(Bloomberg Opinion) -- This week, an Indian prime minister, dressed like a priest-king in a saffron scarf, a silver crown and a lockdown-lengthened beard, performed a sacred ritual in the ancient capital of Ayodhya. Narendra Modi thus founded a new Hindu temple on a site where, for hundreds of years, a mosque had stood.
After decades of legal warfare and mob violence, Hindu nationalists have now effectively reclaimed the land where they believe the god Rama was born. The state-sponsored pageantry of the moment, however, proclaimed their greater victory: the transformation of India from a secular-nationalist republic into an ethno-nationalist state.
No mere democratic election could match the elation of this moment, as far as the Hindu revivalists were concerned; theirs was a victory not over politicians but over history itself. In their story of India, centuries of “Muslim oppression” persisted as long as mosques still stood on disputed land and as long as India’s flawed secular leadership sought to include Muslims in a broad governing coalition. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party effectively ended both, soundly defeating a government led by a Sikh prime minister and a Christian party president. Modi’s two emphatic election victories, the nationalists believe, have shown India that its Muslims can be safely ignored.
Twenty, even ten years ago, there would have been agonizing in the media and in public over an Indian prime minister presiding over such a religious-political spectacle. Certainly, when the mosque that once stood in Ayodhya was demolished by a mob, general revulsion was great enough for Modi’s predecessors to claim they were ashamed. Now, Hindu nationalism’s capture of the soul of India is so complete that television anchors broke into devotional song and newspaper front pages looked more like religious calendars than broadsheets.
Modi, and India, are not alone. The most ambitious and effective of today’s populist-nationalists match themselves against the broad sweep of history and seek to reverse it. When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan turns the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, he wants to erase not just the legacy of Ataturk but of Ottoman Turkey’s “humiliation” at the hands of the West after the First World War. It’s no coincidence that the first prayers at Hagia Sophia were timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne that the defeated Ottomans were forced to sign.
Viktor Orban’s Hungary mourns its “dismemberment” in the Treaty of Trianon a century ago — most spectacularly through a new monument in the center of Budapest. As for Vladimir Putin, it is not clear which Russia he wants to celebrate — the Soviet Union that he once served, or the vast Orthodox empire it replaced. Regardless, there’s no doubt that he, too, wishes to turn the clock back.