The Bengal Safari Park, near the city of Siliguri in eastern India, is in the eye of a storm. Everything revolves around the lioness Sita and the lion Akbar, who live together in one enclosure. She is named after the Hindu goddess of fertility and agriculture, he after Akbar the Great. He was an Islamic Mughal emperor who ruled large parts of present-day India in the sixteenth century.
The fact that the two animals live together in one enclosure is not to the liking of many Hindus. Akbar had an important role in spreading Islam in India, and Hindu nationalist groups associate that period with slavery.
Attack on all Hindus
“Sita really cannot stay with Mughal Emperor Akbar,” Anup Mondal of the Visha Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu nationalist organization, said last week. “This amounts to blasphemy and is an attack on the faith of all Hindus.”
Interesting detail: lion Akbar comes over from the state of Tripura. There he would have been called Rama, after the Hindu god. In Tripura, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party is in power, which pursues a Hindu-first policy and puts culture first in various ways.
But in the state of West Bengal, where the lion now lives, the Trinamool Congress party is in charge. He is diametrically opposed to Modi, and is said to have arranged for Rama to go through life as Akbar from now on.
When Akbar was accompanied by a lioness at the beginning of this month, the party reportedly deliberately named her after a Hindu goddess. A deliberate provocation, says the VHP. (read more below the photo)
According to Birbaha Hansda, Forest Minister in the state and member of the Trinamool Congress party, there is no such thing and the VHP is playing a political game. He told The Indian Express newspaper that the safari park chose the names itself.
A judge is expected to consider the issue this week. The VHP would prefer a total ban on giving religious names to animals. In the meantime, Akbar and Sita have already been separated as a preventative measure, a West Bengal official told the British newspaper The Guardian. According to the safari park itself, the names are not yet final.
The story of the two lions is further evidence of the religious tensions in India. Since Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, violence between Hindus and Muslims has occurred regularly. At the beginning of February, two more people were killed and dozens injured in riots in northern India when a Koranic school and a mosque were destroyed.
The coming weeks also promise to be exciting in the country. After all, Prime Minister Modi wants to be elected for a third time in two months. In January, with much fanfare, he inaugurated a large Hindu temple on the site where a large mosque was destroyed in 1992.
