Thirty-three years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the event occupies a troubled and unresolved position in India’s constitutional imagination. The structure was brought down on 6 December 1992 by kar sevaks mobilised by organisations associated with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, an act the Liberhan Ayodhya Commission of Inquiry (2009) described as neither spontaneous nor unplanned.
While judicial bodies later acknowledged that the 1949 occupation of the mosque and its 1992 demolition were profoundly unlawful, neither accountability nor restoration followed. The long legal journey, spanning the 2010 Allahabad High Court verdict, the 2019 Supreme Court decision (M Siddiq v. Mahant Suresh Das), the 2020 Special CBI Court verdict, and the archival record compiled by A G Noorani, reveals not a dispute resolved but a moment in which constitutional principle consistently yielded to political mobilisation.
The Supreme Court’s 2019 judgment further entrenched this contradiction. While recognising the illegality of the 1949 idol placement and the 1992 demolition, the Court awarded the disputed land for the construction of the Ram Mandir, which now stands on the site. The Court simultaneously directed the allotment of five acres to the Sunni Waqf Board, where the Mohammed Bin Abdullah Mosque is planned in Dhannipur, Ayodhya. These developments underline the core dilemma: even where illegality is judicially affirmed, the remedy offered does not reinstate what was unlawfully taken.
The Foundations of Assertion
Much of the mobilisation relied on the assertion that a grand temple marking Rama’s birthplace once stood at the exact location of the mosque. Yet, this claim has been rigorously challenged by leading historians. Romila Thapar, in Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple, demonstrated that the belief in a geographically precise birthplace is a relatively modern devotional development rather than a historical certainty. RS Sharma, in Communal History and Rama’s Ayodhya, found no conclusive evidence of a deliberate temple demolition. Noorani’s archival compilation reinforces this ambiguity. Together, these works show that the historical foundation of the Ayodhya narrative grew not from verifiable evidence but from sustained political and ideological assertion.
Understanding the demolition requires examining the political mobilisation that preceded it. The Liberhan Commission documented years of planned rallies, coordinated speeches, organisational preparation, and the deliberate weakening of security arrangements, creating an environment in which the state failed to act. As scholars like Christophe Jaffrelot and Thomas Blom Hansen have shown, the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign developed into a national political project aimed at consolidating a majoritarian identity through public spectacle. The demolition was not a spontaneous eruption, but the culmination of a movement that had already moved away from legal contestation toward political theatre.
The demolition also triggered widespread communal violence across India, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Delhi. Human rights reports documented that hundreds of people were killed, the majority of them Muslims. The Bombay riots of December 1992 and January 1993, extensively examined in the Srikrishna Commission Report (1998), emerged directly from the national shockwave of the demolition. This violence reflects not merely public disorder but the state’s tragic inability to safeguard citizens’ lives in the wake of a politically orchestrated act.
The Failure of Judicial Accountability
The judicial record reflects a tension between constitutional recognition and constitutional remedy. The Supreme Court acknowledged illegality yet did not reverse its consequences, resulting in the fundamental contradiction of recognising wrongful dispossession without offering restoration. While the judgment achieved legal closure, it left unresolved the deeper moral and constitutional implications, departing from the traditional principle that remedies should aim to restore the status quo ante.
This sense of incompleteness is deepened by the absence of accountability. Despite the evidence assembled by the Liberhan Commission, the Special CBI Court in 2020 acquitted all 32 accused by describing the demolition as spontaneous. This conclusion stands in direct contradiction to institutional fact-finding and decades of contemporaneous reporting. It highlights the chronic difficulty of prosecuting mass political mobilisation under the evidentiary constraints of criminal law. The outcome was stark: No individual or organisation was held responsible for an act repeatedly recognised as unlawful by the state.
Even archaeology has been frequently misinterpreted.
The Archaeological Survey of India’s 2003 excavation report identified earlier structural remains at the site. However, the Supreme Court itself clarified that the ASI did not conclude that the mosque had been built after the demolition of a temple. Distinguishing structural continuity from deliberate destruction is complex, and the report’s findings do not support the definitive political claims often made in its name.
The Unsettled Question of Equal Citizenship
The demolition and its legal aftermath profoundly shaped how Indian Muslims understand their place within the constitutional framework. Scholars such as Asghar Ali Engineer and Rajeev Bhargava have documented how the events of 1992 created a deep sense of vulnerability and exclusion, particularly given the state’s failure to protect a legally recognised place of worship. Reports noted that the demolition was widely experienced as a moment in which minority religious heritage was left unprotected in the face of majoritarian mobilisation.
These concerns intensified after the 2019 Supreme Court judgment. The community’s unlawful dispossession was acknowledged but not remedied, and the alternative land allocation did not address the core constitutional issue. Scholars have observed that Muslim responses were shaped not by the question of land, but by concerns over the uneven application of constitutional protections. The experience of being recognised as wronged yet not restored, and of witnessing an illegal act shape the final outcome, created a perception that equality before the law did not hold uniformly. These are not mere emotions; they are a civic response to a sequence of institutional failures that reshaped understandings of dignity, belonging, and constitutional protection.
A Memory That Will Endure
The Babri dispute remains unresolved because institutional responses did not satisfy the basic requirements of constitutional justice. The state did not prevent the unlawful acts. Judicial recognition of illegality did not result in restoration. The criminal justice process produced no accountability. Public narratives continued to merge myth, devotion, and history without the rigour of evidence.
In this context, the chain of events surrounding Babri unsettled long-standing principles of equal protection, secular governance, and the rule of law, leaving the constitutional fabric more fragile than before.
A meaningful resolution requires acknowledging institutional failures, reforming legal mechanisms, strengthening protections for minority religious heritage, and fostering historical education grounded in scholarship. Without these measures, the belief that the demolition was politically rewarded and legally normalised will persist. This belief matters because it influences whether citizens understand the Constitution as a functioning guarantee of equal protection or merely as a symbolic promise.
In the end, Babri Masjid will not disappear from the nation’s memory. It will stand as a reminder of the constitutional promises that were strained, the institutions that faltered, and the citizens who waited for justice that never fully arrived. Its place in public history endures because it marks a moment when the ideals of equality, protection, and fairness were tested in full view of the republic. Babri is, in this sense, a quiet memorial to the work that remains unfinished.
