Mosque promised in India's Ayodhya settlement scaled back over funding shortfall

NEW DELHI: A mosque project conceived as part of India’s Supreme Court settlement of the decades-old Ayodhya dispute is being scaled down to a fraction of what was originally envisioned due to the Muslim community’s lack of interest in backing the project, its officials said on Wednesday.

Ayodhya, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, has been at the heart of one of India’s most contentious religious disputes for decades. The town drew international attention in 1992 when a Hindu mob demolished the 16th-century Babri mosque, triggering nationwide riots that killed about 2,000 people, most of them Muslims.

In 2019, the country’s Supreme Court awarded the bitterly contested religious site to Hindus, and asked the state government to allot land to Muslims to build a mosque complex funded by the community.

The Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation (IICF) was established to build the mosque, but officials said it had abandoned its original plans for the five-acre plot after donations fell far short of expectations.

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The foundation had originally aimed to build a mosque, a 300-bed multi-speciality hospital and a library on the site.

IICF Chairman Zufar Ahmad Faruqi blamed a lack of funds.

“There is certainly a disinterest from the community and the donations received are not enough,” Faruqi said. “We now plan to build a mosque much smaller than the one originally proposed.”

While the mosque project has stalled, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party fulfilled one of its biggest campaign promises, building a grand Ram temple at the site. Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially opened the temple months before the 2024 elections.

IICF Secretary Athar Husain said the foundation now planned to build a “small mosque” for which it would need funds of about 30 million Indian rupees ($313,856) to 50 million rupees. So far it has collected only 15 million rupees in donations, he said.

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The Ram temple also has problems, dealing with a scandal over allegations of stealing from temple donations, which forced an overhaul of its leadership on Tuesday.

The alleged theft at the temple has provided the opposition with ammunition ahead of an election due early next year in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and a political bellwether.