Akanksha Singh

Opinion | India’s Ayodhya judgment: old scores have been settled but new wounds are likely to be opened

The Supreme Court judgment allocating the disputed site on which a mosque stood until the 1990s to the Hindu community will whet fundamentalist Hindu groups’ appetite for other such plots across the country

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Activists of the Bajrang Dal, a Hindu organisation, hold torches during a procession in Amritsar on December 6, 2014, marking the 22nd anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Photo: AFP

Akanksha Singh

Published: 6:00am, 14 Nov 2019Updated: 8:53am, 14 Nov 2019

The Indian Supreme Court ruled on November 9 that a plot of land in the northern city of Ayodhya, which has been a bone of contention between the country’s Hindu majority and its Muslim minority, will go to the Hindu community.

The disputed land once housed the Babri Masjid, a mosque built in 1528. In 1992, a Hindu mob, headed by the Vishva Hindu Parishad, a fundamentalist group affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which is currently in power in India, destroyed the mosque, saying a Hindu temple that had stood on the site had been destroyed to build the mosque.

The illegal demolition of the mosque sparked riots across the country, in which around 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. The riots were followed by a series of terrorist attacks linked to Islamist groups in the years that followed.

Although India is a secular nation, tensions sporadically flare up between the Hindu and Muslim communities. The rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP has worsened communal discord.

Human rights activists in Kolkata, India, take part in a march on December 8, 2017, against the killing of a Muslim man in the western state of Rajasthan. Photo: AP

The Indian Supreme Court overturned the verdict of the Allahabad High Court in 2010 which had ruled that the 2.77 acre plot should be divided equally between the three plaintiffs – the Sunni Waqf Board for the Muslims, the Nirmohi Akhara, a Hindu denomination, and the deity Ram Lalla (infant Ram), considered by the court to be a “juridical person” and represented by people associated with the Vishva Hindu Parishad.