By Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett

[This Wall Street Journal investigation is being published in serialized form. A new chapter will be posted each morning this week on India Real Time. Click here to read chapter one and three.] 

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s prime minister, was greatly perturbed by an idol of Lord Ram being placed in a mosque.

 

Staff/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images – Jawaharlal Nehru, left, with U.S. President Harry Truman.

Polished, intellectual and skeptical of religion, Nehru was trying to propel the nation into an era of modern socialism and scientific thinking. But the events in Ayodhya forced him to grapple anew with the centuries-long friction between Hindus and Muslims – and to try to counter the spreading belief that a deity had materialized in the dead of night.

“I am disturbed at developments at Ayodhya,” Nehru said in a telegram on Dec. 26, 1949, to Govind Ballabh Pant, chief minister of United Provinces, which roughly included what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh. “Earnestly hope you will personally interest yourself in this matter. Dangerous example being set there which will have bad consequences.”

The provincial government wanted the statue removed. K.K. Nayar, the district magistrate in Faizabad, who also oversaw Ayodhya, refused. He wrote to a provincial official that removing the idol was “fraught with the gravest danger to public peace” and would lead to a “conflagration of horror,” according a copy of his correspondence.

Around that time, Guru Dutt Singh, the city magistrate, resigned. His son, Guru Basant Singh, said his father quit because “his work was done” and the idol’s installation, which Mr. Singh helped plan, had succeeded.

Local Hindus added religious items to the mosque: more idols; six black ammonite stones; a small silver throne; brass utensils for worship; and clothes for the deity, according to an official list compiled later.

Muslims weren’t welcome. Mohammad Hashim Ansari, a local tailor, headed to the Babri Masjid with a few others the morning after the idol of Ram was installed, said Mr. Ansari and another local Muslim who was there. The police stopped them at the gate. The Muslims returned home, they said.

Nehru kept pushing. In early January, he wrote again to Mr. Pant. The chief minister called him soon after.

Mr. Pant “intended taking action, but he wanted to get some well-known Hindus to explain the situation to people in Ayodhya first,” Nehru wrote in a separate letter to the governor-general of India dated Jan. 7, 1950.

Weeks passed. The idol stayed.

The Wall Street Journal/Court Files – The idols installed in the Babri Masjid in 1949, shown in a photo taken in 1950.

The discord in Ayodhya threatened Nehru’s desire for India to be a democracy in which all beliefs were equally respected. He also feared that it would have repercussions “on all-India affairs and more especially Kashmir,” the disputed territory between India and the newly-created Pakistan, he wrote to Mr. Pant on Feb. 5, 1950.

Nehru added that he would be willing to make the 600-kilometer trip from Delhi to Ayodhya himself. But, he also noted, “I am terribly busy.”

Nehru didn’t make the trip. By March, he was sounding defeated as local officials continued to balk at removing the idol.

“This event occurred two or three months ago and I have been very gravely perturbed over it,” he wrote in a letter to K.G. Mashruwala, an associate of Mahatma Gandhi.

Nehru lamented that many in his Congress party had become “communal” toward Pakistan and India’s Muslims. “I just do not know what we can do to create a better atmosphere in the country,” he wrote.

In 1952, Nehru visited Uttar Pradesh to campaign for Mr. Pant in an election, according to a person who heard him speak. He told the crowd, in Hindi, “The Ayodhya event has put me to shame,” this person said.

**

In January 1950, a decades-long legal battle began between Ayodhya’s Hindus and Muslims over the site of the Babri Masjid. The first case was filed by a Hindu , Gopal Singh Visharad, in the Victorian Gothic district court building in neighboring Faizabad.

Mr. Singh Visharad – “Visharad” denotes expertise in Hindu scripture — was a lawyer who had moved to Ayodhya because he wanted to live in a Hindu holy place, according to his son, Rajendra. Rajendra was the schoolboy who witnessed Abhiram Das, the sadhu, spreading the word on the morning of Dec. 23, 1949, that Ram had appeared in the mosque.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal – The house where Gopal Singh Visharad lived in Ayodhya.

A stern-looking man with a broad nose and a thick moustache, Mr. Singh Visharad, then 42 years old, was the Ayodhya secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, a conservative Hindu political party that opposed Nehru’s Congress.  He was close to Mr. Nayar
, the district magistrate,  and Guru Dutt Singh, the city magistrate, according to  Rajendra Singh.

