Brief information about Ayodhya case
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The Ayodhya dispute is a political, historical and socio-religious debate in India, centred on a plot of land in the city of Ayodhya, located in Faizabad District, Uttar Pradesh. The issues revolve around access to a site traditionally regarded among Hindus to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama,[1] the history and location of the Babri Masjid at the site, and whether a previous Hindu temple was demolished or modified to create the mosque.
The Babri Masjid was destroyed during a political rally which turned into a riot on 6 December 1992. A subsequent land title case was lodged in the Allahabad High Court, the verdict of which was pronounced on 30 September 2010. In the landmark hearing, the three judges of The Allahabad High Court ruled that the 2.77 acres (1.12 ha) of Ayodhya land be divided into 3 parts, with 1/3 going to the Ram Lalla or Infant Rama represented by the Hindu Maha Sabha for the construction of the Ram temple, 1/3 going to the Islamic Sunni Waqf Board and the remaining 1/3 going to a Hindu religious denomination Nirmohi Akhara. While the three-judge bench was not unanimous that the disputed structure was constructed after demolition of a temple, it did agree that a temple or a temple structure predated the mosque at the same site. The excavations by the Archaeological Survey of India were heavily used as evidence by the court that the predating structure was a massive Hindu religious building.
The first recorded instances of religious violence in Ayodhya occurred in the 1850s over a nearby mosque at Hanuman Garhi. The Babri mosque was attacked by Hindus in the process. Since then, local Hindu groups made occasional demands that they should have the possession of the site and that they should be allowed to build a temple on the site, all of which were denied by the colonial government. In 1946, an offshoot of the Hindu Mahasabha called Akhil Bharatiya Ramayana Mahasabha (ABRM) started an agitation for the possession of the site. In 1949, Sant Digvijay Nath of Gorakhnath Math joined the ABRM and organised a 9-day continuous recitation of Ramcharit Manas, at the end of which the Hindu activists broke into the mosque and placed idols of Rama and Sita inside. People were led to believe that the idols had 'miraculously' appeared inside the mosque. The date of the event was 22 December 1949.
Jawaharlal Nehru insisted that the idols should be removed. However, the local official K. K. K. Nair, known for his Hindu nationalist connections, refused to carry out orders, claiming that it would lead to communal riots. The police locked the gates so that the public (Hindus as well as Muslims) could not enter. However, the idols remained inside and priests were allowed entry to perform daily worship. So, the mosque had been converted into a de facto temple. Both the Sunni Wakf Board and the ABRM filed civil suits in a local court staking their respective claims to the site. The land was declared to be under dispute, and the gates remained locked.
Christophe Jaffrelot has called the Gorakhnath wing of Hindu nationalism 'the other saffron', which has maintained its existence separately from the mainstream Hindu nationalism of the Sangh Parivar. After the Vishva Hindu Parishad was formed in 1964 and started agitating for the Babri Masjid site, the two strands of 'saffron politics' came together. The district magistrate Nair, who refused to carry out orders, was eventually dismissed, but he became a local hero and subsequently a politician of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.