Bulldozers have knocked down a centuries-old mosque in India’s capital, a member of the mosque’s managing committee said on Thursday during a demolition drive to remove “illegal” structures from a forest reserve.
The demolition comes at a sensitive time in India with nationalist activists emboldened in their long campaign for the replacement of several prominent mosques with Hindu temples.
The Masjid Akhonji in New Delhi, which its caretakers say is around 600 years old, was home to 22 students enrolled in an Islamic boarding school.
It was torn down on Tuesday in a forest of Mehrauli, an affluent neighbourhood dotted with centuries-old ruins from settlements predating modern Delhi.
Mohammad Zaffar, a member of the mosque’s managing committee, told AFP that it had not received any prior notice before a demolition carried out “in the dark of the night”.
He said many graves in the mosque compound were also desecrated, and no one was allowed to take out copies of the Holy Quran or other materials from inside the mosque before it was razed.
“Many of our revered figures and my own ancestors were buried there. There is no trace of the graves now,” Zaffar told AFP. “The rubble from the mosque and the graves has been removed and dumped somewhere else.”—AFP