Mr. Singh Visharad had celebrated the appearance of the Ram Lalla idol and worshipped at the site for a few days, his son said. But when he went there on  Jan.14, 1950, the police stopped him at the gate.

By then, another local magistrate had already issued an order seizing the building.  A receiver was named and the place was locked for devotees. As an interim arrangement, the receiver appointed a small team of priests to attend daily to the statue of Ram Lalla at the site because it was, after all, a deity that needed feeding, bathing, and clothing, according to Hindu ritual.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Singh claimed the right to worship the deity in the building “without any obstruction whatever” and  asked for a “temporary injunction” to prevent government officials from removing the idols.

The judge granted the injunction but didn’t rule on the question of his right to worship.

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

The next day, Anisur Rahman, a Muslim about 30 years old, filed a court petition of his own — the first Muslim legal volley in the dispute. Mr. Rahman made tin boxes that he sold from a shop in the local market in Ayodhya. He lived with his family close to the Babri Masjid.

Weeks before the idol was installed, he had sent messages to district officials that he saw “imminent danger” to the mosque from the sadhus gathered around it, according to the official records of Mr. Nayar, the district magistrate.

Mr. Nayar had dismissed Mr. Rahman as an “exception” among Muslims in Ayodhya whom, he wrote, “are far from agitated,” according to the records.

Petitioning the High Court in Allahabad, a major city in the state, Mr. Rahman sought to have any cases claiming title to the site of the Babri Masjid heard by a court outside Ayodhya and Faizabad.

He claimed that “in view of the highly strained relations between the two communities and also district authorities not being free from communal bias,” there was no prospect of a fair hearing around Ayodhya.

He also noted in an affidavit that district authorities had done nothing to help Muslims take back their mosque after the idol was installed. Instead, they had seized the building.

Mr. Rahman’s effort was countered by about 20 Muslims from Ayodhya, who signed identical affidavits in a local courtroom.

They said they had no objection if the Hindus continued to possess the Babri Masjid. “Babri Masjid has been built by demolishing Ram birthplace temple,” they said. “It’s against the Islamic law to pray there,” the affidavits said.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal – Farooq Ahmad, the shopkeeper who remembers Anisur Rahman.

Mr. Rahman’s petition was dismissed. Muslim lawyers today doubt the authenticity of the Muslims’ affidavits.

Mr. Rahman sold his shop. Sometime in the early 1950s, he migrated with his family to Pakistan, according to several local Muslims. His descendants could not be traced.

A Muslim shopkeeper in Ayodhya recalled Mr. Rahman telling him, before leaving: “We don’t get any justice here. Nobody helps us.”

In late 1950, a mercurial sadhu filed a similar court case to Gopal Singh Visharad’s. He was a member of Ayodhya’s famous Digambar Akhara, a group of Hindu holy men devoted to Ram.

Both Hindu suits named five local Muslim men as defendants, alleging they had put pressure on local government officials to remove the idols by making “baseless and dishonest assertions.”

The most prominent among the defendants was Haji Phenku, one of Ayodhya’s biggest property owners at the time.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – The Faizabad District Court.

At court, Mr. Phenku, then 65 years old, and the other Muslims refuted the allegations, according to legal papers. They also claimed that the Babri Masjid had been used by the Muslims as a mosque ever since it was built in 1528. They said no Hindu temple existed at the site before the construction of the mosque.

Mr. Phenku boarded a horse cart at his residence at least once a month to travel from Ayodhya to the courthouse, about 10 kilometers away, said his son, Haji Mahboob Ahmad, in an interview.

When Mr. Phenku returned home, he recounted his experience, often with frustration. “The judge again adjourned the hearing and asked us to appear on the next date,” Mr. Phenku said repeatedly, according to his son.

Gopal Singh Visharad, the lead Hindu petitioner, regularly cycled to court. He was resigned to the fact that it would be a prolonged dispute because he believed the government didn’t want to deal with the implications of a verdict, according to his son.

The hearings dragged on, with little progress, for nine years. Then, in 1959, another suit was filed by a sect of sadhus known as the Nirmohi Akhara.

The name means “Group Without Attachment,” a reference to the fact that the 12,000 sadhus it claims as members have abandoned the material world for the company of their deity, Ram. The sect had tried, in the late 19^th century, to build a temple near the mosque but had been prevented by the court.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal – Bhaskar Das.

