Ayodhya, the Battle for India’s Soul-5

AYODHYA, THE BATTLE FOR INDIA'S SOUL - 5
By Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett
 
Thanks to Wall street Journal and Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett for writing the series on the topic, it is one of India's unfinished social business and needed to be addressed. The article follows my commentary.
 ......
Article follows my comments.

The Wall Street Journal/Court Files

Excavation work at the Babri Masjid site in 2003. Click here to view related slideshow.

In the months following the demolition of the Babri Masjid on Dec.6, 1992, the government of India enacted a new law to acquire a large area of land in Ayodhya that included the site where the mosque stood.
After the mosque’s demolition, Hindu activists had hastily built a makeshift temple to Ram Lalla, the statue of an infant Lord Ram that had been placed in the mosque in 1949. The new law set aside all the suits that claimed title to the site but allowed Hindu worship there to continue.

Simultaneously, through a process known as a presidential reference, the government put a question to the Supreme Court: Did a “Hindu temple or any Hindu religious structure” exist where the mosque had been built in 1528?
Muslim representatives challenged the legality of the new law and the presidential reference, saying that the government could not acquire a holy site. They also claimed no temple that was being used for worship was torn down to make the mosque, as Hindus contended. The Nirmohi Akhara, the sect of sadhus in Ayodhya that was part of the title litigation, also challenged the government’s acquisition of the land, which it claimed for itself.
A bench of five justices started deliberations in September 1993.
The solicitor general told the court that the government was committed to “the construction of a Ram temple and a mosque,” but needed the Supreme Court to decide their location.
After a year, the court declined to answer the question in the presidential reference, saying it was “superfluous and unnecessary,” even though it was a major bone of contention between the two sides.
The court, by a majority decision, upheld the law acquiring the land. But it said the government should hand over the small plot of about a quarter-acre, where the mosque and its two courtyards had stood, once the suits claiming title to the site were decided. The justices also reinstated those lawsuits, which had been transferred to the high court in Lucknow from Faizabad.

Mahendra Tripathi/The Wall Street Journal / Devotees line up to visit the site following the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

In its judgment, the Supreme Court couldn’t resist a commentary on what happened on the day of the Babri Masjid’s demolition. The Hindu community must, it said, “bear the cross on its chest for the misdeed of the miscreants reasonably suspected to belong to their religious fold.”
In early 1995, the frontlines of the dispute shifted back to the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court. The suits claiming title to the site were bundled together to be part of the same case.
On the Muslim side, there was the Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Board of Waqfs, which was responsible for maintaining Muslim holy sites, and six individual co-plaintiffs from Ayodhya and neighboring areas.
On the Hindu side, there were three suits. One filed by Gopal Singh Visharad, an Ayodhya local, in 1950. Another, filed in 1959, by the Nirmohi Akhara, the sect of sadhus dedicated to serving Ram. And another, filed in 1989, that added a new dimension to the proceedings. (A fourth suit, filed in 1950 by another sadhu in Ayodhya had been withdrawn.)
**
The 1989 suit, the most recent to be filed, was the work of Deoki Nandan Agarwal, a retired Hindu judge who lived in Allahabad, a city in Uttar Pradesh. where Ayodhya is located.

Click here for an overview of key players in chapter five.

He worked late into the night for years on the filing and told his daughter, Minu, that he was typing up “the most important case in India,” she said in an interview.
Justice Agarwal was frustrated by how slowly the litigation over the site was proceeding. He believed the evidence was clear that the site belonged to Ram, his daughter said.
In his suit, he made the lead plaintiff Bhagwan Sri Ram Virajman – Ram himself.
Indian law recognizes religious figures as “juristic persons.” Justice Agarwal is named in the suit as a supplementary plaintiff, Ram’s “next friend.”
The defendants were all the other parties who had previously laid claim to the site, from the Nirmohi Akhara to the waqf board.
Ram was “extremely unhappy” with the length of time the litigation was taking as well and with the deteriorating management of the site, Mr. Agarwal’s suit said. It called for the plaintiffs to be given title to the entire premises since it was Ram’s birthplace.
**
The recording of oral evidence started in the summer of 1996.
The Lucknow court is a collection of tall red-brick buildings, a blend of British and Mughal architecture. It has spacious arched corridors painted yellow and light blue that lead visitors around the roughly 30 court rooms in the complex.
In most, a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, shown in contemplative pose, hangs on the wall behind the elevated bench where the judges sit.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal

The Lucknow court.

In the courtroom hearing the Babri Masjid case, two court typists and two stenographers recorded witness statements. Three judges presided. The judges and the lawyers identified more than 80 issues for the court to decide, based on the claims made by the four parties—one Muslim and three Hindu.
The key issues were about the construction and nature of the disputed building and the land around it: Was it the birthplace of Ram, which Hindus claimed but Muslims disputed? And was the building that stood there a mosque as defined by Islamic law, as Muslims claimed but Hindus disputed?
The Muslims produced their witnesses first – a total of 33 in all. Experts in Islam testified that the Babri Masjid was a proper mosque even though the building had some unusual architectural touches like images on the pillars and no minarets.
Historians and archaeologists for the Muslim side testified that there was no historical or religious evidence to show that the disputed site was the birthplace of Lord Ram.
Eight of those expert witnesses were Hindus. They volunteered to testify, saying they wanted to stand for “facts” and defend secularism, according to the lawyers for the Muslim side.
Mohammad Hashim Ansari, the tailor who was living in Ayodhya when the legal dispute began in 1950, stood in the witness box in 1996, 46 years later.
A co-plaintiff in the waqf board suit, he was then 75 years old, his hair gray and his face laced with wrinkles.
He started each day’s testimony with an oath, “In the name of Allah,” that he would speak only the truth.
Mr. Ansari’s memory was occasionally hazy. When he testified that he had offered his first prayer at the Babri Masjid in 1938, one Hindu lawyer during cross-examination asked: “Which month of 1938?”

