“It’s these babajis and their ilk, I tell you… disguised in saffron, with not an ounce of tyag (sacrifice) or altruism in them. Always looking for controversies and trouble, these riot-mongers,” said a visibly bitter Namita Singha, wiping sweat off her forehead with the aanchol of her modest cotton sari on a merciless May afternoon.

The erstwhile homemaker was forced in her late forties to turn shopkeeper in Gazole’s Shivajinagar, 28km from Malda and 350-odd km from Calcutta. Her 24-year-old son Nayan Singha was compelled to find work at a factory elsewhere in the district after his once-bustling shop – Joy Baba Ganesh Fast Food – almost went out of business following the March closure of the imposing structure that stands on the other side of the narrow road, the 16,684 square metre Adina Masjid of the Ilyas Shahi dynasty (1342-1487) of the Bengal Sultanate, one of north-central Bengal’s top draws for tourists.

Sitting in the shop next to a newly set up police chowki, Singha narrated how 300-plus families from the Hindu-dominated Shivajinagar and its neighbouring areas – under the Malda Uttar Lok Sabha constituency – were hit hard by the “indefinite” closure of the site protected by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), and labelled a monument of national significance. They provided a range of services to thousands of daily visitors, from parking to refreshments.

“We used to make daily sales of Rs 3,000-4,000, selling everything from cigarettes and chocolate to soft drinks and snacks. During festivals and fairs, it used to be Rs 15,000-plus, daily,” said Singha. “Now, it’s barely Rs 300, from whatever these policemen from the chowki buy.”

“Who cares if it was a mandir, a masjid, a girja, or whatever… centuries ago? Why deliberately spoil things now?” she asked.

Adina Masjid was the largest structure of its kind in the Indian subcontinent, completed in 1374 as a royal mosque by Bengal’s second Sultan, Sikandar Shah, who is buried inside. For centuries, it was comparable in its plan and splendour to the 7th century Great Mosque of Damascus. The area was part of Pandua then, which served as the capital of Bengal (extending from what is now Uttar Pradesh’s Jaunpur in the west to Myanmar’s Rakhine State in the east) between 1339 and 1453.

Various affiliates of the saffron ecosystem have claimed Adina Masjid was built atop a Hindu, Shaivite temple dedicated to Adinath. ASI states that the “architectural members of some earlier structures have been utilised partly in the construction”, implying the reuse of material from pre-Islamic Hindu and Buddhist structures from the area. Historians agree that the same set of craftsmen being hired for building structures adhering to various religions was commonplace.

The design incorporated elements of medieval Bengali, Arab, Persian, and Byzantine architecture, and had a rectangular hypostyle structure with an open courtyard, and several hundred domes.

Why the closure? In February, police in Malda lodged an FIR against “a few persons” for performing religious rituals on the Masjid premises, on the basis of a complaint from the ASI.

Police sources in Malda and witnesses from the Shivajinagar area said a Bengali man from Uttar Pradesh — a self-styled monk with alleged Sangh Parivar backing — had, in the presence of some local people, performed certain religious rituals on the premises.

Following the incident and the complaint, which reached state secretariat Nabanna, the ASI launched a conservation exercise and disallowed access to the premises. Scores of CCTV cameras were set up. The police chowki came up for 24x7 surveillance.

ASI officials in north Bengal and police in Malda remain tightlipped, officially, on the matter. Sources in the administration said the monument and the situation were being closely monitored, and a decision on reopening would be taken after the general election.

The BJP’s Malda Uttar organisational district leadership has distanced itself from the controversy in the peak of the poll season, the constituency deemed a likely win for the party.

But sources in the saffron ecosystem, in the loop on what was being attempted by the Bengali man from Uttar Pradesh’s Vrindavan, said there are plans afoot to add Adina Masjid to the ever-growing list that includes the Babri Masjid of Ayodhya, the Gyanvapi Masjid of Varanasi, and the Shahi Idgah of Mathura.

“This is not political or even religious, but social. After the Ram temple at Ayodhya, people everywhere will now try to restore the great glory of all the sites that were robbed during the… foreign rule,” said a source, busy being a backroom boy in the Malda campaign for the BJP. “We decided not to make this an electoral issue this time, because we are winning anyway.”

Political scientists wondered the extremes to which the chaos would reach if such politics is allowed to thrive in India, as there is never going to be a dearth of instances of repossessed, repurposed, or reconverted buildings, religious and otherwise.

“Those who want to engage in the politics of Hindu-Muslim – not unlike what we sometimes see now between Christians and Muslims in Turkey – there is enough richness and vastness in our history for them to keep finding their ammunition,” said political scientist Subhamoy Maitra.

“Should, at some point, the Buddhists also want in on this, they too would find examples in abundance. Albeit Buddhists are a miniscule minority in India and are not really made part of electoral politics here,” he added, tongue firmly in cheek.

Historians say the Adina Masjid instance no longer remains a standalone question, and therefore cannot be ignored.

Historian Kanad Sinha pointed out that in monarchical polity, when one ruler fought another — irrespective of religious affiliation — things used to happen by way of assertion of power, which included religious intimidation.

“Instances abound in Hinduism, in Buddhism, in Islam, in Christianity…. That could be up for historical, academic analyses, and one could even condemn some things. But in a secular democracy, one simply cannot talk in terms of going about reversing them,” said Sinha.

“Across Europe, countless Christian sites are converted from the Graeco-Roman, pagan religion, but no civilised nation or its people will say that now all those churches ought to be reconverted into places of worship for the Olympian pantheon,” he added.

Like Calcutta’s Sinha, Shivajinagar’s Singha hopes good sense would soon prevail.

Given her apparently woke, secular-liberal sensibilities, whom would she vote for?

“Modi, who else?” she shrugged.

But what about all the things she had to say about the ways of the saffron ecosystem that has directly affected lives and livelihood in her family?

“Not Narendra Modi’s fault, are they?” added Singha, suppressing a smile of embarrassment. “Everyone here, including those 300-plus families harmed by this closure, will vote for Modi. There is no alternative.”