Religion always remained an influential force in the Indian social and cultural rubric due to the prevalence of partition’s trauma on Indian national politics. The creation of Pakistan as a sovereign Muslim state after the British colonial withdrawal from the subcontinent was the main factor in creating a countrywide culture of communal violence in India and making Indian state authorities incapable of preventing the spread of religious riots across the country.

The mainstream Indian leadership remained reluctant to protect the presence of various minorities in the country, parallel to formally designing various legislative frameworks for minorities.

The use of religious symbols and ideological narratives across the country proved that the minority protection laws are merely restricted to the formal policy documents of New Delhi. The ideological division of the society, mainly consisting of multifaceted Hindu-Muslim conflict, became an overwhelming trend in India, and the mainstream leadership of New Delhi under different political administrations always tried to use anti-Muslim sentiment in their national narratives. In this way, an analytical overview of Indian domestic politics validated that state leaders consider the Muslim communities as a political scapegoat for maximizing their power in the country.

The nation’s political leaders overemphasized the communal division of the society, intending to consolidate their Hindu majority vote mainly during the Lok Sabha general elections. The polarizations of the society on Hindu-Muslim lines instruct the Indian national leaders to use various anti-Muslim slogans and hate speech discourses cemented in an enduring antipathy towards the Muslim population to empower their election campaigns.

In the debate of increasing anti-Muslim slogans of Indian national leaders, the recent event of Ram Mandir’s inauguration on January 22, 2024, refreshed the increasing interconnection between ideological politics and the Indian general election in which the right-wing extremist leaders of the country are strong-minded in supporting current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi’s religious nationalist agenda. The inaugural ceremony of the Ram Mandir or Ram Temple, attended by various politicians, prominent cricketers, influential religious authorities, and different celebrities of Bollywood, sent a message of jubilation to the Hindu population without estimating the impact of this act on the Muslim population.

This Mandir’s construction at the site of the historical Babri Mosque, Ayodhya, disturbed the Muslim population due to their spiritual association with the historical Mosque and the conversion of the Mosque into a Hindu Temple.

The management of the Temple, Ram Janmbhoomi Trust, hosted around 7000 people for the inaugural celebration and showed the overwhelming strengths of Hindu ideologies on the country’s domestic cultural and political attributes. The prominent leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) advocated the strong association of Prime Minister Modi with the feelings of the Hindu community to enhance their vote bank for the upcoming 18^th Lok Sabha election. In contrast, the Congress Party logically denied the BJP’s stance on Ram Temple’s construction.

Due to having its genesis in an ideologically extremist organization, Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP always aligned its political strategies and election campaigns with the religious heritage of Hindu culture. It helped the BJP cultivate a wide range of voters’ support in Lok Sabha elections while attempting to put other political parties at disadvantageous positions in domestic politics. The mainstream leadership of the BJP remained active in supporting the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement, which gained momentum across the country on the issue of demolishing the historical Muslim religious place, Babri Mosque, and converting it into a highly consecrated Hindu site.

In other words, the BJP’s support for the Janmabhoomi Movement played a crucial role in arranging multiple public rallies to garner massive support on the issue of the Ram Mandir construction in Ayodhya Parallel to consider it an effective tool of political mobilization in the society. It is primarily designed by the current Indian government to unify the Hindu vote, taking advantage of the country’s historical Hindu-Muslim rivalry.

The association of the BJP with the Mandir’s construction and its completion before the elections in 2024 proved that the ideological Hindu narratives have become a gravitational point of BJP’s current election campaign. Mandir’s grand inaugural celebration has sent a message to all constituencies about the victory of Hindu ideology over the Muslim minority in domestic politics and convinced the general population of the leadership of Narendra Modi, who is committed to reforming the country’s societal structure on religious lines.

The wider support of Modi to the Ayodhya cause during two consecutive terms as Indian Prime Minister has already communicated to the Hindu population the vision of BJP for creating India as a Hindu-only nation.

The continuation of Modi’s mission for making India fiercely a pure Hindu state attached it to the Ayodhya Temple issue and made it a significant factor in its election campaign because all Indian media channels have massively covered the inaugural celebration of Tempe. The debates on multiple social media networks have also started shaping BJP’s political narrative, increasing its popularity nationwide. These political patterns of the BJP are pervasive in the Indian population because this political party is always known for its Hindu nationalist attitude and its association with several controversies consisting of anti-Muslim campaigns.

The decades-long support of BJP’s leaders to the Ayodhya Mandir and its completion before elections provided a sense of confidence to Hindu voters against Muslim voices of India because the extremist ideology of BJP has portrayed the Ram Mandir as a symbol of pride and cultural monopoly of Hindu population across the country. In this way, it is appropriate to maintain that the construction of the Ram Temple will serve the political objective of the Modi government, which will augment India’s existing religious and cultural politics.

Moreover, the Ram Mandir issue has a high probability of staying long in the future political discourse of the BJP while having inseparable connections with the future of the Indian nation. It will persistently exhibit the complicated interconnection between extremist societal anti-Muslim sentiments of BJP and Indian domestic politics. This scenario will multiply the suffering of the Indian Muslim population while augmenting the Hindu-Muslim communal violence in India under a broader political agenda of the BJP. In short, the future of Indian politics is presently heavily dependent on BJP’s current election campaign, in which anti-Muslim ideological slogans will prevail in Indian society while marginalizing the position of the Muslim population in India.