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal

Mohammad Hashim Ansari.

Mr. Ansari shot back, “Had I known that there would be this dispute on the Babri Masjid, I would have noted and remembered it,” according to a copy of his testimony.
He remained firm on issues of faith. A Hindu lawyer read a verse from the Koran and asked him to define the word “kafir.” Mr. Ansari said the term meant “people who don’t consider God as one and don’t follow the Book,” according to his testimony.
When the lawyer asked him whether Hindus are “kafir” by this definition, he said: “Those who don’t believe in the formless God are ‘kafir.’”
**
On the Hindu side, Deoki Nandan Agarwal, the retired judge whose case made Ram a plaintiff, testified despite a heart problem. A special provision was made for recording his statement at his residence in Allahabad.
At the age of about 80, Mr. Agarwal spoke with gusto when describing the basis of his claim, according to lawyers on both sides. He testified both on behalf of Ram and himself, as Ram’s “next friend” in the suit.

Minu Agarwal

Deoki Nandan Agarwal

He said that according to Hinduism, an idol is not important for worshipping but many devotees worship a statue of their deity to gain access to the divine.
His claim hinged on his contention that the site was the “birthplace of Lord Ram” and that when the Babri Masjid was built, “Ram was its owner.” He said Muslims who had offered prayers at the site in the past did so without the “permission of the owner of the land.”
When the Muslims’ lawyers asked the basis of his claim, Mr. Agarwal answered that it was the tradition of Hindu belief, which was at least 2,000 years old and was passed down through generations.
He died at his home before his cross-examination could be completed.
When Rajendra Singh, the son of Gopal Singh Visharad, took the stand, his father – who was the first to file a legal claim in the dispute — was dead. Rajendra Singh was a retired employee of a state bank, aged in his late-60s.
He acknowledged in an interview that he didn’t know much about his father’s suit. His statement is one of the shortest of the 54 witnesses on the Hindu side.
During cross-examination, Mr. Singh said he believed Ram’s birth had taken place hundreds of thousands of years ago. “This I have heard from my ancestors and I have also read about it,” he said.
Bhaskar Das, the head of the Nirmohi Akhara sect, the third Hindu plaintiff, took a different line from the other Hindus.
Contradicting their testimony, he claimed that “no incident took place in the disputed building” on the night of Dec. 22, 1949, the date the idol of Ram appeared in the Babri Masjid.
In an interview, Mr. Das maintained that nothing happened then. He added that the building had at no time been a mosque, either: “That place was always a temple owned by Nirmohi Akhara.”
During the cross-examination by a lawyer for the Muslims, Mr. Das said his knowledge about Lord Ram’s life was based on the “story” he had heard from Hindu sages.
The lawyer asked him whether that story had any description of a temple at Ram’s birthplace. Mr. Das quoted a verse from a colloquial version of the Ramayan, the sacred text of Ram’s life, written by a 16^th-century poet, Tulsidas.
Citing a quote from Ram, Mr. Das chanted: “My birthplace is this beautiful city, to the north of it flows the sacred Sarayu,” the river by Ayodhya.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal

The entrance to the Nirmohi Akhara ashram in Ayodhya.

Just funding the case took a toll on the Nirmohi Akhara, said another senior sadhu in the sect. The sect sold a plot of land near Ayodhya to buy a jeep to ferry witnesses to the court. “We lost a lot of money in litigation,” the sadhu said in an interview.
**
It took the court 11 years to hear all the witnesses.
To support their claims, lawyers for each side produced volumes of documentary evidence: more than 1,000 reference books in Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish, Persian and French; travelers’ historic accounts; copies of the memoir of Babar, the Mughal ruler whose troops had constructed the mosque in 1528; and religious texts, including the Ramayan.
The Muslim plaintiffs also produced inspection reports, land records, and other documents dating back to the mid-19^th century.
In all, the documents occupied 21 steel cupboards, measuring about seven feet by four feet each. Witness statements alone comprised 14,000 pages. The records were kept in a dedicated court room and were regularly treated with special insecticide powder to prevent bookworms. A staff of five looks after them, said a court official.
At the start of the trial, in 1996, a large crowd of Hindus and Muslims from Lucknow thronged the courtroom. Over time, the numbers fizzled to a handful.

