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“A super majority is what they need to launch a full-scale, pan-India, Hindutva experiment,” Muralidharan said, referring to the century-old ideology guiding Modi.

In the 1980s, reclaiming the site emerged as the principal goal of the Hindutva movement, which has for a hundred years sought to identify multiethnic India with Hinduism and vice versa.

The political party representing Hindutva, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., and its affiliated groups organized nearly 100,000 of their volunteers to gather in Ayodhya on Dec. 6, 1992.

Many associated the rioters with an earlier Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1948 out of devotion to Hindutva ideology.

“When was the last time he acted as a prime minister? There have been so many instances where he has just behaved either as a BJP leader or as a Hindutva mascot, seldom as the prime minister of India,” Salam said.