Month: December 2012

By Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett

[This Wall Street Journal investigation is running in serialized form on India Real Time all this week.

Read chapters one, two, three, four and five. In this final chapter, a visit to Ayodhya today and some thoughts on the potency of the dispute to reignite the nation.] 

The road from Faizabad to Ayodhya is thick with bikes, cars, horses, rickshaws, and vegetable stalls. Goats graze in the roadside mud.

Ayodhya itself bears few of the hallmarks of the economic expansion that has transformed other Indian towns and cities. The streets are wide, lined with two- or three-story houses of green, blue and yellow. Narrow lanes lead to ashrams: compounds behind walls where the faithful congregate.

There is no noticeable business development or new construction because, locals say, of the Babri Masjid controversy and the heavy security presence in town. Rather, there is an air of history and decrepit permanence. The tops of temples form the skyline.

“We want schools, hospitals, factories and mills so that the unemployed people get jobs,” said Mohammad Aminullah Khan, 22 years old, who drives a small van for a living. “We want a peaceful resolution to this dispute.”

As they have for centuries, bearded sadhus wander in small groups through town. So do pilgrims, who arrive in throngs for festivals. At the bus depot, sheets of saffron – a color considered holy in Hinduism — hang from buses packed with the aged.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – A street stall in Ayodhya.

Women in saris visit street-side stalls full of the paraphernalia of devotion: small food for offering and sacred threads, bells, and lamps. Cows lope and monkeys scamper through the crowds.

At the main intersections, there are barriers and armed police in brown uniforms, part of an extensive security plan throughout the town.

Down one street there is a large compound of trees, lawns and low buildings. A sign at the entrance reads: “Karsevakpuram,” place of the “karsevaks,” or volunteers. It is run by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the organization that mobilized support for a temple to Lord Ram at the place where many Hindus believe he was born.

Inside the compound, in a small building, is a model of the temple that the VHP wants to build where the Babri Masjid stood before it was demolished on Dec. 6, 1992. Acting as custodian and tour guide is Hajari Lal, the activist who said he climbed on a dome of the mosque before it collapsed that day.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – A painting on the wall at Karsevakpuram.

He leads visitors around the model of “Sri Ram Janma Bhumi Mandir,” the Birthplace Temple. The temple, said Mr. Lal, will have 212 pillars of sandstone and 51,000 electric lights. He added: “We will build a grand temple on the entire land.”

The pillars for the temple lie on the ground at a nearby park, which has become an Ayodhya tourist attraction. Stonemasons chip away at the sandstone, brought from Rajasthan. Some pillars have been lying there for two decades.

Behind an information desk hangs a large poster. It shows a portrait of Guru Dutt Singh. He was the city magistrate of Faizabad who played a major role in installing a statue of Ram in the Babri Masjid on Dec. 22, 1949, according to his son. It is the same picture that hangs in his family’s living room today.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – A stonemason at the pillar park.

Under the portrait, it reads, in Hindi: “The one who on Dec. 23, 1949, showed his determination and courage when Lord Ram appeared in Ramjanmabhoomi,” the Hindu name for the site. It notes that when Mr. Singh was ordered to remove the idol by “the Delhi government that trod on the fatal path of Muslim appeasement,” he resigned instead. “He lives with his immortal legacy among countless Hindus as a result of this courageous work,” it adds. It says Mr. Singh  lived from 1894 till 1971.

Not far away, Mohammad Hashim Ansari, the Muslim tailor who has been involved in the legal dispute over the site since 1950, spends his days in a small blue house across from an open piece of land where there is a 24-hour armed police guard assigned for his protection.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – The police post by Mr. Ansari’s house.

Mr. Ansari, now 92 years old, speaks in angry tones. He points and pokes, staring intently. There is a painting of the Babri Masjid on the wall of his home.

“We have had very dirty politics in our country in the name of mosque and temple,” he said.

**

The central government today controls the site of the ruins of the Babri Masjid and its surroundings. It is protected by a high, yellow, steel fence. On an average day, a few thousand Hindu devotees visit the makeshift temple that was established after the mosque’s destruction in 1992. There has been no provision for Muslim worship at the site since late 1949.

To reach it, you walk into a small portico with a security checkpoint. Scattered around the police there are confiscated wares: pens, notebooks, cameras, lighters. A passageway then runs for about 50 yards beside the yellow perimeter fence. Above is a watchtower and a CCTV camera on a lamppost.

