Reclaiming your own temples, after giving the injured party land to rebuild their mosque, is not persecution in my book. I would argue that building a mosque after demolishing a temple at the place Hindus believe their Lord was born was a deliberate provocation, and the other party refusing to let it go for 500 years was persecution of Hindus and their faith.

No other mosque in Ayodhya was touched when this particular mosque was demolished three decades back. If Hindus were truly supremacist, every single one would have been.

> minority

There are more than 600,000 mosques in India and over 200 million Muslims. They are a second majority.

> When modern histories describe this period, this time when all the old religions died away and Christianity finally became pre-eminent, they tend to call it the “triumph of Christianity.” It is worth remembering, however, the original Roman meaning of the word “triumph.” A true Roman triumph wasn’t merely about the victory of the winner. It was about the total and utter subjugation of the loser. In a true Roman triumph the losing side was paraded through the capital while the winning side looked on at an enemy whose soldiers had been slain, whose possessions had been despoiled and whose leaders had been humiliated.

> A triumph was not merely a “victory.” It was an annihilation.

> ...

> For before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and mutilated. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was leveled. Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off, and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches. Books—which were often stored in temples —suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.