CHAPTER TWO

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s prime minister, was greatly perturbed by an idol of Lord Ram being placed in a mosque.

Polished, intellectual and skeptical of religion, Nehru was trying to propel the nation into an era of modern socialism and scientific thinking. But the events in Ayodhya forced him to grapple anew with the centuries-long friction between Hindus and Muslims – and to try to counter the spreading belief that a deity had materialized in the dead of night.

“I am disturbed at developments at Ayodhya,” Nehru said in a telegram on Dec. 26, 1949, to Govind Ballabh Pant, chief minister of United Provinces, which roughly included what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh. “Earnestly hope you will personally interest yourself in this matter. Dangerous example being set there which will have bad consequences.”

The provincial government wanted the statue removed. K.K. Nayar, the district magistrate in Faizabad, who also oversaw Ayodhya, refused. He wrote to a provincial official that removing the idol was “fraught with the gravest danger to public peace” and would lead to a “conflagration of horror,” according to a copy of his correspondence.

Around that time, Guru Dutt Singh, the city magistrate, resigned. His son, Guru Basant Singh, said his father quit because “his work was done” and the idol’s installation, which Mr. Singh helped plan, had succeeded.

Local Hindus added religious items to the mosque: more idols; six black ammonite stones; a small silver throne; brass utensils for worship; and clothes for the deity, according to an official list compiled later.

Muslims weren’t welcome. Mohammad Hashim Ansari, a local tailor, headed to the Babri Masjid with a few others the morning after the idol of Ram was installed, said Mr. Ansari and another local Muslim who was there. The police stopped them at the gate. The Muslims returned home, they said.

Nehru kept pushing. In early January, he wrote again to Mr. Pant. The chief minister called him soon after.

Mr. Pant “intended taking action, but he wanted to get some well-known Hindus to explain the situation to people in Ayodhya first,” Nehru wrote in a separate letter to the governor-general of India dated Jan. 7, 1950.

Weeks passed. The idol stayed.

The discord in Ayodhya threatened Nehru’s desire for India to be a democracy in which all beliefs were equally respected. He also feared that it would have repercussions “on all-India affairs and more especially Kashmir,” the disputed territory between India and the newly-created Pakistan, he wrote to Mr. Pant on Feb. 5, 1950.

Nehru added that he would be willing to make the 600-kilometer trip from Delhi to Ayodhya himself. But, he also noted, “I am terribly busy.”

Nehru didn’t make the trip. By March, he was sounding defeated as local officials continued to balk at removing the idol.

“This event occurred two or three months ago and I have been very gravely perturbed over it,” he wrote in a letter to K.G. Mashruwala, an associate of Mahatma Gandhi.

Nehru lamented that many in his Congress party had become “communal” toward Pakistan and India’s Muslims. “I just do not know what we can do to create a better atmosphere in the country,” he wrote.

In 1952, Nehru visited Uttar Pradesh to campaign for Mr. Pant in an election, according to a person who heard him speak. He told the crowd, in Hindi, “The Ayodhya event has put me to shame,” this person said.

**

In January 1950, a decades-long legal battle began between Ayodhya's Hindus and Muslims over the site of the Babri Masjid. The first case was filed by a Hindu , Gopal Singh Visharad, in the Victorian Gothic district court building in neighboring Faizabad.

Mr. Singh Visharad – “Visharad” denotes expertise in Hindu scripture -- was a lawyer who had moved to Ayodhya because he wanted to live in a Hindu holy place, according to his son, Rajendra. Rajendra was the schoolboy who witnessed Abhiram Das, the sadhu, spreading the word on the morning of Dec. 23, 1949, that Ram had appeared in the mosque.

A stern-looking man with a broad nose and a thick moustache, Mr. Singh Visharad, then 42 years old, was the Ayodhya secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, a conservative Hindu political party that opposed Nehru's Congress.  He was close to Mr. Nayar, the district magistrate,  and Guru Dutt Singh, the city magistrate, according to  Rajendra Singh.

