India’s Ayodhya wakes up to harsh realities after Modi’s Ram temple event
Al Jazeera
As devotees stream in, residents say small town in one of India’s poorest states lacks infrastructure to host millions.
Ayodhya, India – As half a million people converged on the gates of the new temple to the Hindu deity Ram, Brijesh Pathak looked on.
It was the day after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had consecrated the shrine amid a national frenzy that had turned the attention of a country of 1.4 billion people to the temple town of Ayodhya in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where Hindu scriptures say Ram was born.
The devotees had turned up to catch a glimpse of Ram’s idol installed at the grand structure built on the ruins of a 16th-century mosque demolished by a right-wing mob in 1992.
But as the crowd swelled, Pathak, the 32-year-old manager of a guesthouse, said, a stampede-like situation was created outside the temple premises. Buses and rickshaws were ordered off the streets, police barricades were put up and more security personnel were rushed to the small town, incapable of handling such a huge number of visitors.
“It was a flood of people. You could only see endless heads,” Pathak told Al Jazeera.