Bhaskar Das is the head of the sect. Now in his mid-80s, he is a thin man and an imposing sight. His wrinkled head is shaved close with a longer outcropping of hair knotted in a tail at the back. A Y-shaped pattern of white paint, accentuated with vermillion stripes, starts at the bridge of his nose and runs in two lines up his forehead.

Mr. Das came to Ayodhya in 1946 to learn Sanskrit at the age of 18. Soon after, he visited an idol of Ram located on the wooden platform where Hindus worshipped in the outer courtyard of the Babri Masjid. The Nirmohi Akhara maintained the platform.

“I felt belongingness with Lord Ram” and decided to lead the life of a sadhu, Mr. Das said in an interview at the sect’s ashram in Faizabad, a collection of four-story white buildings off a street clogged with traffic.

In its 1959 petition, the group claimed that Ram’s birthplace “has been existing before the living memory of man.”

It also claimed that the Babri Masjid building had never been a mosque but had been a temple since ancient times and was rightfully the possession of the Nirmohi Akhara. The suit was added to the others.

Two years later, in December 1961, representatives of the local Muslim community responded.

Leading the case was the Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Board of Waqfs, a body created by Indian law to be responsible for the protection and preservation of “waqfs,” or Muslim religious and cultural sites.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal – Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Board of Waqfs.

It listed Mohammad Hashim Ansari, the tailor, and other Ayodhya Muslims as co-petitioners.

The board, based in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, claimed that the Babri Masjid was registered with it as a public mosque and is “vested in the Almighty.”

In 1964, the court consolidated all four suits – of Gopal Singh Visharad; the sadhu from the Digambar Akhara; the Nirmohi Akhara, and the waqf board.

The litigants became used to the delays that plague India’s court system today. It took 17 years to settle on the appointment of a new receiver at the Babri Masjid site after the death of the first receiver.

In court, the judge would listen for about 15 minutes, set a date for the next hearing, and adjourn, according to two people involved in the case.

“Many judges came and went but the case was not decided,” said Haji Mahboob Ahmad, 74 years old. He replaced his father, Haji Phenku, as the defendant in one of the Hindu suits after his father died in 1960.

**

Singh family Guru Dutt Singh, left, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Guru Dutt Singh and K.K. Nayar – the administrators who were instrumental in the idol’s placement — turned to politics. They played no further direct role in the Ayodhya dispute.

Mr. Singh joined the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a  Hindu nationalist party, within six months of resigning his administrative post. The party was founded by a former president of the Hindu Mahasabha, the first conservative Hindu party in India.

In the 1951 national election, the Jana Sangh won three seats in Parliament, compared with 364 seats won by Nehru’s Congress party. Mr. Singh became the Jana Sangh’s district chief  in Faizabad, said his son.

A photo from the late 1960s in the reception room of the family’s Faizabad residence shows Guru Dutt Singh with a young Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then national president of the Jana Sangh and later prime minister of India.

Mr. Nayar was transferred to another post in early 1950. He took voluntary retirement in 1952.  He settled in Faizabad and joined the Jana Sangh with his wife. In 1967, he was elected to the national Parliament from a constituency near Ayodhya.

**

Among the sadhus of Ayodhya, the idol’s installation was overwhelmingly supported.

Akshaya Brahmachari, the young sadhu who had opposed the move, argued with others that “all Ayodhya is Ram’s birthplace,” according to his disciple, Meera Behen, and others who knew him. He asked: “Why do you diminish His glory by putting him in a mosque?”

He was assaulted and banished from the sadhus’ fraternity. He went to Lucknow and sat on a series of fasts from Jan. 30, 1950, in a bid to press the government to remove the idol. But a state government minister responded that, “Ayodhya’s situation is better now and the case is pending in a court of law at the moment. The final decision can be taken only after a judgment from the court.”

Abhiram Das, the sadhu who championed installing Ram in the mosque, organized festivals to commemorate the event.

Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal Mohammad Hashim Ansari.

One pamphlet printed by him in December 1953 exhorted Ayodhya’s residents to participate in a reading of the Ramayan, the Hindu holy text, at the site. Another pamphlet mentions him as the “savior” of Ram’s birthplace.

Hindu control of the site and the lack of action by the courts frustrated Ayodhya’s Muslims.  Moha
mmad Hashim Ansari, the tailor, said that in 1954 he and about 100 local Muslim men sought permission to offer prayers at the site. It was denied.