Mr. Singh Visharad had celebrated the appearance of the Ram Lalla idol and worshipped at the site for a few days, his son said. But when he went there on  Jan.14, 1950, the police stopped him at the gate.

By then, another local magistrate had already issued an order seizing the building.  A receiver was named and the place was locked for devotees. As an interim arrangement, the receiver appointed a small team of priests to attend daily to the statue of Ram Lalla at the site because it was, after all, a deity that needed feeding, bathing, and clothing, according to Hindu ritual.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Singh claimed the right to worship the deity in the building "without any obstruction whatever" and  asked for a “temporary injunction” to prevent government officials from removing the idols.

The judge granted the injunction but didn’t rule on the question of his right to worship.

The next day, Anisur Rahman, a Muslim about 30 years old, filed a court petition of his own -- the first Muslim legal volley in the dispute. Mr. Rahman made tin boxes that he sold from a shop in the local market in Ayodhya. He lived with his family close to the Babri Masjid.

Weeks before the idol was installed, he had sent messages to district officials that he saw “imminent danger” to the mosque from the sadhus gathered around it, according to the official records of Mr. Nayar, the district magistrate.

Mr. Nayar had dismissed Mr. Rahman as an “exception” among Muslims in Ayodhya whom, he wrote, “are far from agitated,” according to the records.

Petitioning the High Court in Allahabad, a major city in the state, Mr. Rahman sought to have any cases claiming title to the site of the Babri Masjid heard by a court outside Ayodhya and Faizabad.

He claimed that “in view of the highly strained relations between the two communities and also district authorities not being free from communal bias,” there was no prospect of a fair hearing around Ayodhya.

He also noted in an affidavit that district authorities had done nothing to help Muslims take back their mosque after the idol was installed. Instead, they had seized the building.

Mr. Rahman’s effort was countered by about 20 Muslims from Ayodhya, who signed identical affidavits in a local courtroom.

They said they had no objection if the Hindus continued to possess the Babri Masjid. "Babri Masjid has been built by demolishing Ram birthplace temple," they said. “It’s against the Islamic law to pray there,” the affidavits said.

Mr. Rahman’s petition was dismissed. Muslim lawyers today doubt the authenticity of the Muslims' affidavits.

Mr. Rahman sold his shop. Sometime in the early 1950s, he migrated with his family to Pakistan, according to several local Muslims. His descendants could not be traced.

A Muslim shopkeeper in Ayodhya recalled Mr. Rahman telling him, before leaving: “We don’t get any justice here. Nobody helps us.”

In late 1950, a mercurial sadhu filed a similar court case to Gopal Singh Visharad’s. He was a member of Ayodhya’s famous Digambar Akhara, a group of Hindu holy men devoted to Ram.

Both Hindu suits named five local Muslim men as defendants, alleging they had put pressure on local government officials to remove the idols by making “baseless and dishonest assertions.”

The most prominent among the defendants was Haji Phenku, one of Ayodhya’s biggest property owners at the time.

At court, Mr. Phenku, then 65 years old, and the other Muslims refuted the allegations, according to legal papers. They also claimed that the Babri Masjid had been used by the Muslims as a mosque ever since it was built in 1528. They said no Hindu temple existed at the site before the construction of the mosque.

Mr. Phenku boarded a horse cart at his residence at least once a month to travel from Ayodhya to the courthouse, about 10 kilometers away, said his son, Haji Mahboob Ahmad, in an interview.

When Mr. Phenku returned home, he recounted his experience, often with frustration. “The judge again adjourned the hearing and asked us to appear on the next date,” Mr. Phenku said repeatedly, according to his son.

Gopal Singh Visharad, the lead Hindu petitioner, regularly cycled to court. He was resigned to the fact that it would be a prolonged dispute because he believed the government didn’t want to deal with the implications of a verdict, according to his son.

