A sea of orange at the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya: While most of us were focused on our local news and coverage of the GOP primary in New Hampshire, a very interesting, controversial and historic thing happened in India yesterday: ...and the $215 million temple isn't the only thing being built in Ayodhya. Large infrastructure projects and scores of hotels and other tourism-related businesses are being constructed to accommodate as many 50 million travelers a year to the site. Needless to say, the Ram Mandir is going to transform Ayodhya. As noted in the article, this site, along with many others in India, has a long turbulent history. During the Muslim conquests of India, thousands of Hindu temples were either destroyed and mosques built on their ruins or the temples were converted into mosques. Now, under the BJP-led government, some of these sites are being converted back into Hindu temples in what is seen by millions of Hindus as a renaissance in the religious and cultural life of their nation. Of course, many, most notably the Muslims and secularists in India, see and portray this development in a negative light. Personally, I find this very interesting. There aren't many countries where you see such a revival of the original religious and cultural life in a nation. Post Reconquista Spain immediately comes to mind, and I suspect that there are areas in Central and Eastern Europe that have experienced this after the expulsion of the Ottoman Turks. Another interesting aspect of this is that it somewhat fits in with the predictions made by Samuel Huntington in his 1996 book Clash of Civilizations, where he saw a multipolar world emerge/re-emerge out of religious and cultural identities instead of ideologies.