Security personnel, part of a contingent of more than 2000, are posted behind sandbags and concrete barriers. After another security check, you enter a green metal caged walkway, about 10 feet high and four feet wide, with a concrete floor. It is perhaps 200 yards long. After a slight rise, you make a final left turn and a sign announces: “For Viev of the Diety.”

Up a flight of 10 steps, about 15 yards away, behind the flaps of a white tent, you can make out a small, gold-covered object surrounded by lavish curtains. It is the idol of Ram Lalla, the infant god. The tent’s canvas is water-proof, fire-proof and bullet-proof, according to the temple’s head priest. The faithful – women in saris, children, some men, sadhus in saffron – create a small bottleneck as they strain for a glimpse of the statue. Then the walkway leads you away and out.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – The perimeter fence at the Babri Masjid site.

One woman, as she left the site one recent day, asked a policeman: “Where is the temple?”

“What’s important,” he said philosophically, “is not what is seen but what is unseen.”

**

In the political arena, there has been no decisive winner from the dispute.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which championed the construction of a Ram temple in 1989, came to power in New Delhi in successive coalition governments in the late-1990s.

But its coalition partners, uninterested or opposed to the BJP’s position on Ayodhya, made it clear that building a temple was not to be on the agenda. And the party lost the last two general elections, in 2004 and 2009, to the Congress party, headed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s widow, Sonia.

The canvas temple standing at the site today, hastily erected on Dec. 6, 1992, is testament to the fact that the cause of construction hasn’t advanced in two decades.

Neither the BJP nor Congress, which also sought to use the temple movement for electoral gain in the 1980s, has been able to muster a simple majority in Parliament since Ayodhya became a political issue.

In part that’s because the dispute fragmented the electorate, fueling the rise of powerful political alternatives such as the Samajwadi party in Uttar Pradesh and the party of Nitish Kumar, chief minister in the neighboring state of Bihar.

Both have wide support among Muslims, who have become an influential voting bloc, especially in northern India. As a result, the nation will be governed by diverse coalitions in New Delhi for the foreseeable future.

A map of India showing Ayodhya.

Lal Krishna Advani and several other leaders of the BJP and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad are facing trial in a special criminal court on a range of charges brought by the Central Bureau of Investigation, the national investigative agency. The charges include inciting communal violence on the day the mosque was demolished.

Several Hindu activists are also separately facing trial in a criminal court for their alleged involvement in the demolition. A lawyer representing the leaders and the activists says all deny the charges; the cases continue.

Kalyan Singh, the BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh — the state where Ayodhya is located — at the time the Babri Masjid was demolished, resigned when the mosque fell. He became the state’s chief minister again for two years in late 1990s, heading a coalition government.

But the BJP’s overall performance in Uttar Pradesh has declined consistently in the five state elections since the demolition. Today, Mr. Singh is an independent member in the national Parliament. He says he accepts responsibility for the demolition of the mosque.

Nor has a mosque been rebuilt on the site where the Babri Masjid stood. That has angered many Muslims, who blame the Congress party for what they view as ambivalence over the issue stretching back all the way to 1949 when the idol was first installed in the mosque.

Today, as they have since 1949, Hindus remain in control of a place that Muslims have considered sacred for almost 500 years, though many Hindus argue it was sacred to them for thousands of years before that.

**

The 2010 verdict by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court which divided the site of the mosque and the surrounding land into three parts left all litigants dissatisfied.

The Supreme Court in New Delhi admitted their appeals and has ordered the digitization of tens of thousands of documents. The papers, many of which are in Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian, will have to be translated, the court said. There is no indication when hearings may start; a verdict may yet be years away.

Aside from Mohammad Hashim Ansari, the Muslim tailor, all the individual litigants involved in the original filings are dead.

Bhaskar Das remains the legal representative of the Nirmohi Akhara, the sadhus who say they have traditionally protected Ram. He is the third head of the order to represent the sect in the suit. Now 85 years old, he
is suffering from an assortment of medical ailments. He spends his days chanting Ram’s name.

Otherwise, a new generation is taking up the fight.

After the death in 2002 of Deoki Nandan Agarwal, who served as Ram’s “next friend” in one of the Hindu suits, Triloki Nath Pandey, a Vishwa Hindu Parishad activist, became Ram’s new “next friend.”

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal – Triloki Nath Pandey at Karsevakpuram.

