Ayodhya, 1992 to 2024

The mosque, dated by its inscriptions to 1528-29 under Babur, stood on a site many Hindus hold to be Rama's birthplace. A crowd at a rally organised by the Vishva Hindu Parishad and attended by BJP leaders brought it down, and the riots that followed, in Bombay and elsewhere, killed some two thousand people across India. In 2020 a special CBI court in Lucknow acquitted all 32 accused, among them L. K. Advani, holding that the demolition had not been planned.

On 9 November 2019 a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court unanimously awarded the 2.77-acre site to a trust for a temple, called the demolition an egregious violation of the rule of law, and ordered five acres elsewhere in Ayodhya for a mosque. The court noted the Archaeological Survey's finding of an earlier non-Islamic structure beneath the mosque but held that title could not be decided on archaeology. Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the consecration of the new temple in January 2024. The tradition track's Ayodhya pin is the Ramayana's city; this one is the modern dispute.