New mosque in India’s Ayodhya to begin in May, local Muslims request strict security for upcoming Ram temple event

As Hindu devotees prepare to inaugurate a grand temple in Ayodhya, India’s minority Muslims plan to begin building a new mosque in the same city later this year, hoping to make a fresh start after a bloody, decades-long dispute.

Haji Arfat Shaikh, the head of the development committee of the Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation (IICF) that is overseeing the mosque project, said this week that construction would begin in May, after the holy month of Ramadan, and the mosque would take three to four years to build.

However, Muslims living in Ayodhya town are worried despite the Uttar Pradesh government’s repeated assurance that it will maintain peace and security in the area on the date of the consecration ceremony and afterwards, amid a likely influx of devotees.

For this reason, a local Muslim organisation submitted a petition to local authorities demanding strict security and vigil in localities with sizeable Muslim populations as well as other parts of Ayodhya which witnessed communal violence after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.

There are roughly 5,000 Muslims in a four-kilometre radius around the temple. In Ayodhya district, 14.8% of the nearly 2.5 million inhabitants are Muslims.