“If Muslims have to stay in this country, they have to respect the feelings of Hindus,” Mr. Pandey, 67 years old, said in an interview.

Neelendra Singh, 40 years old, is the son of Rajendra Singh and the grandson of Gopal Singh Visharad, the man who filed the first suit in the legal battle in 1950.

“I plan to represent my father in this case after him but hope the case is decided within my father’s lifetime,” Neelendra Singh said. He works as an insurance agent in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.

Mohammed Waqar, 35 years old, is the son of Haji Mahboob Ahmad and grandson of Haji Phenku, one of the original Muslim defendants.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – Mohammed Waqar, left, with his father.

Mr. Waqar recently returned to Ayodhya from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where he worked for a multinational company. He says he will take up the court case when the time comes.

“As a Muslim, I know what masjid means to me,” he said in an interview.

Meanwhile, Shakti Singh, the grandson of Guru Dutt Singh, the Faizabad city magistrate in 1949, said he hopes to be a Bharatiya Janata Party candidate for Parliament at the next elections, scheduled for 2014.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal – Shakti Singh.

If Mr. Singh, 52 years old, runs for office, he said he will campaign to build a Ram temple at the site: “It’s a responsibility for me to complete the task that my grandfather started.”

As the battle is picked up by a new generation, we asked Swaminathan Gurumurthy, the chartered accountant who was involved in a 1990 effort to negotiate a solution, what he thought Lord Ram would make of the dispute’s seemingly endless spiral.

“It is very simple: Ram will think, ‘This is the way of the world,’” Mr. Gurumurthy said. “He couldn’t do much about it. He can’t correct human nature.”

**

Can Ayodhya again ignite the nation?

Until it is solved one way or the other, the dispute will retain some potency.

Ashok Singhal of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad said in an interview that Hindus could be mobilized to the cause in an instant – then he snapped his fingers on both hands.

Around Ayodhya, communal tensions still flare from time to time. In October in neighboring Faizabad, Hindus and Muslims clashed during the annual Hindu ritual of Dussehra. Two people died, according to the Faizabad district magistrate. One was Hindu, one was Muslim.

Still, India is a very different country today than it was 20 years ago. It is living an era of rapid economic expansion, focusing younger Indians in particular on the pursuit of prosperity rather than historical divisions. Culturally, the country is less hidebound by its past, too.

“We are all in a hurry, particularly the younger generation,” said Arif Mohammed Khan, the minister who resigned from Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1986. “They want India to transform into America at the earliest.”

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

And in a nation of 1.2 billion that is about 80% Hindu, the majority has not consistently run roughshod over Islam or any of India’s other religions – as it could potentially have done given the country’s feeble law-enforcement apparatus and Ayodhya’s appeal to Hindu nationalists.

In 1991, the government enacted a law that made it illegal to change the character of a place of worship to another religion. The act exempted only the Babri Masjid.

The law was a victory for Akshaya Brahmachari, the sadhu who had opposed the installation of the Ram idol in the mosque in 1949. He was instrumental in persuading politicians in New Delhi to bring the legislation. Mr. Brahmachari died in 2010.

That’s not to say that all India’s citizens have equal access to economic, educational or political opportunities. But the movement that at one time aggressively asserted its dominance over a minority community has lost much of its popular appeal and momentum.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal – A street leading to a mosque in Ayodh
ya.

“The country has learned so much, it has gone so beyond these emotions that there will be nothing very serious” whenever the Supreme Court’s verdict over the site comes, said Zafaryab Jilani, the lead lawyer for Muslims in the court case. “It will be the country which will win; it will be the country which will lose, if at all.”

In that, India’s secular nature has, for now, prevailed. That required many Hindus to reject the inflammatory and divisive nature of the Ayodhya dispute, either out of fatigue, disillusionment with politicians, or a sense — set deep in the religion’s spiritual traditions — that it is wrong to destroy another’s house of worship.

“The soul of India was retrieved by the Hindus who refused to go along with the desecration of this place of worship that was not in their own community,” said Mani Shankar Aiyar, Rajiv Gandhi’s special assistant. “For Hindus, all places of worship are divine.”

**

Every day, a small team of priests at the makeshift temple cares for the idol of Ram Lalla and other statues that have been added since 1949.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – A replica of Ram Lalla, dressed.

The first priest arrives at around 5:30 a.m. He opens the temple curtain then chants, “Gods, wake up, wake up!” He rings a small bell and puts the idols in a sitting position.