When they tried to force themselves into the mosque, they were arrested and spent two months in jail, Mr. Ansari later testified in court.

**

Tomorrow: An incident 2,000 kilometers away catapults the dispute in Ayodhya onto the national stage.

By Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett

[This Wall Street Journal investigation is being published in serialized form. A new chapter will be posted each morning this week on India Real Time. Click here to read chapter two and three.]

Our story begins in 1949, two years after India became an independent nation following centuries of rule by Mughal emperors and then the British.

What happened back then in the dead of night in a mosque in a northern Indian town came to define the new nation, and continues to shape the world’s largest democracy today.

The legal and political drama that ensued, spanning six decades, has loomed large in the terms of five prime ministers. It has made and broken political careers, exposed the limits of the law in grappling with matters of faith, and led to violence that killed thousands. And, 20 years ago this week, Ayodhya was the scene of one of the worst incidents of inter-religious brutality in India’s history.

On a spiritual level, it is a tale of efforts to define the divine in human terms.

Ultimately, it poses for every Indian a question that still lingers as the country aspires to a new role as an international economic power: Are we a Hindu nation, or a nation of many equal religions?

CHAPTER ONE

The Sarayu river winds its way from the Nepalese border across the plains of north India. Not long before its churning gray waters meet the mighty Ganga, it flows past the town of Ayodhya.

In 1949, as it is today, Ayodhya was a quiet town of temples, narrow byways, wandering cows and the ancient, mossy walls of ashrams and shrines.

The town’s residents included both Muslims and Hindus. But most noticeable were the Hindu holy men known as sadhus, with painted foreheads, long beards and loose robes. They flocked there, as they do today.

Copyright: The British Library Board

Details of an 18th century painting of Ayodhya.

Hindu scriptures say Ayodhya is the birthplace of Lord Ram, making it one of the religion’s holiest places. (Ayodhya means “unconquerable” in Sanskrit.)

Among the sadhus, back then, was Abhiram Das, a muscular priest with a strong voice, a severe visage and a quick temper, according to two of his surviving disciples. In his mid-40s, he had arrived in the town 15 years before from the countryside of Bihar, to the east, they say.

He revered Ram. And, his disciples say, he made it his mission to restore Ram to the exact place he believed the god had been born: a site then occupied by a mosque called the Babri Masjid.

The mosque was named after the Mughal ruler, Babar, whose troops had built it more than 400 years before. Inside, the mosque had space for about 90 people to pray, according to two elderly Muslims in Ayodhya. Verses of the Koran were written on the walls inside. On the  minbar, or pulpit, under the central dome was inscribed in Persian: “Place for the angels to descend.”

The complex had two courtyards, ringed by a perimeter wall and separated by a wall with a railing. In the outer courtyard was a small wooden platform with an idol of Ram where Hindus worshipped.

A map of India showing Ayodhya.

Abhiram Das wanted to establish Ram inside the building itself. He was not alone in his quest: a movement of sadhus dedicated to that goal was gathering momentum.

They claimed the mosque had been built from the ruins of an ancient temple to the Hindu god, which Muslims disputed. The site had been an occasional flashpoint for violence between the two communities in the past.

Abhiram Das told his disciples that he had a recurring dream that Ram made an appearance under the building’s central dome, the two disciples said.

One day in mid-1949, the sadhu repeated his vision to the city magistrate in neighboring Faizabad, the city which oversees the administration of Ayodhya.

His words immediately struck a chord with the magistrate, Guru Dutt Singh, according to an account given by Mr. Singh’s son, Guru Basant Singh. Mr. Singh’s reply, his son said: “Brother, this is my old dream. You are having it now; I am having it for a long time.”

The two men started to talk about how a statue of a young Ram might be surreptitiously put in a Muslim place of worship, Mr. Singh’s son said.

The use of idols marks one of the great differences between Hinduism and Islam. Islam strictly prohibits idol worship because God, to its followers, is an invisible and indivisible entity. Hinduism holds that God can exist in many forms and devotees worship idols as mediums to God. So a statue of Ram itself would be a deity.

There are various versions of what transpired a few weeks later. Many Hindus have come to believe that it was a miracle. Mr. Singh’s son, speaking in detail for the first time about those events, said it was, rather, a carefully-planned plot to return Ram, in the view of his father and Abhiram Das, to the deity’s place of birth.

