NEW DELHI -- Nearly three decades after a 16th-century mosque was demolished by Hindu hardliners, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday visited Ayodhya, the site of the incident, to lay the foundation of a new planned Hindu temple.
The temple's construction, along with scrapping the semi-autonomous status of India's only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, have been part of election manifestos that brought Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party to power and kept them there.
