<div><b><span style="font-size: 1rem;">An Indian court has asked authorities to find new monikers for two lions named after a Hindu goddess and a Muslim emperor, following a religious group’s petition to stop them from sharing an enclosure.</span><br></b></div><div><br></div><div>Sita and Akbar were shipped to Siliguri Zoo in West Bengal this month as part of an animal exchange programme from a neighbouring state.</div><div><br></div><div>That irked the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a prominent right-wing Hindu organisation that has campaigned against interfaith relationships.</div><div><br></div><div>The group took the matter to court saying the lion pair’s cohabitation was an act of “blasphemy” that hurt Hindu religious sentiments.</div><div><br></div><div>Justice Saugata Bhattacharyya of the Calcutta high court asked government counsel to rename the pair yesterday.</div><div><br></div><div>“These names should be avoided and discontinued to avoid unnecessary controversy,” he said from the bench, according to the Hindustan Times newspaper.</div><div><br></div><div>Government counsel Joyjit Choudhury told the judge that the state was “already thinking of renaming” the pair.</div><div><br></div><div>Sita is one of the main characters of the Hindu epic Ramayana and the wife of Ram, one of the Hindu faith’s most revered deities.</div><div><br></div><div>Akbar was a 16th-century Mughal emperor who extended Islamic rule over much of the Indian subcontinent – a time Hindu nationalist groups say was a period that their religion was oppressed.</div><div><br></div><div>The VHP also claimed that Akbar the lion had originally been named after Ram before the pair arrived in Siliguri.</div><div><br></div><div>Critics say religious intolerance towards India’s 200-million-strong Muslim minority has grown since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government came to power in 2014.</div><div><br></div><div>The VHP, a group loosely affiliated with Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, has campaigned against interfaith marriages and supported efforts by state governments to make them more difficult.</div><div><br></div><div>It has also promulgated a “Love Jihad” conspiracy theory that alleges India’s Muslim minority hoodwink Hindu women into marriage to convert them to Islam. - AFP </div><div><br></div><div>bnbd24/fas</div>