**

At the time, India as a country was only two years old, its promise as a fle
dgling democracy challenged by the fact that it was rent in two – geographically, demographically, socially, emotionally — by the Partition that created the Muslim nation of Pakistan in the territory’s northwest and northeast.

The migration of many Muslims to Pakistan consolidated the Hindu majority in the new India. Muslims comprised 24.4% of India’s population in 1941; they were down to 10% of post-Partition India a decade later, according to census data.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, was striving to stabilize the new country. He was determined to establish India as a secular nation that respected the religious beliefs, or lack of them, of all its citizens.

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

“All of us, to whatever religion we may belong are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations,” he said in a message to the nation when India became independent on Aug. 15, 1947.

Still, many Hindus felt aggrieved about Pakistan’s creation and the choice given to Muslims to move or stay. They used a term that would be repeated countless times over the following decades: Muslim “appeasement.”

Even within Nehru’s Indian National Congress party, there were many who supported the drive to make India a Hindu-dominated country. Some in Congress were actively involved in the formation of the All India Hindu Mahasabha, a conservative Hindu political party, several years before.

The party opposed the creation of Pakistan and blamed Congress for it. The man who killed Mahatma Gandhi in early 1948, Nathuram Godse, was an activist of the Hindu Mahasabha. He was hanged in November 1949.

Partition had little effect in Ayodhya, though. Many Muslims stayed, maintaining a cultural mix that had existed for hundreds of years.

Muslim artisans made many of the idols that Hindu devotees worshipped in the temples. Hindu priests bought clothes and flowers for temple statues from Muslim vendors. One temple in Ayodhya even had a Muslim manager.

“Why would we leave our country?” said Mohammad Hashim Ansari, a local tailor, who was then in his late 20s. “We belong to this land.”

**

Guru Dutt Singh, the Faizabad city magistrate, was tall and obstinate, with a neatly-trimmed moustache. He graduated from Allahabad University in what was then the United Provinces; today, it is in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

He joined the Provincial Civil Services but, his son said, refused to kowtow to his colonial masters. He insisted on wearing a self-fashioned turban in contrast to the hats favored by the British.

Singh Family

Guru Dutt Singh, Faizabad city magistrate in 1949.

During a posting to Bareilly, when he first met one of his superiors, Michael Nethersole, the British man asked him: “Why don’t you wear a hat?”

“Why don’t you wear Indian headgear?” Mr. Singh retorted, according to his son.

Yet Mr. Singh also demanded respect for rank: He scolded his son for cheekily referring to Mr. Nethersole, as “Leather Sole” because “He is, after all, a district magistrate,” his son recalled being told. Mr. Nethersole’s descendants couldn’t be traced.

In his duties, which included preventing riots, Mr. Singh sought to be even-handed about religion, his son said. At times, he told Hindus that he would lock them up if they created trouble.

At other times, he called Muslims for consultation and said, “I consider you as my younger brothers; I’m your elder brother and we both belong to Mother India,” his son said.

What Mr. Singh considered his neutrality at work, however, fueled his resentment at what he saw as “the appeasement of minorities” – Muslims, in other words — his son said.

His father was not in favor of the creation of Pakistan. But once it existed, he believed, “If a country has been made for you, you should all go there,” his son said.

Mr. Singh was a devout Hindu, eschewing alcohol and maintaining a vegetarian diet. He visited Ayodhya at least annually, staying in a guest house at a temple. Since college days, Ram had been his religious focal point.

Ram is one of the incarnations of Lord Vishnu, who is part of Hinduism’s holy trinity: Vishnu is the protector; Brahma is the creator; Shiva is the destroyer.

According to Hindu scriptures, Ram was born in Ayodhya tens of thousands of years ago. He was the eldest son of the Hindu King Dasharath of the Solar Dynasty, so-called because the monarchs were believed to be descendants of the sun. Ram is revered as “maryada purushottam,” an excellent man of honor.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal

A Ram shrine at an Ayodhya ashram.

It was to Ayodhya that Ram returned from exile after rescuing his wife, Sita, from the demon god Ravan in Sri Lanka, according to an ancient Sanskrit version of the Ramayan, the Hindu text about Ram’s life.

