The Infamous Ayodhya Case: Who Won The Century-Old Religious Battle
By Sushmita Roy
The final Supreme Court verdict on the most disputed land in India was delivered on Saturday. If you are an Indian, have remotely lived in India, or keep up with global affairs, chances are you have heard of the “Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhomi” case. The case was first registered in the court after a Hindu nationalist activist placed a Hindu idol in Babri Masjid, an important historical mosque for Indian-Muslims in 1949, claiming it miraculously appeared there.
The real dispute, however, is more than a century old.
India’s majority population is Hindu, who consider Ayodhya, a small city in Uttar Pradesh, to be the birthplace of Lord Ram, one of the most important Hindu deities. In the 16th century, when the Mughals took over India, the Muslim kings built mosques all around their new empire, oftentimes around Hindu temples.
Although some historians, including the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), claim that the Babri Masjid, constructed in the mid-18th century, was built on a land where a non-Islamic structure had previously existed, little evidence exists on the structure being a Hindu temple.
In fact, two archaeologists, Supriya Varma and Jaya Menon, accused the ASI of having preconceived biases ahead of the dig and violating ethical codes and procedures during the excavation.
"What the ASI has excavated is not evidence there was a temple underneath the mosque. One is this western wall, the second is these 50 pillar bases and third are architectural fragments," Varma, professor of archeology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told HuffPost India.
"The western wall is a feature of a mosque. It is a wall in front of which you say namaaz. It is not the feature of a temple. Temple has a very different plan. Underneath the Babri Masjid, there are actually older mosques," she said.
But extremism requires no proof. On December 6, 1992, right-wing affiliates: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), the current governing party, organized a rally of 150,000 kar sevaks or devotees to rally against the Islamic establishment, which they believed existed on a religious Hindu site. The rally turned violent even before security forces could call for more help.
Within hours, three domes of the mosque were demolished by using axes, hammers, and grappling hooks, and 2,000 people killed. Children were burned alive and Muslim nuns and women raped. The ripples of the violence reached the neighboring Islamic countries where scores of Muslim men harassed and killed Hindu women and men to avenge what happened in India.
Around 60 people were found guilty of inciting the deadly incident in 1992 that prompted deadly communal riots throughout the country -- the worst India has seen post-independence. Initially, the local court divided the land into three equal parts: a third was allocated to Ram Lalla (Underrepresentation of Hindu Mahasabha); one-third to the Islamic Waqf Board; and the remaining third to the Nirmohi Akhara, another Hindu group claiming rights.
Last week’s Supreme court verdict awarded the 2.7 acres of land to the Hindu litigant over Muslim objections and represented a major victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who promised to deliver the results in his re-election campaign.
Modi and other leaders in his party have often branded India as a Hindu country, unlike the secular country the forefathers imagined.
To deliver what the court considered a “balanced” judgment, the Islamic Waqf Board was allotted 5 acres of alternate land to build another mosque. Right-wing activists, whose demands were finally met, rejoiced and celebrated the decision. While many Indian Muslims said they were happy the conflict was finally resolved, some called into question the ethics of the decision.
“I and millions of my co-religionists have been made to feel like an orphan yet again in the land we have loved, cherished and called our own,” Rana Ayyub, a child of the 1992 riots in India, wrote for the Washington Times. "I have struggled to make sense of the kind of 'justice' that is being celebrated, this closure and relief many speak of. Whose closure?"
She recalled being in a hideout with her sister when the communal violence first broke out in the neighborhood. Their neighbors, a Sikh family had taken Ayyub, who was then 9 and her elder sister who was 14, to a locality of Sikhs where they took refuge for two months. The sisters had no contact with their family who were left behind.
“In the eyes of the country, we were Muslims first and Indians later,” she said.
“A land whose liberation from the British was fought by revolutionaries and freedom fighters that included our own forefathers. I wonder if that cherished freedom holds any meaning in the new India that seeks to erase my legacy and my existence,” Ayyub wrote.
Hundreds of lawyers gathered around the Supreme Court on Saturday chanting Jai Shri Ram, Hail Lord Ram after the final verdict was announced. Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who read the verdict, was spotted celebrating the decision with his colleagues over dinner at the posh Taj Mansingh in Delhi.
"If a person demolishes your house and if you go to an arbitrator and he gives your house to the person who demolished it and tells you that you will be given an alternate land at some other place, how'd you feel," Asaduddin Owaisi, President of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and Member of Parliament, asked India Today.
India is home to around 200 million Muslims. A spike in hate crimes and mob lynchings have many Muslims worrying if they are now going to be seen as “second-class” citizens in their own country.
After the decision, it’s difficult to tell who really won, when both sides have sacrificed lives over the 2.77 acres of land. Regardless, the fight does not end here. There are many more mosques on the hit list of many Hindu nationalists.