The Supreme Court judgement brings to a close a case that fundamentally altered civil and political life in India. The Hindu trust will be set up by the government in three months.
NEW DELHI — The Supreme Court of India granted the site of the demolished Babri Masjid to the Hindu parties to build a temple, while ordering that the Muslim litigants be given a 5 acre alternative site to construct a mosque.
For now, the ownership of the 2.77 acres that comprised the mosque’s structure and courtyards shall be give to the government for a period of three months. The government shall use that time to set up a trust of Hindu representatives who shall decide what to do with the land.
The unanimous verdict, delivered by a five judge bench, brings to a close one of the longest running land disputes between Hindus and Muslims in India.
The night before the verdict Prime Minister Narendra Modi had tweeted the verdict will not be a victory or loss for any side, but the fact remains this is a victory for him and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Hindu nationalist party has since the eighties demanded a temple devoted to Hindu god Ram to be built on the exact spot where the Babri Masjid had stood since 1528.
Senior BJP leaders whipped up religious passions to the point of frenzy in the late eighties and early nineties, which eventually led to Hindu mobs demolishing the mosque on 6 December, 1992, located in the temple town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh.
The Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title dispute preceded the demolition by decades, but the destruction of the mosque and the communal violence that followed is inextricably linked to the property case in the minds of most people.
The demolition and subsequent riots plunged India into its darkest period of communal strife since the Partition which displaced 15 million people and left more than a million people dead. It also fundamentally altered Indian electoral politics, offering a platform for Hindu nationalism, which until that time was more of less or confined to an ideology.
In a recent conversation with HuffPost India, BBC’s former bureau chief, Sir William Mark Tully, who was one of the first journalists to report the demolition, spoke of Britain’s role in leaving behind a colonial legacy riddled with religious faultlines that plague India to this day.
Recalling how the UP police did not even attempt to stop the mobs thronging the mosque with sticks, tridents and sickles on the morning of 6 December, 1992, Tully said, “It’s a political religious case. It’s been made an issue by the BJP in order to promote Hindu nationalism. So whether you call it a property dispute or a land dispute, we all know that fundamentally it’s an issue which has been created for political purposes.”
The verdict today was delivered by a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and including one Muslim judge S. Abdul Nazeer.
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