India's mosques are not falling by accident. From Ayodhya to Ujjain, they are being brought down by what may be called Hindutva through memory: the construction of a story in which "Hindus endured a thousand years of humiliation under Muslim rule," and in which Muslims living today "must settle the debt."

Last year, I described the Waqf Amendment Act in one of my op-eds in Daily Sabah as Hindutva through legislation. The demolitions reveal its companion instrument, a manufactured past mobilized selectively, that turns a place of prayer into something to be punished.

The story's roots are colonial. Political theorist James Mill's "The History of British India" divided the subcontinent's past into Hindu, Muslim and British ages, as if its people had lived in sealed religious compartments. Hindu nationalist politician V.D. Savarkar turned that division into an epic of "Hindu resistance to Muslim invaders." A colonial convenience became a nationalist creed.

The history it claims to describe looks very different. The Muslim centuries of the subcontinent were, for long stretches, an age in which non-Muslims flourished. Under the Mughals, Raja Man Singh commanded imperial armies and Raja Todar Mal reorganized the empire's revenue system. Akbar's policy of "sulh-i-kul," peace with all, opened high office to Hindus, and his court translated the Mahabharata and Ramayana into Persian. Mughal rulers issued land grants to temples and Hindu religious figures, and Hindus remained the overwhelming majority throughout. The humiliation narrative survives only by erasing this shared past.

The Babri Masjid was where that narrative was first put into practice. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement claimed the 16th-century mosque stood on the birthplace of Rama, the seventh avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu, and was a standing insult from the Mughal era.

On Dec. 6, 1992, kar sevaks, or so-called Hindu activists mobilized by the Sangh Parivar, tore it down, triggering riots that killed more than 2,000 people, most of them Muslims. In 2019, the Supreme Court awarded the site for a temple, even while calling the demolition a grave violation of the rule of law. In January 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi consecrated that temple and declared an era of Hindu pride restored. A manufactured grievance had become state ceremony.

Babri was meant to be the exception; it became the template. Claims that mosques stand on temple sites have since multiplied, from Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh to the Sufi shrine at Ajmer, and courts have repeatedly entertained them. In May, the Madhya Pradesh High Court declared Dhar's medieval Kamal Maula mosque a temple, ending a two-decade arrangement under which both communities shared the site. Each verdict draws legitimacy from the last.

The same logic now reaches far beyond famous shrines. In late September, Muslims in Ujjain kept an all-night vigil outside the Shahi Masjid, which the city wanted partially cleared for a Hindu pilgrimage due in 2028. After police dispersed them with tear gas and batons, the community was left to dismantle part of the mosque itself or watch the bulldozers do it.

No official count of demolished Muslim sites exists for the years since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took power in 2014, an absence that is itself telling. The figures that do exist point one way: Uttarakhand's government reports removing 538 tombs, Gujarat told its assembly in 2024 that it had razed 108, and an Indian media compilation records more than 2,100 actions against Muslim religious and community sites in just the past six years.

Furthermore, the framing is selective in where it speaks. At Ayodhya, Sambhal and Dhar, the claim is loud: this mosque stands on our temple. In the far more numerous encroachment and road-widening drives, it falls silent, and officials cite only land records and zoning. Yet when demolitions come at night, fall overwhelmingly on Muslim sites and follow years of rhetoric against mosques, madrassas and waqf land, the message is the same.

In Kashmir, the project takes a subtler form: not erasing sacred spaces but stamping them with the state. In September 2025, the Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board, chaired by a BJP leader, installed a plaque bearing India's national emblem inside Srinagar's Hazratbal shrine, which houses a relic of the Prophet. Worshippers saw an image inside a mosque as an affront to Islamic belief and removed it. The board's chief called it terrorism, and police detained more than 50 people. Even the so-called Delhi-installed chief minister said the emblem belonged to government functions, not places of worship.

India's laws were meant to prevent all this. The Places of Worship Act of 1991 froze every shrine's religious character as it stood at independence, with Ayodhya the sole exception, and in late 2024 the Supreme Court barred punitive demolitions and halted new suits against mosques. Yet challenges to the 1991 Act remain pending with no final hearing date, while cases such as Dhar keep moving.

Courts can settle disputes, but they cannot easily undo a narrative that has already decided who owes what for the past. That is the essence of Hindutva through memory. It invents a history of humiliation, erases the centuries of coexistence that contradict it and presents the bill to citizens who were never there. Legislation strips Muslims of their institutions; memory strips them of their claim to belong. If such a grievance can outweigh an act of Parliament and centuries of continuous prayer, no minority's place of worship in India is secure.

Ultimately, India need not forget its past. It must stop rewriting it selectively to punish its present.