He changes their overnight clothes, bathes them with flower perfume, water and sandalwood, and dresses them. There is clothing of different colors for each day. He places a tilak, or holy mark, on their foreheads then a silver crown on their heads before offering them sacred smoke from burning incense sticks. After, he presents them with a breakfast of “peda,” a sweet made of milk. Lamps are lit. Hymns are sung.

A few hours later, Mahant Satyendra Das, the chief priest, leaves his house and is driven in an SUV to the site. He bows at the temple’s entrance and gently touches the floor of the wooden platform where the idols sit. He takes some sandalwood, adds a dab of water, and puts a mark on his own forehead.

He lights incense and waves the stick in a circular motion around the idols, singing: “From the heart of God is the moon, the sun is from His eyes, the wind and the life are from His ears and the fire is from His mouth.”

He chants silently until more food is brought for the deities. Then the idols have a 90-minute nap.

Shortly after sunset, another priest offers evening food and puts the deities to sleep. He places them horizontally and removes their crowns. He gives them cotton pillows to rest on and tucks them in under small blankets.

Then the priest draws the curtain closed.

—The End—

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – The temples of Ayodhya today.

By Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett

[This Wall Street Journal narrative investigation is running in serialized form. A new chapter will be posted each morning this week on India Real Time. Read chapters one, two, three and four. In chapter five, the litigants, after four decades, have their day in court and the site of the Babri Masjid is excavated, a decade after it was demolished in 1992.]

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 happ
ened 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.

A map of India showing Ayodhya

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.

**

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

The Wall Street Journal/Court Files – Excavation work at the Babri Masjid site in 2003.

By Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett

[This Wall Street Journal story is running in serialized form. A new chapter will be posted each morning this week on India Real Time. Read chapters one, two and three.]

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.

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.

A map of India showing Ayodhya

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.

Mahendra Tripathi/The Wall Street Journal – Hindu activists atop the Babri Masjid on Dec. 6, 1992.

By Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett

[This Wall Street Journal investigation is running in serialized form. A new chapter will be posted each morning this week on India Real Time. Read chapters one and two.]

In the 1980s, the Ayodhya dispute escalated from a local issue to a national one. It fed, and was fed by, other points of tension in Indian politics and society that set Hindus and Muslims on a collision course over the span of the decade.

Each side came to feel that its religion and status in India was under threat – and both sides responded with political pressure and shows of force.

It started in 1981 in Meenakshipuram, an unremarkable village deep in the countryside of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, more than 2,000 kilometers from Ayodhya.

The village hit the national news when its low-caste Hindus – about 400 families, villagers say — converted, en masse, to Islam.

“We became Muslims to become equal,” said 65-year-old N. Hidayathullah, one of the converts, in an interview on the porch of his modest home, as a herd of goats wandered by.

The families had felt ill-treated by local upper-caste Hindus, he said. “Nobody told us to convert; it was our desire to be treated with respect,” he added.

**

 

Vishwa Hindu Parishad – Sadhus during the 1984 dharma sansad 

At stake was more than belief: In India, how you worship defines your community, most likely your marriage and whom you vote for, your approach to life, and your identity.

In 1984, Hindu leaders responded to what they viewed as the threat of Islam emanating from the Meenakshipuram conversion.

About 500 sadhus — Hindu holy men — from across India gathered at Vigyan Bhavan, a government-owned conference center in New Delhi. They comprised a “dharma sansad,” or religious parliament.

The meeting was put together by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a conservative Hindu organization founded in the 1960s. The chief organizer was Ashok Singhal, then the VHP’s joint general secretary.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal – Ashok Singhal today

The son of a government official in Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, Mr. Singhal graduated with a degree in metallurgical engineering from Banaras Hindu University in 1950. Now 86 years old, he has worked to promote Hindu causes ever since. “Our culture is under siege,” he said in an interview at the VHP’s offices in New Delhi.

The religious parliament began with a song by a group of musicians. “This country’s soil is sacred,” they sang, according to a later account of the event published by the VHP. “Every girl is an image of a goddess, every boy is Ram.”

After a sadhu blew a conch shell, speeches began. Among the speakers was Karan Singh, a former minister in Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s cabinet. At the time, he was an independent member of Parliament. Courtly and soft-spoken, he is the son of the last Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir.