Benevolently, Ram ruled over his kingdom from Ayodhya, becoming the epitome of good governance, the Ramayan says. And, in the twilight of his life, he was said to walk through a doo
r in Ayodhya directly to heaven.

As Mr. Singh aged, his conviction grew that he wanted to put Ram back where he believed he belonged, his son said. He thought Muslims should yield the Babri Masjid.

“He used to have this tussle in him that ‘While I so much respect their religion, why don’t they reciprocate?’” his son said.

In the mid-1940s, Mr. Singh met K.K. Nayar, an administrator in the national Indian Civil Service, Mr. Singh’s son said. The service was a precursor to today’s Indian Administrative Service and the two men were stationed in the same city.

Mr. Nayar was from Kerala in the south. He was erudite and more soft-spoken than Mr. Singh. The two men found common cause in their reverence of Ram and their desire to take action, Mr. Singh’s son said. Both men were also sympathetic to the Hindu Mahasabha, the conservative Hindu political party, but refrained from actively supporting it because of their government jobs, he said.

Together, the men asked the official in charge of appointments in the United Provinces to post them at the same time to Faizabad, which administered Ayodhya, according to Mr. Singh’s son.

Mr. Singh moved there in 1948 as city magistrate. Around the same time, Mr. Nayar moved there as district magistrate, the most senior administrative post in the district. Both men are now deceased. Mr. Nayar’s son declined to be interviewed.

**

The Singhs moved into Lorpur House, a yellow, British-era mansion. Starting in mid-1949, Mr. Singh, Mr. Nayar, Abhiram Das and other local officials met there to plan how to install Ram in the Babri Masjid, according to Mr. Singh’s son.

As the family’s only child, Guru Basant Singh was then about 15 years old. He said he was in charge of serving tea and water at the meetings and at times hid behind the door to listen in on the planning.

The meetings were held in secret after sunset, he said. A Hindu servant was posted at the door with instructions to tell any visitors that his father was resting.

His version of events is confirmed by Mahant Satyendra Das, one of Abhiram Das’s surviving disciples, who is now the government-appointed head priest at the site of the mosque.

Dharam Das

Abhiram Das in the later days of his life.

He joined Abhiram Das in 1958. That year, the sadhu gave him a detailed account of events, said Mr. Das, who recalled their discussion in an interview. (The two men share a surname but were not related.)

“Top district officials” including K.K. Nayar and Guru Dutt Singh, worked with Abhiram Das on how the idol might be put in the Babri Masjid, which was locked and guarded, Mr. Das said the sadhu told him.

One guard, a Hindu, took the afternoon and evening shift. Another guard, a Muslim, took night watch, Mr. Das said he was told.

The Hindu guard agreed to let Abhiram Das and a small group of sadhus sneak into the mosque with an idol of Ram during his watch, Abhiram Das told his disciple, adding: “We took the Hindu guard into confidence by telling him about the virtues he will earn by being part of this extremely holy work.”

The Hindu guard would then hand over the keys to the Muslim guard at midnight, as usual, Mr. Das said the sadhu told him.

On the other hand, the Muslim guard was “briefed” by Guru Dutt Singh and K.K. Nayar “what he had to do,” according to Guru Dutt Singh’s son. He was threatened with his life if he did not cooperate, Mr. Singh’s son said. The guards and their descendants couldn’t be traced.

The statue of Ram would be about seven inches tall, made of eight metals, and would depict an infant – a “Ram Lalla” – befitting the place of his birth.

Both Mr. Singh, the city magistrate, and Mr. Nayar, the district magistrate, knew how furious Nehru and the government in New Delhi would be if the mosque was infringed upon, said Mr. Singh’s son. They both decided that they would resign rather than obey any order to remove the statue, he said.

Other details fell into place and the meetings ended around October 1949, according to Mr. Singh’s son. Now, the planners had to await their moment.

In late November 1949, religious friction in Ayodhya was on the rise. Sadhus and devotees of Ram lit sacred fires outside the mosque and read from the Ramayan as they listened to speeches about how Ram should be returned to his birthplace.  Members of the crowd scuffled with local Muslims.

The planners, said Mr. Singh’s son, set their date for soon after: The night of Dec. 22, 1949, a Thursday.

“We decided that since the country has now got political liberation, we should also liberate the birthplace of Lord Ram,” Abhiram Das told Mr. Das, the latter said.