In breaks, Zafaryab Jilani, the lead Muslim attorney, ordered tea and biscuits for all the lawyers, who sipped in the corridor outside the courtroom as they gossiped and sometimes cracked jokes.
Several lawyers involved in the case say they are either unpaid or paid meagerly by their clients. But they say they took the case because of their own religious beliefs and the importance of the issue to their communities.
The atmosphere inside the courtroom was somber but occasionally leavened with humor. Once a judge told a lawyer, in Hindi, “Tum bahut kam aate ho,” which means, “you are coming less frequently.”
The lawyer mistook the phrase for what could sound, in Hindi, like, “you earn a lot.”
“No your lordship, I don’t earn much,” he replied as the court erupted in laughter.
There were also moments of tension. One expert witness, a Hindu, visited the court to testify on behalf of the Muslims. A crowd of Hindus assaulted him and accused him of being a “traitor,” according to lawyers and court staff present at the time.
Overall, starting from 1989, 18 judges hearing the case either retired or were transferred, according to the lawyers involved.
It wasn’t just the judges who changed. Over time, the legal team representing the Nirmohi Akhara included three generations of the same family of lawyers.
Ranjeet Lal Verma, the lawyer for the Nirmohi Akhara today, was a law student at Allahabad University when the sect filed its case in 1959. His father was the sect’s lawyer. After graduation, Mr. Verma joined the case. After his father’s death in 1994, Mr. Verma’s son, Tarun Jeet Verma, joined him.
**
With the Muslims claiming that the mosque had been constructed on vacant land and the Hindus claiming it was built after demolishing a temple, the judges decided “to have a scientific investigation at the disputed site.”
The idea was to see if there was empirical evidence to settle the question of what lay beneath the ruined mosque – nothing, or a ruined Hindu temple.

The Wall Street Journal/Court Files

Excavation work at the Babri Masjid site.

In late 2002, the court called into service the country’s top archaeological research agency, the Archaeological Survey of India. Headquartered in New Delhi, the ASI was formed by the British in 1861 and today is charged with excavating and preserving ancient monuments.
The ASI was reluctant to get involved. But after the court appointed a New Delhi-based geo-physical investigation company to do the survey work, the ASI agreed to supervise it.
The company surveyed the area using earth-sensing equipment with high-powered antennas that transmitted electromagnetic waves into the ground and recorded the variations in their travel speeds after hitting different objects. The returning waves were fed into a special computer that generated maps that could show “anomalies” – perhaps structures and artifacts – beneath the soil.
In its report to the court, the company said it found “a variety of anomalies ranging from 0.5 to 5.5 meters in depth that could be associated with ancient and contemporaneous structures such as pillars, foundation walls, slab flooring, extending over a large portion of the site.”
To confirm, the site needed to be excavated, the survey report said.
The court asked the ASI to excavate about 10,000 square feet of the main disputed area, except under the makeshift temple containing the idol of Ram. The excavation should not disturb the worshipping of Ram Lalla—the infant god—and the visits of devotees, the court added.
The excavation team comprised of 14 senior ASI archaeologists, photographers and draftsman and 80 local laborers. It began in March 2003.
The court allowed the parties who were fighting in court to have observers present. The excavation team dug 90 trenches, most up to five meters deep.
They unearthed and recorded structures such as brick and stone pillar bases, masonry walls, and floors of lime. They found glazed tiles, human and animal figurines, inscribed copper coins, bone and iron objects, ear-studs and bangles of terracotta.
The ASI submitted a 272-page report with separate volumes of photos. The report’s summary said the sum of the discoveries was “indicative of remains which are distinctive features found associated with the temples of north India.”

The Wall Street Journal/Court Files

Shards of glazed terracotta from the site.

The report also said that radio-carbon dating showed that people using “northern black polished ware” were the first people to “occupy the disputed site at Ayodhya.”
The finding pushed evidence of habitation in the area to the middle of the 13^th century B.C, about 3,300 years ago from today.
The archaeologists involved in the excavation declined comment, citing restrictions placed on them by the court.
In the court in Lucknow, the Hindu parties and their expert witnesses broadly welcomed the ASI report and said it vindicated their claims that a Hindu temple was torn down to build the mosque.
But the waqf board, Hashim Ansari and other Muslim plaintiffs objected. They called the report “one-sided” and produced eight expert witnesses, six of them Hindu.
They assailed the report for its alleged “omissions,” such as the discovery of animal bones with cut marks found in different layers of the trenches that would be unlikely to come from a Hindu shrine.
The survey didn’t conclusively settle the question it was designed to address.
**
By July 2010, the lawyers had completed their arguments. The court set a date — Sept. 30, 2010 – to deliver the first verdict in a case that had begun 60 years before.
In the days before the verdict, the national and state governments dispatched tens of thousands of security personnel to deal with any post-verdict violence. Just in Uttar Pradesh, about 190,000 police and paramilitary forces were deployed.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Image

Security officials on a street in Ayodhya, Sept. 23, 2010.

The situation was sensitive. Violence had accompanied the dispute in the past and India at the time was on display to the world: The Commonwealth Games, a major athletic event, was to begin in New Delhi a few days later.
The verdict was a test of whether India had moved beyond the old wounds and divisions that had split its two largest constituencies, Hindus and Muslims.
“I think that India has moved on. Young people have moved on,” Palaniappan Chidambaram, then federal home minister, said at a press conference before the verdict. “Particularly people born after 1992 have a different world view.”
Judgment day was a Thursday. News channels offered live coverage as lawyers at the court awaited the ruling. The national government blocked the sending of mass text messages to deter any organized agitation. In the southern state of Karnataka, the government closed schools and colleges for two days.
The streets of Ayodhya were empty of civilians, according to several residents.
In the courtroom in Lucknow, there were about 25 lawyers. News crews with television cameras camped outside the court complex as paramilitary troops patrolled.
The court ruled that the quarter-acre site of the mosque and its immediate surroundings should be divided into three parts—two for the Hindu side and one for Muslims. It was a majority decision, approved by the Muslim judge and one of the two Hindus.
The location of the mosque’s central dome, where the idol of Ram Lalla sat, was given to Ram himself and his “next friend.” That was originally Deoki Nandan Agarwal. Since his death in 2002, the position had been assumed by a representative of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the organization that had championed the construction of a Ram temple.
The site of the wooden platform in the mosque’s outer courtyard where Ram had been worshipped for centuries, was given to the Nirmohi Akhara.
The ruling also said that the entire area of the former mosque and its inner and outer courtyards should be divided in such a way that Muslims also get no less than one third.
The judges then read summaries of their opinions. On the question of what predated the Babri Masjid, the Muslim judge observed that the mosque “was constructed over the ruins of temples which were lying in utter ruins since a very long time before the construction of [the] mosque.”
On the issue of whether the site was the birthplace of Ram, one of the Hindu judges observed: “It is held that the place of birth, as believed and worshipped by Hindus, is the area covered under the central dome of the three domed structure.”