The hearings dragged on, with little progress, for nine years. Then, in 1959, another suit was filed by a sect of sadhus known as the Nirmohi Akhara.

The name means “Group Without Attachment,” a reference to the fact that the 12,000 sadhus it claims as members have abandoned the material world for the company of their deity, Ram. The sect had tried, in the late 19th century, to build a temple near the mosque but had been prevented by the court.

Bhaskar Das is the head of the sect. Now in his mid-80s, he is a thin man and an imposing sight. His wrinkled head is shaved close with a longer outcropping of hair knotted in a tail at the back. A Y-shaped pattern of white paint, accentuated with vermillion stripes, starts at the bridge of his nose and runs in two lines up his forehead.

Mr. Das came to Ayodhya in 1946 to learn Sanskrit at the age of 18. Soon after, he visited an idol of Ram located on the wooden platform where Hindus worshipped in the outer courtyard of the Babri Masjid. The Nirmohi Akhara maintained the platform.

“I felt belongingness with Lord Ram" and decided to lead the life of a sadhu, Mr. Das said in an interview at the sect’s ashram in Faizabad, a collection of four-story white buildings off a street clogged with traffic.

In its 1959 petition, the group claimed that Ram’s birthplace “has been existing before the living memory of man.”

It also claimed that the Babri Masjid building had never been a mosque but had been a temple since ancient times and was rightfully the possession of the Nirmohi Akhara. The suit was added to the others.

Two years later, in December 1961, representatives of the local Muslim community responded.

Leading the case was the Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Board of Waqfs, a body created by Indian law to be responsible for the protection and preservation of “waqfs,” or Muslim religious and cultural sites.

It listed Mohammad Hashim Ansari, the tailor, and other Ayodhya Muslims as co-petitioners.

The board, based in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, claimed that the Babri Masjid was registered with it as a public mosque and is “vested in the Almighty.”

In 1964, the court consolidated all four suits – of Gopal Singh Visharad; the sadhu from the Digambar Akhara; the Nirmohi Akhara, and the waqf board.

The litigants became used to the delays that plague India’s court system today. It took 17 years to settle on the appointment of a new receiver at the Babri Masjid site after the death of the first receiver.

In court, the judge would listen for about 15 minutes, set a date for the next hearing, and adjourn, according to two people involved in the case.

“Many judges came and went but the case was not decided,” said Haji Mahboob Ahmad, 74 years old. He replaced his father, Haji Phenku, as the defendant in one of the Hindu suits after his father died in 1960.

**

Guru Dutt Singh and K.K. Nayar – the administrators who were instrumental in the idol’s placement -- turned to politics. They played no further direct role in the Ayodhya dispute.

Mr. Singh joined the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a  Hindu nationalist party, within six months of resigning his administrative post. The party was founded by a former president of the Hindu Mahasabha, the first conservative Hindu party in India.

In the 1951 national election, the Jana Sangh won three seats in Parliament, compared with 364 seats won by Nehru’s Congress party. Mr. Singh became the Jana Sangh's district chief  in Faizabad, said his son.

A photo from the late 1960s in the reception room of the family’s Faizabad residence shows Guru Dutt Singh with a young Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then national president of the Jana Sangh and later prime minister of India.

Mr. Nayar was transferred to another post in early 1950. He took voluntary retirement in 1952.  He settled in Faizabad and joined the Jana Sangh with his wife. In 1967, he was elected to the national Parliament from a constituency near Ayodhya.

**

Among the sadhus of Ayodhya, the idol’s installation was overwhelmingly supported.

Akshaya Brahmachari, the young sadhu who had opposed the move, argued with others that "all Ayodhya is Ram's birthplace," according to his disciple, Meera Behen, and others who knew him. He asked: "Why do you diminish His glory by putting him in a mosque?"