Mr. Singh was the founder of an organization to espouse the values of universal brotherhood and human welfare contained in the Vedas and Upanishads, Hindu sacred texts. He formed it in direct response to the events of Meenakshipuram, he said in an interview in the book-lined study of his Delhi mansion.

The mass conversion to Islam “was, first of all, a clear statement that the way Hinduism was functioning is not acceptable to a large number of people,” Mr. Singh said. At the time, the message was: “People are leaving because we are not following our principles.”

At the religious conference, Mr. Singh spoke about the need to reconnect individual life and politics with the tenets of Hinduism, and to rid society of the dowry system and the stigma of “untouchability” that relegated lower-caste Hindus to an underclass, according to the VHP’s account of the event. He also rued the fact that Hindu holy sites had been neglected.

Vishwa Hindu Parishad – Karan Singh, at the center, during 1984 dharma sansad.

“We cannot even light a holy lamp” at Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya, he told the sadhus. “How shameful a matter is it for 80% of this country’s residents who call themselves Hindus?”

The gathering issued a code of conduct for individuals, families and society. Its code for the country’s statesmen included the demand that three important holy sites be “given back to Hindu society.”

The Babri Masjid, the mosque in Ayodhya that many Hindus claimed was Lord Ram’s birthplace – “Ram Janmabhoomi” in Hindi — was top of the list.

Ram appealed to Hindus of all castes: one story recounted in the Ramayan, the text about his life, has him happily eating berries given to him by a lower-caste woman.

A few months after the religiou
s parliament, the VHP followed up with a rally for devotees led by a motorized chariot. Hindu scripture says Ram rode a chariot into battle.

The rally started at Sitamarhi in Bihar in late September 1984. The district is believed by Hindus to be the place where Sita, Ram’s wife, emerged from the earth.

Vishwa Hindu Parishad – The 1984 rally from Sitamarhi to Ayodhya.

Thousands of the faithful joined the procession, which reached Ayodhya 12 days later. There, they descended to the banks of the Sarayu river, cupped its water in their palms and, according to several participants, took an oath.

The crowd totaled about 50,000 that day, according to Mr. Singhal of the VHP, who was among them. Similar oath-taking ceremonies were held at major rivers around the country.

The Hindus at the Sarayu that day wanted to go further than keeping a tiny statue of Ram inside the Babri Masjid. They wanted to build a house of worship where Ram sat: “We will give up everything to build Lord Ram’s temple at his birthplace,” they swore, according to several people who took part.

The organizers say they were surprised by the number of supporters. “People found that this is an agitation which will be successful,” Mr. Singhal said. “Such a large number of people came from small villages to witness and join the movement.”

A day later, the chariot started rolling again. But its journey was interrupted when, on Oct. 31, 1984, Mrs. Gandhi, the prime minister and Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, was shot dead at her New Delhi home by two Sikh bodyguards.

Soon, Ayodhya would become a defining issue for the country’s new leader: Mrs. Gandhi’s 40-year-old son, Rajiv.

**

Rajiv Gandhi was a political beginner. Eschewing politics, he worked as a pilot for Indian Airlines and married an Italian, Sonia Maino.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

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

He was elected as a member of Parliament in 1981, following the death of his younger brother, Sanjay, in a plane crash. Soon after Mr. Gandhi succeeded his mother, he called for national elections. His Congress party won the biggest Parliamentary majority in India’s electoral history.

Mr. Gandhi brought the promise of a new kind of Indian leader. He was young and interested in promoting technology. Within months, however, he was deeply embroiled in the historical tussle between Muslims and Hindus and the sense of victimhood that both sides felt.

The catalyst was a case brought by a Muslim woman called Shah Bano. She had been divorced by her husband several years before and was left destitute. She asked the Supreme Court to force her ex-husband to pay maintenance.

In the spring of 1985, the Supreme Court ruled in her favor, citing the provisions against destitution in Indian criminal law that applied to all Indians.

Prominent members of the Muslim clergy viewed the ruling as a threat to Islamic law, which had long governed their personal matters. It does not require the equivalent of alimony. But the justices had ordered a divorced man to pay maintenance.

At first, Rajiv Gandhi backed the verdict. Arif Mohammed Khan, a Muslim and minister in Mr. Gandhi’s government, made a long speech in Parliament in praise of the ruling.

In an interview, Mr. Khan said he did so at the prime minister’s request. Afterward, he received a note from Mr. Gandhi, he said, which congratulated him on a “wonderful performance” and a “great speech.”