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Lawyers representing Hindu groups after the court’s decision on Sept. 30, 2010.

The other Hindu judge, who was retiring the next day, went deep into the terrain of faith and spirituality: “Spirit of divine ever remains present everywhere at all times for anyone to invoke at any shape or form in accordance with his own aspirations and it can be shapeless and formless also.”
This judge, in a dissenting opinion, said the entire area belongs to Ram Lalla.
The judges’ statements lasted about one hour. Then Tarun Jeet Verma, son of the main lawyer for the Nirmohi Akhara, emerged from the courtroom flashing a victory sign.
All four parties said the “trifurcation” of the site was not what they had sought from the court. They all appealed to the Supreme Court in New Delhi, which stayed the Lucknow high court’s ruling and agreed to take the appeals.
Mohammad Hashim Ansari, the Ayodhya tailor, was surrounded by television cameras outside his home. He appealed to Muslims to remain calm even though he was not happy with the result.
Lal Krishna Advani, senior leader in the Bharatiya Janata Party, which championed the Ram temple cause, told the media that the verdict was “the judiciary’s reconciliation formula.” Still, he maintained, “The judgment has paved way for the construction of the temple.”
On the nation’s prime-time new shows that evening, several commentators criticized the judgment for being too heavily grounded in faith rather than in law, while some hailed it as politically astute because neither side was granted a clear win.
The nation remained calm. Its attention returned to the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.
**
Courtesy of  Wall Stree Journal  - http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/12/07/ayodhya-the-battle-for-indias-soul-chapter-five/

Tomorrow in the sixth and final chapter: How the Ayodhya dispute changed India and what impact it may have on the nation’s future.

Ayodhya, the Battle for India’s Soul-4

AYODHYA, THE BATTLE FOR INDIA'S SOUL - 4   http://mikeghouseforindia.blogspot.com/2012/12/ayodhya-battle-for-indias-soul-4.html

By Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett
 
Thanks to Wall street Journal and Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett for writing the series on the topic, it is one of India's unfinished social business and needed to be addressed. The article follows my commentary.
 ......
Article follows my comments.

Every Goddamned controversy is a fodder to the politicians. It is a shame that the public falls for this, specially inciting them with religion.

I have written extensively on how the Christian politicians of Europe and and Muslim politicians of Middle East have deliberately mistranslated (Arabic version remains intact) the Quraan for their political gains, by feeding hatred towards each other. The first mistranslation was in 1142 by the Christian Kings, painting Muslims as a Muhammadan Cult ready to kill the Christians, and got their subjects to support them against the Muslims. Then in 1924 the Hilali/Khan misinterpreted Quraan inserting words of hate towards Jews, Christians and others, apparently as a reaction to the regain the lost Ottoman Empire. Fortunately, the Arabic version of Quraan has remained intact and free of hatred. Thank God for that, God does not hate any one, period. The politicians do, and a lot of politicians hide under religious garb.

The same has happened in India; the damned politicians succeeded creating hatred between two groups of Indians. Rajiv Gandhi needed “an issue to change the dynamics of the upcoming elections.” And BJP who had just two seats in the parliament hitherto, wanted Ayodhya to become their crutch to rise up. What a shame. However, you can fool the public only so much, but they have injected venom among a few Hindus and Muslims, while the majority of them are fine, thank God again for that. 

Indians are awakened now, and they cannot be fooled by either Hindu or Muslim appeasing politicians, all they want is a job to take care of their families. The Hindu Indians have dumped BJP despite their inciting them to build a Ram Temple, and Muslims are doing the same with the Congress. We need political parties that focus on economy, jobs and well being of the people not only in India, but in America as well.

 

A patriotic Indian is one who wants the best for India, everyone included in that whole. If you are a Muslim or a Hindu and felt hatred toward the other or rejoice for the situation while reading this, you are less likely to have a prudent opinion.

Jai Hind  
Jai Hind

Mike Ghouse for India's Pluralistic ethos
http://MikeGhouseforIndia.Blogspot.com

.............................................
 

Mahendra Tripathi/The Wall Street Journal - Hindu activists atop the Babri Masjid on Dec. 6, 1992. Click here to view a related slideshow.

By the summer of 1989, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was in a bind. The euphoria that marked the start of his term had given way to controversy: opposition parties alleged that he benefitted from bribes paid in India’s purchase of howitzer guns from a Swedish company, AB Bofors.

Mr. Gandhi denied wrongdoing. But as the end of his first term approached, he needed an issue that would change the dynamics of the upcoming election.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which had just two seats in Parliament, already had seized on Ayodhya as its chief campaign issue.

The party was formed in 1980 from the remnants of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the Hindu party that both Guru Dutt Singh and K.K. Nayar, the administrators in Faizabad in 1949, joined when they entered politics.

