It’s 8 o’clock on a Tuesday evening. Jyoti Gupta, 21, walks over to the ancient Hanumangarhi, an area with a temple second in popularity only to the Ram Janambhoomi, about 100 metres away from Ayodhya’s still-under-construction landmark. She stares at the selfie point, also constructed as a place of rest for pilgrims, before they make the pilgrimage to the mandir dedicated to Ram’s devotee.
Sometimes people ask her to take photos of them as they make their way up the steps to reach the Ram tilak point; mostly, she looks up at the mandir and cries. “My shop and home used to be here until the government demolished it under the Ram temple project,” she says, of her 30x30 foot space. “My father died in trauma and my mother has never recovered.
She has lost everything: her husband, our house, the shop.” It has been two years now, but Jyoti tears up quickly. She got ₹1.
95 lakh as compensation from the administration, but that was too small an amount to build a house and a shop, and start afresh. She wonders whether, in the balance of life, a ‘selfie point’ was more important than homes and livelihoods. In the build-up to the inauguration of the Ram temple, 10-15 shops were demolished, to make way for wider roads and ‘beautification’.
The Ram temple, one of the 2014 Lok Sabha poll promises of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a resolution of the Sangh Parivar (RSS) in 1986, was consecrated amidst political pomp by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January .