**

In the chill of the north Indian winter, the Hindu guard ended his shift that night. But before he left, as planned, Abhiram Das and two other sadhus gained access, Abhiram Das told his disciple.

When the Muslim guard came for his round of duty, the Hindu guard handed over the keys. Around 3 a.m., an auspicious time in Hinduism, Abhiram Das and the other sadhus started ringing small bells inside the mosque. They lit a lamp and sang to the tiny idol that was placed on the pulpit under the central dome: “God appeared, compassionate and benevolent,” the sadhu told his disciple.

The Muslim guard made a statement to local authorities soon after that at around 3 a.m. he saw the area under the central dome bathed in a golden light, according to Mr. Singh’s son and others. He said the light illuminated a tiny figure of Ram that seemed to have appeared by itself.

The Muslim guard’s “revelation” and the statement had been planned in advance to appear to bear witness to a religious miracle, said Mr. Singh’s son.

Bindeshwari Prasad, a sadhu living in Ayodhya, was there that night, the youngest of a group of sadhus camped outside
, he said in an interview at the red-brick ashram where he now lives. He described the events in mystical terms.

Paul Beckett/The Wall Street Journal

Bindeshwari Prasad, a sadhu who still lives in Ayodhya.

“I and other people sleeping there that night saw Ram Lalla in our dreams; we all woke up at 3 in the morning,” Mr. Prasad said, his voice a whisper and his skin stretched like bark on his aged body. He claimed they could see the idol on the floor through the railings.

Abhiram Das was there, he recalled. The lock to the mosque was broken and the group of sadhus entered. “We went near the Lord and sang religious hymns and worshipped him,” said Mr. Prasad.

Armed constables, alerted to what was happening, shot a few rounds in the air, Mr. Prasad said. A bullet grazed his abdomen, he said, pointing to the spot. He said another sadhu took a bullet in the toe.

Mr. Singh’s son said the police had instructions only to fire in the air, as part of the planning his father and the others had done.

Back at Lorpur House, Guru Dutt Singh was kept informed of what was happening by two messengers who worked in a bicycle relay from Ayodhya to Faizabad to convey the latest news, his son said.

Mr. Singh, in turn, entrusted a Hindu employee in the household to take hand-written messages to K.K. Nayar with a special order to give the missives only to him. “That was how they communicated,” said Mr. Singh’s son.

When the officials realized the statue had been successfully installed, and the mosque was filled with sadhus, Mr. Singh and Mr. Nayar took a car to the site, according to Mr. Singh’s son and Mr. Prasad.

Later that morning, Mr. Singh offered prayers, or puja, in Lorpur House, his son said:  “I don’t know what he said but it is my understanding that he was telling God, ‘Let happen what has been happening.’”

Then Mr. Singh imposed an order that prohibited the gathering of large groups of people in Ayodhya. But he made it clear to police that they were not to obstruct Hindus, his son said.

After, Mr. Singh left his Faizabad home for nearby government accommodation where visiting officials stayed. He gave instructions that if anyone inquired about his whereabouts, they were to be told he was “out of station,” his son said.

Word spread quickly to neighboring communities. Thousands of Hindu devotees came to see the idol in the mosque.

Abhiram Das helped whip up enthusiasm. That day, Dec. 23, he visited a local school. Rajendra Singh, the son of a local officer of the Hindu Mahasabha, the conservative Hindu party, was a pupil then.

“Lord Ram has appeared! Lord Ram has appeared!” he recalled Abhiram Das saying.

**

There was a dissident voice among the local sadhus. Akshaya Brahmachari was about 35 years old at the time and a devotee of Ram.

 

Meera Behen

Akshaya Brahmachari with his disciple Meera Behen, right, in an undated photo.

He also was a local Congress party officer who defended the rights of Muslims to remain in India “as equal citizens” rather than move to Pakistan, according to a disciple, Meera Behen, who was then a high school student.

There was rising friction in town that day as loudspeakers announced “the appearance of God, exhorting all Hindus to come for audience,” Mr. Brahmachari wrote in a memorandum a few months later. But local officials, including K.K. Nayar, showed no interest in removing the idol or defusing the situation, he wrote.

He added: “Communal poison was spread in an organized manner and the attitude of the officials gave the idea to the people that either the Government wanted all that to happen, or they had completely given in to the communalists.”

TOMORROW: The fight to keep the idol in the mosque and the legal battle that ensued.