The BJP had close links to the largest conservative Hindu organizations: the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which for years had been calling for the construction of a temple to Lord Ram in Ayodhya; and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a hard-line Hindu group that was formed in 1925.
At a meeting in Palampur in the foothills of the Himalayas, in June 1989, the BJP’s national executive endorsed the demand to build a Ram temple, calling it by its Hindu name, “Ram Janmabhoomi.”

The statement declared that the dispute over the Babri Masjid “highlighted the callous unconcern” which Mr. Gandhi’s Congress and other parties “betray towards the sentiments of the overwhelming majority in this country – the Hindus.”
The prime minister’s advisers encouraged him to co-opt the same issue for his own re-election effort. He “had been advised by various intelligence agencies and politicians that ‘You launch your campaign from Ayodhya,’” said R.K. Dhawan, then Mr. Gandhi’s private secretary, in an interview.

Ayodhya: The Battle for India's Soul

4:9

A centuries-long conflict between Hindus and Muslims in the ancient city of Ayodhya has had a profound influence on Indian life and politics and continues today. WSJ's Paul Beckett reports.

The BJP, at the time, was not viewed as the main opposition: Mr. Gandhi faced a greater threat from an alliance of former ministers who had split from Congress: Arif Mohammed Khan, the minister who resigned from Mr. Gandhi’s government in 1986; Arun Nehru, Mr. Gandhi’s cousin and former political adviser; and Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Mr. Gandhi’s former finance minister.

They were hammering on the Bofors allegations. So Mr. Gandhi seized on Ayodhya. He launched his campaign from the neighboring city of Faizabad in the autumn of 1989.
On a large field, before a crowd of thousands, he gave a speech from notes that had been prepared by Mani Shankar Aiyar, his special assistant and speechwriter. But, said Mr. Aiyar, the prime minister slipped in an unscripted reference to “Ram Rajya.”

The phrase connoted the ideal governance that Lord Ram had practiced when, Hindu scripture says, he ruled Ayodhya thousands of years before. It had been a term used by Mahatma Gandhi during India’s independence struggle. But it also was used by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to promote the movement to construct a Ram temple. When Rajiv Gandhi used the phrase, his opponents accused him of pandering to divisive Hindu sentiment.
Still, Mr. Gandhi further embraced the Ayodhya issue soon after. In early November 1989, just weeks before the general election, the prime minister sent Buta Singh, the home minister, to the town to participate in a “shilanyas,” or symbolic temple foundation-laying ceremony.

Mahendra Tripathi/The Wall Street Journal

The symbolic foundation-laying ceremony for a Ram temple in 1989.

The event was organized by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which had been collecting bricks from all over India and bringing them to Ayodhya to symbolize the desire to build a Ram temple. As many as 275,000 villages and 60 million people participated, according to a VHP spokesman. Bricks were also sent from the U.S., the U.K. and other foreign locales.

Mr. Gandhi figured no Muslims would object if a Ram temple was built near the Babri Masjid but outside the area that was being disputed by Hindus and Muslims, Mr. Aiyar said.

To ensure the land where the ceremony took place was uncontroversial, a court registrar verified the plot with pencil markings on a map, Buta Singh said in an interview at his New Delhi home.

But afterward, Muslim leaders claimed the site of the ceremony had impinged on a graveyard around the mosque and was part of the property being fought over in court.
They publicly vowed revenge at the ballot box against Mr. Gandhi’s Congress party, said Zafaryab Jilani, convener of the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee and the lead lawyer representing Muslims in the court dispute.

Mr. Gandhi’s strategy of using Ayodhya to boost his re-election prospects had backfired. Muslims saw in the performance of the shilanyas a direct threat to the mosque. Hindus who wanted a temple on the site of the Babri Masjid, which they viewed as Ram’s birthplace, weren’t satisfied with a temple near the mosque.

“We fought on somebody else’s territory and the tactics we used blew back on us,” said Mr. Aiyar. It was a “horrendous decision,” added Mr. Dhawan.

It spelled electoral disaster. No single party won a majority in Parliament and Congress remained the largest party. But it lost so many seats that Mr. Gandhi opted not to try to form a government.

Instead, his opponents did. The new coalition government was headed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the former finance minister in Mr. Gandhi’s government, who had switched from Congress to the Janata Dal party.

The BJP saw its seats in Parliament jump to 85 from two, according to election commission results. It used its new power to support the new government and give it a working majority in Parliament. That gave the BJP huge leverage which it would exercise, over Ayodhya, in the following months.
**
The BJP’s sudden prominence thrust Lal Krishna Advani, one of the party’s senior leaders, to the forefront of New Delhi politics.

Click here to see the major players in chapter four.

Almost a year later, he gained national attention when, on Sept. 25, 1990, he began a cross-country journey in an air-conditioned mini-bus made to look like a chariot and decorated with marigold flowers, according to Mr. Advani’s autobiography. Ram rode a chariot into battle, according to Hindu scriptures.

Mr. Advani began the trip from Somnath, in the western state of Gujarat. Somnath is, like Ayodhya, one of Hinduism’s holiest sites. A temple there dedicated to the god Shiva, the destroyer, had been repeatedly razed by Muslim invaders over centuries. But construction of a new temple in Somnath had begun in 1947 with the blessing of the government in New Delhi, making it a symbolic starting point for his journey.

Mr. Advani planned to reach Ayodhya by Oct. 30. That was the day that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Hindu organization, set for “karseva” — religious work — to begin in Ayodhya. The religious work envisaged was the construction of a Ram temple on the site in dispute between Hindus and Muslims.