He was assaulted and banished from the sadhus’ fraternity. He went to Lucknow and sat on a series of fasts from Jan. 30, 1950, in a bid to press the government to remove the idol. But a state government minister responded that, “Ayodhya’s situation is better now and the case is pending in a court of law at the moment. The final decision can be taken only after a judgment from the court.”

Abhiram Das, the sadhu who championed installing Ram in the mosque, organized festivals to commemorate the event.

One pamphlet printed by him in December 1953 exhorted Ayodhya’s residents to participate in a reading of the Ramayan, the Hindu holy text, at the site. Another pamphlet mentions him as the “savior” of Ram’s birthplace.

Hindu control of the site and the lack of action by the courts frustrated Ayodhya’s Muslims.  Mohammad Hashim Ansari, the tailor, said that in 1954 he and about 100 local Muslim men sought permission to offer prayers at the site. It was denied.

When they tried to force themselves into the mosque, they were arrested and spent two months in jail, Mr. Ansari later testified in court.

CHAPTER FOUR

By the summer of 1989, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was in a bind. The euphoria that marked the start of his term had given way to controversy: opposition parties alleged that he benefitted from bribes paid in India’s purchase of howitzer guns from a Swedish company, AB Bofors.

Mr. Gandhi denied wrongdoing. But as the end of his first term approached, he needed an issue that would change the dynamics of the upcoming election.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which had just two seats in Parliament, already had seized on Ayodhya as its chief campaign issue.

The party was formed in 1980 from the remnants of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the Hindu party that both Guru Dutt Singh and K.K. Nayar, the administrators in Faizabad in 1949, joined when they entered politics.

The BJP had close links to the largest conservative Hindu organizations: the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which for years had been calling for the construction of a temple to Lord Ram in Ayodhya; and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a hard-line Hindu group that was formed in 1925.

At a meeting in Palampur in the foothills of the Himalayas, in June 1989, the BJP’s national executive endorsed the demand to build a Ram temple, calling it by its Hindu name, “Ram Janmabhoomi.”

The statement declared that the dispute over the Babri Masjid “highlighted the callous unconcern” which Mr. Gandhi’s Congress and other parties “betray towards the sentiments of the overwhelming majority in this country – the Hindus.”

The prime minister’s advisers encouraged him to co-opt the same issue for his own re-election effort. He “had been advised by various intelligence agencies and politicians that 'You launch your campaign from Ayodhya,’” said R.K. Dhawan, then Mr. Gandhi’s private secretary, in an interview.

The BJP, at the time, was not viewed as the main opposition: Mr. Gandhi faced a greater threat from an alliance of former ministers who had split from Congress: Arif Mohammed Khan, the minister who resigned from Mr. Gandhi’s government in 1986; Arun Nehru, Mr. Gandhi’s cousin and former political adviser; and Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Mr. Gandhi’s former finance minister.

They were hammering on the Bofors allegations. So Mr. Gandhi seized on Ayodhya. He launched his campaign from the neighboring city of Faizabad in the autumn of 1989.

On a large field, before a crowd of thousands, he gave a speech from notes that had been prepared by Mani Shankar Aiyar, his special assistant and speechwriter. But, said Mr. Aiyar, the prime minister slipped in an unscripted reference to “Ram Rajya.”

The phrase connoted the ideal governance that Lord Ram had practiced when, Hindu scripture says, he ruled Ayodhya thousands of years before. It had been a term used by Mahatma Gandhi during India’s independence struggle. But it also was used by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to promote the movement to construct a Ram temple. When Rajiv Gandhi used the phrase, his opponents accused him of pandering to divisive Hindu sentiment.

Still, Mr. Gandhi further embraced the Ayodhya issue soon after. In early November 1989, just weeks before the general election, the prime minister sent Buta Singh, the home minister, to the town to participate in a “shilanyas,” or symbolic temple foundation-laying ceremony.

