A lawsuit was filed last month by the Hindu Sena seeking a survey of the site of the Ajmer Dargah Sharif of Khwaja Mu’in al-din Chishti, one of the epicentres of sufism in South Asia and one of the symbols of the spiritual convergence between religious communities in India. For centuries Hindu and Muslim pilgrims have prayed together in this shrine.
The lawsuit argues that this mausoleum and pilgrimage site had been built over a Shiva temple, that was there before the 13th-century shrine. This is not a new idea.
Har Bilas Sarda. Photo: vediclibrary.in.
In 1911, Har Bilas Sarda, the local leader of the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha published a book on the city of Ajmer where he argued that the Dargah was partly built with the material of Hindu and Jain temples which preexisted the tomb of the Sufi saint and had been demolished. According to him, the Dargah was built on the site previously occupied by a Shiv Mandir.
This claim was part of a series of attacks against Mu’in al-din Chishti who, according to Sarda, had been part of the violent conquest of India by the Muslims in the medieval era. He writes that before entering India, Mu’in al-din Chishti “went to Ghazni. From there he came to India with the army of Shahabuddin Ghori, and at the age 52, took up his abode in Ajmer”. Historical evidence supporting this version of the past is missing, but this belief remains strong among some of the supporters of Hindutva.
For decades, Sangh Parivar leaders did not adhere to this narrative. In fact, some of their leaders patronised Ajmer Dargah Sharif. The Scindia family is a case in point: since the conquest of Ajmer by the Marathas in the 17th century, the Scindias contributed to the maintenance of the site and supported its custodians. As descendants of the Gwalior Maharajahs who made generous donations to Dargah Sharif – like dozens of Rajput aristocrats from Rajasthan – Rajmata Scindia and her daughter, Vasundhara Raje, visited the shrine on many occasions.
Vasundhara Raje at Ajmer Dargah. Photo: Video screengrab.
But other key figures of the BJP visited Dargah Sharif as pilgrims. L.K. Advani himself performed ziarat e khwaja while he was deputy prime minister and Murli Mohan Joshi went one step further – he sat, between the Diwan (the descendent of Mu’in al-din Chishti at the helm of the site) and his son, in the khanqah, the place where the Muslim saint lived and was given the last bath after his death. He had no inhibition being seen as a devotee of Mu’in al-din Chishti, like the millions of Hindus who have visited and prayed in the Dargah Sharif. Like them, Joshi believed in the power of the place and he wanted to sit where Mu’in al-din Chishti used to sit to maximise the benefit of being in the Dargah Sharif. In that sense, his attitude was not different from those of ordinary devotees who tied manaat at the door and windows of the khanqah.
Murli Manohar Joshi photographed by a follower of the Ajmer Dargah Sharif Diwan. Photo: By arrangement.
After all, Mu’in al-din Chishti has been revered for centuries as a saintly figure endowed with baraka by Muslims and non-Muslims alike – including Sangh Parivar leaders. Nizamuddin and other luminaries of the Chishti order were and are almost equally popular. A few weeks ago, Indresh Kumar, an RSS senior ideologue and the chief of Muslim Rashtriya Manch, an RSS-backed Muslim group, visited the iconic Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia’s Dargah in Delhi on the occasion of Diwali.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself pays homage to Mu’in al-din Chishti, like his predecessors in New Delhi since the Mughal Empire, by sending a chadar to Ajmer every year on the occasion of Urs. More generally speaking, he has engaged with the Sajjadanishin of Ajmer Dargah, known as the Diwan – a rapprochement well in tune with his appreciation of Sufism.
Narendra Modi with Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi in 2015, holding a chadar that says, ‘There is no god but God; Muhammad is the messenger of God’.
Indeed, Modi has always promoted Sufism. He hosted the World Sufi Forum in March 2016 in Delhi. While the King of Jordan was the chief guest, the Diwan of Ajmer Sharif appeared as primus inter pares among the Sajjadanashins who had been invited. Modi highlighted that Sufism embodied true Islam and that it would help to delink religion and terror. This message has been repeated ad nauseam.
After this event, the Modi government invested time and energy in organising the Sufi leaders of India, and invested more especially in the Diwan and his son Naseer in this very perspective. With its blessing, the Diwan took the lead of a new initiative to federate the Sajjadanashins and play the role that had been officially recognised to his predecessors by the British in 1877. An All India Sajjadanashins’ Council took shape to this effect in the late 2010s with the Diwan of Ajmer Dargah Sharif at its helm. Interestingly, the foundational charter of this institution justified his preeminent role by mentioning not only that he was “the direct descendant in the 22nd generation of the Sufi Saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisty and the Hereditary Sajjadanashin Spiritual Head of the shrine of Ajmer Dargah”, but also “in the aspect of gynaecological lineage (family tree), […] the most direct descendant of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisty”.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
The main aim and objective of the Council, according to the charter, was “to bring a sense of mutual respects & greater understanding, between the Hindus, Muslims and other communities in the country”. From promoting this unity, among the office bearers of the Council, figured, as media advisor a Hindu, Deepak Sharma who was the nephew of Mauli Chandra Sharma, one of the founders of the Jana Sangh in 1951.