Mr. Advani, now 85 years old, declined to be interviewed. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said through an aide.

Slender, with dark-rimmed glasses, a neatly-trimmed moustache and a circle of white hair below his bald pate, Mr. Advani grew up in a devout Hindu household in pre-Partition Karachi, now Pakistan’s largest city. At the age of 14, he joined the RSS, the hard-line Hindu group.

He moved to Rajasthan as an RSS organizer before becoming a journalist and political apparatchik. He was a co-founder of the BJP in 1980.

Along the chariot’s route, Mr. Advani encountered dramatic scenes of devotion: the chariot itself was worshipped as divine, he wrote. In short speeches – he made 20 a day — from a platform on the chariot, he spoke about how the “power of devotion towards Ram can unleash people’s power,” he wrote.

In his autobiography, Mr. Advani claimed the route the chariot took was peaceful. Government officials and published accounts from that time said his journey sparked widespread violence elsewhere between Hindus and Muslims.
**
As Mr. Advani rode across India and the deadline approached for the start of temple construction on Oct. 30, 1990, the nation was on edge.

State officials in Uttar Pradesh, where Ayodhya is located, worried about the potential for large-scale violence. In early October that year, false rumors had spread in one area that Muslims had killed hundreds of Hindus, including butchering women and children. Riots erupted, leaving 80 people dead, all but one of them Muslim, according to a later published account.

In mid-October, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the new prime minister, sought a compromise on Ayodhya that would reduce the tension.

He summoned Swaminathan Gurumurthy from Chennai to New Delhi. Mr. Gurumurthy — a wiry, spry man and chartered accountant by training — was an adviser to the powerful then-publisher of the Indian Express newspaper, Ramnath Goenka, and an interlocutor for the RSS. The organization’s approval was viewed as key to Hindu support for a deal.
In a series of meetings at the prime minister’s residence, Mr. Singh, his advisers, and Mr. Gurumurthy discussed the idea of a presidential ordinance, effectively an executive order.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal

Swaminathan Gurumurthy.

The idea was for the central government to acquire all the land around the Babri Masjid. Most of the land would be handed over to a trust run by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Hindu organization, Mr. Gurumurthy said in an interview. But the Babri Masjid and another small parcel would be kept by the government and referred for deliberations to the Supreme Court.

The court would be asked to decide whether there had previously been a Ram temple on that site, said Mr. Gurumurthy. If so, the assumption was that the site would be given to Hindus. BJP leaders, including Mr. Advani, supported the initiative.

Muslim leaders found out that an ordinance was being considered but they had not been consulted, said Zafaryab Jilani, the lawyer and convener of the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee.

A delegation of Muslim leaders went to question the prime minister at his residence, Mr. Jilani said. Mr. Singh denied there was any plan for an ordinance: “No, no. When I have, I will discuss with you,” Mr. Jilani said the prime minister told them.

But on the night of Oct. 18, the prime minister agreed to pass the ordinance and it was issued the following day.

When the Muslim leaders heard what had happened, they felt deceived, Mr. Jilani said. And they opposed the ordinance because they felt the site of the mosque was sacred land that could not be owned by the government.

They met again the following day with the prime minister. “You are very much annoyed,” Mr. Singh told them, according to Mr. Jilani. “I cannot afford to have you people annoyed.” It was clear Mr. Singh was having second thoughts.

Mr. Gurumurthy said that the prime minister and his advisers had always appeared “tentative” about the ordinance. Mr. Singh “never looked confident in this entire period,” he added. But once the ordinance had been issued, Mr. Gurumurthy figured the prime minister and his advisers “would stick by it.”

Instead, soon after, the government issued a second ordinance that simply canceled the first ordinance, leaving the Ayodhya issue unresolved.

Mr. Gurumurthy said he confronted the prime minister. “You have done greatest harm to the country,” he said he told him. The prime minister was silent, he said. They never met again; Mr. Singh is now deceased.

The flip-flop on the ordinance set up a confrontation between the BJP and the government it supported.

Soon after, Mr. Advani was apprehended in the state of Bihar by local authorities and prevented from reaching Ayodhya. He was later released but the chariot drive stopped. The BJP withdrew its support from Mr. Singh’s government, leaving it short of a majority in Parliament.

Heavy security was placed in Ayodhya to deter Hindu activists, known as “karsevaks,” from arriving for the Oct. 30 start date of construction, or karseva.

Mahendra Tripathi/The Wall Street Journal

The idol of Ram and other deities in the Babri Masjid in 1990.

But many slipped in. Some climbed the domes of the Babri Masjid and damaged the building. Police fought the crowd and later opened fire. The death toll was 16, according to an official government account. The BJP claims more than 50 were killed.
Soon after, Mr. Singh’s government faced a no-confidence vote in Parliament. It lost.
**
A fresh government was installed in November 1990 with a new prime minister, Chandra Shekhar Singh. He was a blunt-spoken socialist. This time, the government was supported by the Congress party, led by Rajiv Gandhi.


The new prime minister tried, again, to find a solution to the Ayodhya dispute.

He asked Subodh Kant Sahai, then minister of state in the home ministry, to lead discussions with Hindu and Muslim representatives, eight from each side. Three chief ministers – of Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh – participated to smooth tensions.

Facing each other across a long table, the two sides brought historians and materials to support their claims: photographs; papers and court judgments from British colonial times; and copies of inscriptions dating back to Emperor Babar’s rule in the sixteenth century.
The meetings were “very cordial,” said Mr. Sahai in an interview, noting it was a period of relative calm in the long-running confrontation. “I was sure we will succeed.”