The event was organized by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which had been collecting bricks from all over India and bringing them to Ayodhya to symbolize the desire to build a Ram temple. As many as 275,000 villages and 60 million people participated, according to a VHP spokesman. Bricks were also sent from the U.S., the U.K. and other foreign locales.

Mr. Gandhi figured no Muslims would object if a Ram temple was built near the Babri Masjid but outside the area that was being disputed by Hindus and Muslims, Mr. Aiyar said.

To ensure the land where the ceremony took place was uncontroversial, a court registrar verified the plot with pencil markings on a map, Buta Singh said in an interview at his New Delhi home.

But afterward, Muslim leaders claimed the site of the ceremony had impinged on a graveyard around the mosque and was part of the property being fought over in court.

They publicly vowed revenge at the ballot box against Mr. Gandhi’s Congress party, said Zafaryab Jilani, convener of the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee and the lead lawyer representing Muslims in the court dispute.

Mr. Gandhi’s strategy of using Ayodhya to boost his re-election prospects had backfired. Muslims saw in the performance of the shilanyas a direct threat to the mosque. Hindus who wanted a temple on the site of the Babri Masjid, which they viewed as Ram’s birthplace, weren’t satisfied with a temple near the mosque.

“We fought on somebody else’s territory and the tactics we used blew back on us,” said Mr. Aiyar. It was a “horrendous decision,” added Mr. Dhawan.

It spelled electoral disaster. No single party won a majority in Parliament and Congress remained the largest party. But it lost so many seats that Mr. Gandhi opted not to try to form a government.

Instead, his opponents did. The new coalition government was headed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the former finance minister in Mr. Gandhi’s government, who had switched from Congress to the Janata Dal party.

The BJP saw its seats in Parliament jump to 85 from two, according to election commission results. It used its new power to support the new government and give it a working majority in Parliament. That gave the BJP huge leverage which it would exercise, over Ayodhya, in the following months.

**

The BJP’s sudden prominence thrust Lal Krishna Advani, one of the party’s senior leaders, to the forefront of New Delhi politics.

Almost a year later, he gained national attention when, on Sept. 25, 1990, he began a cross-country journey in an air-conditioned mini-bus made to look like a chariot and decorated with marigold flowers, according to Mr. Advani’s autobiography. Ram rode a chariot into battle, according to Hindu scriptures.

Mr. Advani began the trip from Somnath, in the western state of Gujarat. Somnath is, like Ayodhya, one of Hinduism's holiest sites. A temple there dedicated to the god Shiva, the destroyer, had been repeatedly razed by Muslim invaders over centuries. But construction of a new temple in Somnath had begun in 1947 with the blessing of the government in New Delhi, making it a symbolic starting point for his journey.

Mr. Advani planned to reach Ayodhya by Oct. 30. That was the day that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Hindu organization, set for “karseva” -- religious work -- to begin in Ayodhya. The religious work envisaged was the construction of a Ram temple on the site in dispute between Hindus and Muslims.

Mr. Advani, now 85 years old, declined to be interviewed. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said through an aide.

Slender, with dark-rimmed glasses, a neatly-trimmed moustache and a circle of white hair below his bald pate, Mr. Advani grew up in a devout Hindu household in pre-Partition Karachi, now Pakistan’s largest city. At the age of 14, he joined the RSS, the hard-line Hindu group.

He moved to Rajasthan as an RSS organizer before becoming a journalist and political apparatchik. He was a co-founder of the BJP in 1980.

Along the chariot’s route, Mr. Advani encountered dramatic scenes of devotion: the chariot itself was worshipped as divine, he wrote. In short speeches – he made 20 a day -- from a platform on the chariot, he spoke about how the “power of devotion towards Ram can unleash people’s power,” he wrote.

In his autobiography, Mr. Advani claimed the route the chariot took was peaceful. Government officials and published accounts from that time said his journey sparked widespread violence elsewhere between Hindus and Muslims.

