1951 to 2019: How the Indian judiciary turned the Babri Masjid into the Ram Mandir

The consecration of the temple dedicated to Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya on January 22 will be the culmination of a long-standing demand of the Hindutva ecosystem.

To many, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the larger Sangh Parivar, the network of Hindutva organisation linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, are seen to be the driving forces behind the temple’s construction.

However, the judiciary has been a major player too. In fact, from the 1940s, when the Babri Masjid structure was handed over for Hindu worship, the opening of the locks of the struture in 1986 and the final temple construction in 2019, every step has come to fruitition as a result of a judicial order.

“From 1949 onwards, the expansion of Hindu claims over the Babri Masjid was endorsed by the judiciary at every stage and culminated in the Supreme Court handing over the Babri Masjid spot to the Hindu litigants,” veteran journalist Ajaz Ashraf, who has covered the legal history of this dispute, told Scroll.

Beginning of the dispute

Stripped of its religious and political overtones, the Ayodhya case was a civil dispute about the ownership of a piece of land.

The legal case can be traced back to 1885, when Raghubir Das, a Hindu priest, started building a temple on a chabutra,...

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