But in March 1991, before the initiative could bear fruit, the Congress party alleged that government agents had been spying on Mr. Gandhi. The accusations were never proven but Congress withdrew its support from the government. Another general election ensued.
Then, on May 21, 1991, on the campaign trail in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, Mr. Gandhi, age 46, was killed by a suicide bomber from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Tamil terror group opposed India’s military support for the Sri Lankan government in the nation’s long-running civil war.
**
Congress won the election, returning to power in June 1991. But its standard bearer, Mr. Gandhi, was gone. The new prime minister was P.V. Narasimha Rao. A lawyer by training, he was reserved and judicious with words — and India’s fourth leader in two years.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Narasimha Rao, centre, was India’s prime minister from 1991-1996.

At the same election, the Bharatiya Janata Party won its first-ever state poll, coming to power in Uttar Pradesh, the state where Ayodhya is located. That gave it huge influence over what happened in the town. Not long after, the state government acquired 2.77 acres of land in front of the Babri Masjid.

A new call was made for volunteers to amass in Ayodhya in July 1992, again to try to start construction of a temple. Mr. Rao scrambled to defuse the situation. That month, he met a group of sadhus in New Delhi who agreed to a three-month delay, pushing the start date back to late October.

Mr. Rao declared in Parliament on July 27 that he saw a way forward for “an agreed solution to the problem.” Instead, it only delayed a crisis.

In October, the prime minister asked Subodh Kant Sahai to re-open the negotiations that had showed promise during the previous administration.

Both sides agreed to maintain peace during the talks. But toward the end of October, there were newspaper reports that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Hindu organization, would call for volunteers to amass when the three-month delay agreed by the sadhus expired. The news angered Muslims who claimed the Hindus had been negotiating in bad faith.

“You all have already announced the date for karseva,” or religious work, one of the Muslim representatives said in anger at the next session, according to two people present. “Why is this meeting going on?”

The negotiations fizzled soon after. Another chance at a settlement was lost. The All India Babri Masjid Action Committee said in a statement at the time that the declaration of karseva “challenged the very foundation of our democratic and constitutional system and secular fabric of the country.”

But a new date was set: Dec. 6, 1992, 20 years ago today.

Mr. Rao was concerned that the mass gathering could lead to disaster. In November, he met at his residence with Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, the two most senior BJP leaders in New Delhi. Kalyan Singh, the BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, also was there, according to two persons who attended.

The Hindu side, at various times until then, had given different versions of what they wanted the volunteer work to involve.

At one point, representatives suggested that the Babri Masjid should be relocated so a temple could be built. At others, they proposed that a temple could be built without interfering with the mosque. Sometimes, they said karseva would involve only symbolic manual labor, such as sweeping. The mosque’s destruction – though called for by many radicals in slogans and speeches – was not formally proposed.

During the hour-long meeting with Mr. Rao, the BJP leaders assured the prime minister that nothing would happen to the Babri Masjid, said P.V.R.K. Prasad, an adviser to Mr. Rao. Kalyan Singh, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister at the time, confirmed that the meeting took place; the other two BJP leaders declined comment. (Mr. Rao is deceased.)
Meanwhile, a rumor was circulating in New Delhi that the prime minister might try to take control of the situation by pushing for president’s rule in Uttar Pradesh. That allows the central government to commandeer the administration of a state where law and order has broken down. The BJP leaders assured Mr. Rao that it wouldn’t be necessary, Mr. Prasad said.

The prime minister was noncommittal in his response: “Alright, definitely we’ll see,” he said, according to Mr. Prasad. “We’ll examine.”

Mr. Rao decided to dispatch more than 20,000 paramilitary personnel to Ayodhya’s surroundings just in case there was trouble.

He told Kalyan Singh, the chief minister: “As we are expecting a lot of people and all that, whether you want them or not we are sending forces,’” according to Mr. Prasad.

Still, Mr. Rao felt he could not go further and impose president’s rule, said Mr. Prasad, because he had no evidence that the Hindus planned violence and he had received assurances from the BJP leaders that order would be maintained. Also, most of the intelligence reports that Mr. Rao received said nothing was likely to happen, said Mr. Prasad.
In a meeting the same month with members of the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee, Mr. Rao was upbeat, according to Mr. Jilani and Mr. Prasad, who both attended.

“What will you do if they damage the mosque?” the group asked the prime minister.
“You are talking with the prime minister of India. India is such a big nation that its forces can reach the neighboring countries in 24 hours,” responded Mr. Rao, according to Mr. Jilani. “Do you think we cannot reach Ayodhya?”

But the prime minister’s confidence soon gave way to anxiety. As Dec. 6 approached, thousands of Hindu activists poured into Ayodhya, raising alarm bells in New Delhi that they would run rampant.

Around 5 a.m. one morning in early December, the phone rang in the home of Mani Shankar Aiyar, Rajiv Gandhi’s former special assistant. A secretary told him Mr. Rao wanted to speak, Mr. Aiyar said in an interview.

The prime minister, he said, came on the line and started talking as if in mid-sentence: “But I did everything for them Mani, I trusted them. And look at the way they are letting me down,” Mr. Aiyar said Mr. Rao told him.
**
The morning of Dec. 6 was quiet.
Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad surveyed the scene in Ayodhya from a rooftop as the volunteers amassed.

Mahendra Tripathi/The Wall Street Journal

Hindu activists thronged Ayodhya.