**

As Mr. Advani rode across India and the deadline approached for the start of temple construction on Oct. 30, 1990, the nation was on edge.

State officials in Uttar Pradesh, where Ayodhya is located, worried about the potential for large-scale violence. In early October that year, false rumors had spread in one area that Muslims had killed hundreds of Hindus, including butchering women and children. Riots erupted, leaving 80 people dead, all but one of them Muslim, according to a later published account.

In mid-October, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the new prime minister, sought a compromise on Ayodhya that would reduce the tension.

He summoned Swaminathan Gurumurthy from Chennai to New Delhi. Mr. Gurumurthy -- a wiry, spry man and chartered accountant by training -- was an adviser to the powerful then-publisher of the Indian Express newspaper, Ramnath Goenka, and an interlocutor for the RSS. The organization’s approval was viewed as key to Hindu support for a deal.

In a series of meetings at the prime minister’s residence, Mr. Singh, his advisers, and Mr. Gurumurthy discussed the idea of a presidential ordinance, effectively an executive order.

The idea was for the central government to acquire all the land around the Babri Masjid. Most of the land would be handed over to a trust run by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Hindu organization, Mr. Gurumurthy said in an interview. But the Babri Masjid and another small parcel would be kept by the government and referred for deliberations to the Supreme Court.

The court would be asked to decide whether there had previously been a Ram temple on that site, said Mr. Gurumurthy. If so, the assumption was that the site would be given to Hindus. BJP leaders, including Mr. Advani, supported the initiative.

Muslim leaders found out that an ordinance was being considered but they had not been consulted, said Zafaryab Jilani, the lawyer and convener of the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee.

A delegation of Muslim leaders went to question the prime minister at his residence, Mr. Jilani said. Mr. Singh denied there was any plan for an ordinance: “No, no. When I have, I will discuss with you,” Mr. Jilani said the prime minister told them.

But on the night of Oct. 18, the prime minister agreed to pass the ordinance and it was issued the following day.

When the Muslim leaders heard what had happened, they felt deceived, Mr. Jilani said. And they opposed the ordinance because they felt the site of the mosque was sacred land that could not be owned by the government.

They met again the following day with the prime minister. “You are very much annoyed,” Mr. Singh told them, according to Mr. Jilani. “I cannot afford to have you people annoyed.” It was clear Mr. Singh was having second thoughts.

Mr. Gurumurthy said that the prime minister and his advisers had always appeared “tentative” about the ordinance. Mr. Singh “never looked confident in this entire period,” he added. But once the ordinance had been issued, Mr. Gurumurthy figured the prime minister and his advisers “would stick by it.”

Instead, soon after, the government issued a second ordinance that simply canceled the first ordinance, leaving the Ayodhya issue unresolved.

Mr. Gurumurthy said he confronted the prime minister. “You have done greatest harm to the country,” he said he told him. The prime minister was silent, he said. They never met again; Mr. Singh is now deceased.

The flip-flop on the ordinance set up a confrontation between the BJP and the government it supported.

Soon after, Mr. Advani was apprehended in the state of Bihar by local authorities and prevented from reaching Ayodhya. He was later released but the chariot drive stopped. The BJP withdrew its support from Mr. Singh’s government, leaving it short of a majority in Parliament.

Heavy security was placed in Ayodhya to deter Hindu activists, known as “karsevaks,” from arriving for the Oct. 30 start date of construction, or karseva.

But many slipped in. Some climbed the domes of the Babri Masjid and damaged the building. Police fought the crowd and later opened fire. The death toll was 16, according to an official government account. The BJP claims more than 50 were killed.

Soon after, Mr. Singh’s government faced a no-confidence vote in Parliament. It lost.

**

 CHAPTER FIVE

In the months following the demolition of the Babri Masjid on Dec.6, 1992, the government of India enacted a new law to acquire a large area of land in Ayodhya that included the site where the mosque stood.