The great attention paid by the Modi government to the – renamed – All India Sufi Sajjadanashin’s Council (AISSC) was evident from the fact that on March 15, 2020, Amit Shah received a delegation of the Council – that included Syed Naseeruddin Chishty, the son of the Diwan who had been officially presented by him as his successor a little while before the meeting. Even more telling was the presence of Ajit Doval at the “interfaith conference” held by the AISSC in Delhi in March 2022 as an attempt to open a new channel of communication with the Muslim community.
In parallel, the Diwan and his son have often supported Hindu nationalist stands: in 2015, they said that they were not in favour of rebuilding the Babri Masjid where it was, but at some distant place, as some Shia leaders suggested first – and as the Supreme Court verdict finally prescribed. In 2017, the Diwan helped the Modi government in drafting the bill reforming triple talaq and supported the Sangh Parivar’s campaign for a beef ban. In 2019, the Diwan appreciated the reading down of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir.
The way the Diwan supported so many initiatives of the Modi government was not acceptable to many Muslims. In Ajmer itself, there were revolts. In 2017, the Diwan’s brother claimed that he had deposed him because of his cow-related pronouncements. Nothing of that kind could actually occur, but many locals (including Khadims) clearly resented the attitude of the Diwan. In 2022, the words of Sawar Chishti, one of the most influential Khadims – he was at the helm of the Anjuman Committee of the Dargah Sharif – was a case in point. When the Diwan did not protest against BJP functionary Nupur Sharma’s utterances about the Prophet Mohammad, Sawar Chishti declared “We will launch such a massive agitation that the whole of Hindustan will shake” and called on Muslims to boycott Hindu merchants, mostly Sindhis, who are flourishing in the vicinity of the Dargah.
The Diwan is no longer the only leader whose authority is contested by people of his own group – this is also true of Hindu nationalist leaders who, till today, have considered Sufis potential allies and the Diwan of Dargah Sharif as their chief. As mentioned above, since Sarda, such a contestation from the right has had its supporters. Some Hindu nationalists have never revered Mu’in al-din Chishti and have strongly resented the popularity of the Dargah – as well as its lure for non-Muslims. It was a symbol of Indian secularism, and for some, this made it a target for terrorism.
On October 11, 2007, a bomb blast at Dargah Sharif killed three persons and injured 15 others. This blast was part of a series that included those of Malegaon, the Samjhauta Express and the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad. In 2018, two RSS pracharaks were sentenced to life imprisonment in connection with the Ajmer blast. The public prosecutor, during the trial, pointed out that “apart from Muslims, Hindus also come in large numbers to pay obeisance at the [Ajmer] shrine and the aim of the bomb blast in the holy month of Ramzan was to spread terror between the two communities and to prevent Hindus from going to the shrine”.
This interpretation relied on information from the interrogation of the accused and the 2008 confession of a Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader, Swami Aseemanand, who explained, after his arrest, how he directed his co-conspirators to the Dargah sharif, in addition to other targets:
In the meeting with the four of us, I suggested that in Malegaon in Maharashtra, 80% of the population is Muslims [sic] and that is why our work should begin with closeby and the first bomb must be kept there. Then I said that at the time of independence the Nizam of Hyderabad decided to go with Pakistan so they should also be taught and thus a bomb should also be kept in Hyderabad. Then I said that Ajmer is the only place where in the Dargah a lot of Hindus visit. That is why a bomb should be kept in Ajmer so that Hindus get scared and stop going there. I also told them that a bomb should be kept in Aligarh Muslin University because there will be young Muslims boys. Everyone accepted my suggestions and it was decided that we should blast bombs in these four places.
According to Swami Aseemanand’s confession, Sunil Joshi, a pracharak from Dewas in Madhya Pradesh prepared the Ajmer blast with two other Madhya Pradesh pracharaks, Sandeep Dange – in charge of the RSS branch of Shapur district, near Indore – and Ram Chandra Kalsangra. The charge sheet of the Ajmer case points out that Dange and Kalsangra “were given the responsibility to procure technical knowledge and to make bombs by using necessary resources such as equipment and explosives, etc. to carry out the bomb blast at Dargah Sharif Ajmer”. The prime accused in the Ajmer case, however, was still another pracharak, Devendra Gupta, the Vibhag Pracharak of Muzaffarnagar in Bihar, who was accused of “making available fake IDs for purchasing [a] mobile phone and sim card to be used as timer device in the bombs to be exploded at Dargah Sharif Ajmer”. In fact, with these fake IDs, Joshi and Kalsagara bought SIM cards which were used in the blast of Ajmer and Hyderabad.
The Ajmer blast shows that for some Hindu nationalists, the dargah was targeted as a symbol of Hindu-Muslim amity that had to lose its attractiveness as well as prestige over Hindus – and to suffer because of its Islamic identity. Whether this school of thought will prevail over those who, in the Sangh Parivar, recognise the quality of sufism remains to be seen. There is much at stake here and, in fact, the fate of Ajmer Dargah Sharif matters even more than that of the Babri Masjid because the site epitomises the interactions between Hindus and Muslims at shared sacred sites.
Christophe Jaffrelot is research director at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Professor of Politics and Sociology at King’s College London and Non Resident Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His publications include Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021, and Gujarat under Modi: Laboratory of today’s India, Hurst, 2024, both of which are published in India by Westland.
This article draws from the author’s contribution to a forthcoming book Shared Sacred Sites in South Asia, London, Hurst, 2025.