Mr. Rao, the prime minister, watched on television at his residence in New Delhi. He was “slightly apprehensive because he was getting the impression that not much forces were there,” according to Mr. Prasad, his adviser, who visited him that morning.

Then, around noon, a group of karsevaks broke through the light security around the Babri Masjid. Some climbed onto the central dome.

Hajari Lal, 55 years old, was among them, he said in an interview. He was a volunteer member of the RSS, the hard-line Hindu organization. He had tried, with others, to destroy the mosque in 1990. But they had failed and, seething with anger, were determined to finish the job, he said.

Mr. Lal said he started chipping away at the domes with a small shovel he carried in his bag. Others used hammers, iron rods and spades.

Mahant Satyendra Das, the chief government-appointed priest at the site, was standing not far away with his assistants, he said in an interview.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal

Pictured, Hajari Lal.

The priests raced into the building to rescue the idol of Ram and other statues added since, he said. They took them to the shelter of a nearby tree.

In New Delhi, watching events with increasing concern, Mr. Rao asked senior officials to push the state government to deploy the forces stationed outside of town, said Mr. Prasad. States are responsible for law and order so the federal government couldn’t order the troops to move.
A state official requisitioned 30 paramilitary companies – about 4,000 personnel — at 12:45 p.m. But they were under strict orders not to use force even though the throng totaled at least 75,000 activists.

Just before 2 p.m., one of the domes collapsed, pulled down by ropes inserted in holes high in the mosque’s walls. Later, the other two were demolished. After more than 450 years, the mosque was gone.

The collapse of a building closely associated with the Mughal invasion of India was a stark declaration of Hindu might and electrified the volunteers.

Ashok Singhal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad official who led the temple movement, said in an interview that, from his perspective, the building wasn’t destroyed at all. Rather, he said, what happened that day was part of a “renovation program.” The VHP has long claimed that a Hindu temple was destroyed in the 1500s for the mosque to be built.

The activists rampaged, targeting local Muslims. Houses were set afire.
Mr. Das, the priest at the site, said he was appalled by the events that day. He considered the building a temple since Ram had been cared for and worshipped there for more than four decades.
“I felt like I was witnessing terrorists attacking a village,” he said.
Hashim Ansari, the 92-year-old Muslim tailor who was involved in the court case over the site, said he fled with his family to relatives in Faizabad. More than a dozen Muslims were killed in the violence, according to local Muslims.
“I should have died instead of having to see the destruction of Babri Masjid that day,” Mr. Ansari said in an interview. He and his family returned to Ayodhya but he said many Muslims left for good.
More federal security forces were deployed. But they were pelted with stones and turned back, according to the government’s official version of events.

As late as 5:40 p.m., most of the security forces remained stalled, in part because local officials said they couldn’t provide the magistrates needed to accompany the forces into town.

A makeshift temple was erected on the rubble where the Babri Masjid once stood. Mr. Das, the priest, said he installed the idols there, placing Ram on a wooden throne.

The prime minister summoned his cabinet in the afternoon and decided to impose president’s rule, according to Mr. Prasad. But only by late evening was the process complete.

Mahendra Tripathi/The Wall Street Journal

The site of the Babri Masjid being cleared

Federal security forces finally secured the site, without incident, on the night of Dec. 7.

Several Congress leaders have since criticized Mr. Rao for not moving more swiftly or decisively to prevent the mosque’s destruction. Mr. Prasad, his adviser, contended that the prime minister “took all the actions that were available at his disposal.”
As the day unfolded, Mr. Rao’s spirits sank, said Mr. Prasad: “First he was worried, then he was angry, then he said he felt very sad.”

The prime minister felt betrayed by Kalyan Singh, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who had given Mr. Rao reassurances that law and order would be maintained, said Mr. Prasad.

In an interview, Kalyan Singh said, “What was said and what wasn’t said to Prime Minister Rao is irrelevant.” Of the Babri Masjid, he said: “It was the symbol of slavery, so it had to go. That’s it.”

Many Hindus were disgusted with what transpired in Ayodhya that day. Subodh Kant Sahai, the leader of two rounds of settlement negotiations, said he was disconsolate. He said his mother, who had supported building a temple, told him: “This is too much. They have crossed the limits.”

The destruction tested Muslims’ faith in India’s governing institutions – the government, courts, and law enforcement.

“First reaction was of disappointment,” said Mr. Jilani, the lawyer. “But soon thereafter we got courage. We said, ‘We have to live here, we will face it.’”

The demolition sparked violence that ricocheted around India over the next several months. By Dec. 9, 16 states saw inter-religious unrest, according to a government report. In December and January 1993, Hindu-Muslim riots racked Mumbai, India’s largest city, leaving about 900, mostly Muslims, dead. In March 1993, a series of bomb blasts across Mumbai killed more than 250.

In 1996, the Congress party government was replaced by a coalition led by the BJP. The new government lasted only 13 days. But the BJP could boast of its first prime minister: Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He returned to the office in 1998, where he remained until 2004.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Ayodhya, meanwhile, continued to polarize the country and inspire bloodshed. In 2002, almost 60 karsevaks, returning from Ayodhya, were burned to death in a train carriage in Godhra in the western state of Gujarat. More than 1,000 people died in the riots that ensued. Most were Muslim.
Six years later, in November 2008, Pakistani terrorists attacked south Mumbai. On the 20^th floor of the Trident hotel, facing a group of guests at gunpoint, one attacker shouted “Remember Babri Masjid?” according to a witness. Then he started firing.


Tomorrow: The nation is on edge as a court verdict is delivered after 60 years.