After the mosque’s demolition, Hindu activists had hastily built a makeshift temple to Ram Lalla, the statue of an infant Lord Ram that had been placed in the mosque in 1949. The new law set aside all the suits that claimed title to the site but allowed Hindu worship there to continue.

Simultaneously, through a process known as a presidential reference, the government put a question to the Supreme Court: Did a “Hindu temple or any Hindu religious structure” exist where the mosque had been built in 1528?

Muslim representatives challenged the legality of the new law and the presidential reference, saying that the government could not acquire a holy site. They also claimed no temple that was being used for worship was torn down to make the mosque, as Hindus contended. The Nirmohi Akhara, the sect of sadhus in Ayodhya that was part of the title litigation, also challenged the government's acquisition of the land, which it claimed for itself.

A bench of five justices started deliberations in September 1993.

The solicitor general told the court that the government was committed to “the construction of a Ram temple and a mosque,” but needed the Supreme Court to decide their location.

After a year, the court declined to answer the question in the presidential reference, saying it was “superfluous and unnecessary,” even though it was a major bone of contention between the two sides.

The court, by a majority decision, upheld the law acquiring the land. But it said the government should hand over the small plot of about a quarter-acre, where the mosque and its two courtyards had stood, once the suits claiming title to the site were decided. The justices also reinstated those lawsuits, which had been transferred to the high court in Lucknow from Faizabad.

In its judgment, the Supreme Court couldn’t resist a commentary on what happened on the day of the Babri Masjid’s demolition. The Hindu community must, it said, "bear the cross on its chest for the misdeed of the miscreants reasonably suspected to belong to their religious fold.”

In early 1995, the frontlines of the dispute shifted back to the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court. The suits claiming title to the site were bundled together to be part of the same case.

On the Muslim side, there was the Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Board of Waqfs, which was responsible for maintaining Muslim holy sites, and six individual co-plaintiffs from Ayodhya and neighboring areas.

On the Hindu side, there were three suits. One filed by Gopal Singh Visharad, an Ayodhya local, in 1950. Another, filed in 1959, by the Nirmohi Akhara, the sect of sadhus dedicated to serving Ram. And another, filed in 1989, that added a new dimension to the proceedings. (A fourth suit, filed in 1950 by another sadhu in Ayodhya had been withdrawn.)

**

The 1989 suit, the most recent to be filed, was the work of Deoki Nandan Agarwal, a retired Hindu judge who lived in Allahabad, a city in Uttar Pradesh. where Ayodhya is located.

He worked late into the night for years on the filing and told his daughter, Minu, that he was typing up “the most important case in India,” she said in an interview.

Justice Agarwal was frustrated by how slowly the litigation over the site was proceeding. He believed the evidence was clear that the site belonged to Ram, his daughter said.

In his suit, he made the lead plaintiff Bhagwan Sri Ram Virajman – Ram himself.

Indian law recognizes religious figures as “juristic persons.” Justice Agarwal is named in the suit as a supplementary plaintiff, Ram’s “next friend.”

The defendants were all the other parties who had previously laid claim to the site, from the Nirmohi Akhara to the waqf board.

Ram was “extremely unhappy” with the length of time the litigation was taking as well and with the deteriorating management of the site, Mr. Agarwal’s suit said. It called for the plaintiffs to be given title to the entire premises since it was Ram’s birthplace.

**

The recording of oral evidence started in the summer of 1996.

The Lucknow court is a collection of tall red-brick buildings, a blend of British and Mughal architecture. It has spacious arched corridors painted yellow and light blue that lead visitors around the roughly 30 court rooms in the complex.

In most, a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, shown in contemplative pose, hangs on the wall behind the elevated bench where the judges sit.

In the courtroom hearing the Babri Masjid case, two court typists and two stenographers recorded witness statements. Three judges presided. The judges and the lawyers identified more than 80 issues for the court to decide, based on the claims made by the four parties—one Muslim and three Hindu.