But the Muslim clergy protested, heaping pressure on the prime minister. They demanded he counter the verdict through an act of Parliament. “The Muslim clergy found this as an opportunity to mobilize the Muslims and project themselves,” said Mr. Khan.

Mr. Gandhi succumbed and started preparations for a law that would effectively overturn the Supreme Court ruling.

But he also wanted to find a way to mollify Hindu outrage over the Muslim protests and to counter anticipated Hindu claims that Muslims were being appeased by the government, said Mr. Khan.

The prime minister, he said, found his answer in a court case in Faizabad, the city next to Ayodhya.

The case sought to have the lock removed on the main gate of the Babri Masjid, granting greater public access to the idol that had been sitting in seclusion under the central dome for almost four decades.

Mr. Gandhi’s calculation, Mr. Khan said, was that the Hindu focus on the Shah Bano case “will be redirected to Ayodhya.”

**

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal – Umesh Chandra Pandey at his residence in Lucknow.

Umesh Chandra Pandey filed the petition to open the lock in late January 1986. He was a 30-year-old lawyer and occasional journalist who then lived in Faizabad.

His interest in the issue had begun three years earlier, when the editor of a local Hindi newspaper asked him to write a feature on the festival commemorating Ram’s birthday, Mr. Pandey and the editor said in interviews.

Mr. Pandey said he also heard leaders from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad claiming that there never had been an official order to lock the Babri Masjid gate.

“I though
t, ‘If this is so, then how has this lock been put there?’” he said.

Adding drama and urgency, a prominent sadhu had threatened to set himself ablaze if the lock was not removed, according to Mr. Pandey and other accounts. Other sadhus threatened to get themselves arrested by trying to unlock the gate themselves, according to the VHP’s Mr. Singhal.

Mr. Pandey, a short man who speaks in emphatic phrases, said he spent a couple of weeks examining court papers. He came to the conclusion that there had never been a formal order putting the lock in place, he said. (Priests who cared for the idols in the building entered through a side gate.)

Soon after Mr. Pandey filed his petition, he found out that a copy had been sent to the state agency in charge of internal security, he said.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – Arif Mohammed Khan

The petition also attracted the interest of Rajiv Gandhi and Arun Nehru, a cousin of Mr. Gandhi’s and a powerful adviser to the prime minister, according to Arif Mohammed Khan, the government minister at the time.

Mr. Gandhi and Mr. Nehru wanted to ensure that the petition succeeded so Hindus would feel assuaged, Mr. Khan said. The prime minister asked Mr. Nehru to coordinate the government’s participation in the case, including dealing with the state government of Uttar Pradesh, Mr. Khan said.

Other officials from the time say Mr. Nehru, the adviser, was the more influential in seizing on the issue and the prime minister acquiesced. Yet others say Mr. Gandhi was unaware of what was happening.

Either way, said Mr. Khan: “The buck stops at the door of the prime minister” as the head of the government.

When asked about the episode in a brief telephone conversation, Mr. Nehru responded: “That’s none of your damn business.”

The government ensured that two senior local officials appeared – unusually — before the judge, rather than submitting affidavits, Mr. Khan said. They testified that law and order could be maintained if the lock was removed, a key consideration in the judge’s deliberations.

Mushtaq Ahmad Siddiqui, one of the lawyers representing Muslims in their legal claims to the Babri Masjid site, said he also asked to be heard before the judge.

“You may, there is no hurry,” he said the judge responded. “The matter is continuing for 36 years – you will be allowed sufficient time.” He was referring to the fact that litigation over the site had begun in 1950.

On the afternoon of Feb. 1, 1986, the judge ruled there had been no official order that placed the lock on the mosque’s gate. He ordered the lock opened “forthwith,” according to witnesses. The judge is now deceased.

Within 30 minutes, a senior police officer in Ayodhya broke the lock. A camera crew from Doordarshan, the government-run television channel, was there. The event was broadcast to the nation.

Mr. Pandey, the man who filed the petition, said he couldn’t sleep that night. The next morning, he went to the site.

“I was without words,” he said. “But I was thankful to God that I was able to look and to offer my prayer.”

The gate opening was the first that millions of Hindus had heard of Ayodhya and the battle over Ram’s birthplace. It energized them en masse because Ram was a role model. Grandmothers told their grandsons to aspire to be like him: obedient to their parents, faithful to their family, honest in their dealings.

