Security personnel (front) stand guard along a road in Ayodhya, ahead of a Supreme Court verdict on the disputed religious site. — AFP photo
NEW DELHI: India’s top court yesterday handed a huge victory to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist ruling party by awarding Hindus control of a bitterly disputed holy site that has sparked deadly sectarian violence.
India had stepped up security nationwide ahead of the decision and Modi called for calm, fearing the final ruling on an issue that has been a focal point of Hindu-Muslim tensions for decades could again trigger unrest.
The Supreme Court ruled that the site in Ayodhya in northern India, where Hindu mobs destroyed a 460-year-old mosque in 1992, must be handed over to a trust to oversee the construction of a Hindu temple, subject to conditions.
A separate piece of land in Ayodhya would be given over to Muslim groups to build a new mosque, the court ruled in a historic judgement aimed at ending a bitter and legal wrangle dating back decades.
Thousands of extra personnel including riot police were deployed and schools closed in and around the northern city of Ayodhya, centre of the thorny dispute, and elsewhere.
In Ayodhya gatherings of people were banned and barricades were erected on roads leading to the Supreme Court building in New Delhi with officials and volunteers scouring social media for inflammatory posts in Facebook’s biggest market.
Hardliners among India’s majority Hindus, including supporters of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), believe that Lord Ram, the warrior god, was born in Ayodhya some 7,000 years ago.
They say that in the 16th century, Babur, the first emperor of the Mughal Islamic dynasty, built a mosque on top of a temple at the 2.8-acre site.
In the 1980s, as Hindu nationalism and the BJP began to strengthen, pressure grew for the mosque to be knocked down and replaced by a glorious Hindu temple.
In 1992, a Hindu mob estimated to number 200,000 did just that, reducing the mosque to rubble.
This unleashed some of the worst religious riots since India’s bloody partition at the end of British colonial rule in 1947, leaving around 2,000 people dead, mainly Muslims.
Ten years later in 2002, after 59 Hindu activists died in a blaze on a train from Ayodhya, riots in Gujarat state – when Modi was its chief minister – saw upwards of 1,000 people perish, again largely Muslims.
According to media reports, the court ruled that archaeological evidence indicated that there was a structure built before the mosque at the site ‘of Hindu origin’.
The verdict, it is hoped, will put an end to an angry and at times arcane legal wrangle that British colonial rulers and even the Dalai Lama tried to mediate. — AFP