Oct 30, 2017 07:06pm |
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Category | News |
Author | Michael Safi |
News Date | Monday, October 30, 2017 01:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
Description | Times are tough for India’s monument to love. Air pollution is turning its marble surface yellow. Restoration work is obscuring its famous minarets. Tens of millions of tourists still flock to Agra each year, but numbers are reportedly waning.
Critics of the Taj Mahal are also growing increasingly bold. In past months, religious nationalists in the Hindu-majority country have stepped up a campaign to push the four-century-old Mughal monument to the margins of Indian history. One legislator recently kicked up a national storm when he labelled the tomb “a blot”.
Resentment at the fact the country’s most recognisable monument was built by a Muslim emperor has always existed on the fringes of the Hindu right. But those fringes have never been so powerful.
Attacks on the monument, a lifeline for its home state of Uttar Pradesh, have grown so loud that last week the state chief minister – himself a critic of the Taj – was forced into “a day-long exercise in damage control”, one newspaper said.
Yogi Adityanath paid an elaborate official visit to Agra on Thursday to issue assurances that the Taj was a “unique gem” that his government was committed to protect. |
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