Mani Shankar Aiyer – Rajiv Gandhi, right, in an undated photo with Mani Shankar Aiyer.

Rajiv Gandhi received the news during a visit to the Maldives, according to Mani Shankar Aiyar, his speechwriter at the time.

In the hours before a state banquet, the prime minister was putting the finishing touches on his formal dress and on his speech when he received a telephone call, Mr. Aiyar said in an interview. Mr. Gandhi was told the lock was opened, Mr. Aiyar said.

The lock opening quickly took on a mystical aspect. Mr. Pandey claimed that on the afternoon of the decision, a monkey sat on the roof of the Faizabad court house. A monkey was symbolic because Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, was a loyal friend of Ram.

The animal, unusually for a monkey, sat still for more than 30 minutes, Mr. Pandey said. Then, when the judge issued his order, the monkey walked to the flagpole on the courthouse roof and touched the Indian flag, according to Mr. Pandey. “I don’t think this can happen without the Almighty’s permission,” he added.

**

The lock opening shocked Muslim elders and lawyers who had been following the Ayodhya dispute because they saw in it a threat to their mosque and to their religion. They gathered the next day in an orphanage in Delhi.

“Today, it appears we have become second-class citizens,” said one elder, close to tears, according to two people who were there.

The leaders worried that the next step would be the Babri Masjid’s destruction.

On Feb. 3, 1986, two days after the lock was opened, a small group of Muslim lawyers petitioned the high court in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, to order that nothing more happen to the site, according to two of the lawyers.

The judge issued a notice that the “status quo” be maintained.

Zafaryab Jilani – Zafaryab Jilani in the mid-1980s

Zafaryab Jilani, one of the lawyers, was then just shy of his 36^th birthday. The lock opening would vault him to the forefront of the Muslim movement seeking to retain the Babri Masjid site for Islam.

Born in a town close to Lucknow, Mr. Jilani pursued his legal studies at Aligarh Muslim University.

There, he gained his first experience in organizing protests. He said he was part of a small group that, in 1970, led students in opposing government plans to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the school’s incorporation by an act of Parliament.

The students were angry about previous government measures that stopped Muslims from being the sole administrators of the university. Faced with the protests, the government scrapped the golden jubilee festivities and, ultimately, undid the administrative changes.

After the Babri Masjid lock opening, Mr. Jilani started organizing protests again.

He and a handful of associates called meetings of prominent local Muslims; it included one gathering of about 200 in a hall in Lucknow, Mr. Jilani said in an interview.

They created the Babri Masjid Action Committee to organize public strikes and demonstrations– and to push back against what the leaders viewed as Hindu aggression.

On Feb. 7, 1986, Mr. Jilani said he and about eight others met the then-chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Vir Bahadur Singh. The chief minister denied any involvement in the lock opening, Mr. Jilani said.

“I haven’t done it. Whatever has been done, it is at the behest of some other leaders, top leaders,” Mr. Jilani said the chief minister told them. Mr. Singh died a few years later.

A week after that meeting, the new committee held its first event: a “Black Day,” or state-wide public strike, Mr. Jilani said. Later, tens of thousands protested in Lucknow and other cities.

**

In May 1986, the government used its huge majority in Parliament to push through a law that effectively reversed the Shah Bano ruling and made it clear Muslim personal law would prevail.

Mr. Gandhi’s supporters say the prime minister was only trying to clarify that matters of Muslim personal law would be governed by Islam, as they had been for decades.

The law’s passage cemented the idea among many Hindus that the government was kowtowing to Muslims. Muslim leaders, on the other hand, were angry about the lock opening. The prime minister’s plan to do something to mollify both sides had gone awry.

Arif Mohammed Khan, the minister who had supported the Shah Bano ruling, resigned from the government. He recalled that Mr. Gandhi said to him at the time: “The situation is such that I am feeling very helpless.”

And, as Mr. Gandhi’s grandfather, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, had feared in 1950, the new prominence of the Babri Masjid dispute complicated the delicate political equation in the late 1980s in Kashmir, the Himalayan region fought over by India and Pakistan.

Militants who favored a separate country of Kashmir used the opening of the lock on the mosque to rebuke Indian Muslims who favored embracing India’s secularism and democracy.

The militants said, according to Mr. Jilani: “Your government is not sincere with you, how do you expect that government to be sincere with us?”

Tomorrow: The last chances at a settlement slip away.