The key issues were about the construction and nature of the disputed building and the land around it: Was it the birthplace of Ram, which Hindus claimed but Muslims disputed? And was the building that stood there a mosque as defined by Islamic law, as Muslims claimed but Hindus disputed?

The Muslims produced their witnesses first – a total of 33 in all. Experts in Islam testified that the Babri Masjid was a proper mosque even though the building had some unusual architectural touches like images on the pillars and no minarets.

Historians and archaeologists for the Muslim side testified that there was no historical or religious evidence to show that the disputed site was the birthplace of Lord Ram.

Eight of those expert witnesses were Hindus. They volunteered to testify, saying they wanted to stand for “facts” and defend secularism, according to the lawyers for the Muslim side.

Mohammad Hashim Ansari, the tailor who was living in Ayodhya when the legal dispute began in 1950, stood in the witness box in 1996, 46 years later.

A co-plaintiff in the waqf board suit, he was then 75 years old, his hair gray and his face laced with wrinkles.

He started each day’s testimony with an oath, “In the name of Allah,” that he would speak only the truth.

Mr. Ansari’s memory was occasionally hazy. When he testified that he had offered his first prayer at the Babri Masjid in 1938, one Hindu lawyer during cross-examination asked: “Which month of 1938?”

Mr. Ansari shot back, “Had I known that there would be this dispute on the Babri Masjid, I would have noted and remembered it,” according to a copy of his testimony.

He remained firm on issues of faith. A Hindu lawyer read a verse from the Koran and asked him to define the word “kafir.” Mr. Ansari said the term meant “people who don’t consider God as one and don’t follow the Book,” according to his testimony.

When the lawyer asked him whether Hindus are “kafir” by this definition, he said: “Those who don’t believe in the formless God are ‘kafir.’”

**

On the Hindu side, Deoki Nandan Agarwal, the retired judge whose case made Ram a plaintiff, testified despite a heart problem. A special provision was made for recording his statement at his residence in Allahabad.

At the age of about 80, Mr. Agarwal spoke with gusto when describing the basis of his claim, according to lawyers on both sides. He testified both on behalf of Ram and himself, as Ram’s “next friend” in the suit.

He said that according to Hinduism, an idol is not important for worshipping but many devotees worship a statue of their deity to gain access to the divine.

His claim hinged on his contention that the site was the “birthplace of Lord Ram” and that when the Babri Masjid was built, “Ram was its owner.” He said Muslims who had offered prayers at the site in the past did so without the “permission of the owner of the land.”

When the Muslims’ lawyers asked the basis of his claim, Mr. Agarwal answered that it was the tradition of Hindu belief, which was at least 2,000 years old and was passed down through generations.

He died at his home before his cross-examination could be completed.

When Rajendra Singh, the son of Gopal Singh Visharad, took the stand, his father – who was the first to file a legal claim in the dispute -- was dead. Rajendra Singh was a retired employee of a state bank, aged in his late-60s.

He acknowledged in an interview that he didn’t know much about his father’s suit. His statement is one of the shortest of the 54 witnesses on the Hindu side.

During cross-examination, Mr. Singh said he believed Ram’s birth had taken place hundreds of thousands of years ago. “This I have heard from my ancestors and I have also read about it,” he said.

Bhaskar Das, the head of the Nirmohi Akhara sect, the third Hindu plaintiff, took a different line from the other Hindus.

Contradicting their testimony, he claimed that “no incident took place in the disputed building” on the night of Dec. 22, 1949, the date the idol of Ram appeared in the Babri Masjid.

In an interview, Mr. Das maintained that nothing happened then. He added that the building had at no time been a mosque, either: “That place was always a temple owned by Nirmohi Akhara.”

During the cross-examination by a lawyer for the Muslims, Mr. Das said his knowledge about Lord Ram’s life was based on the “story” he had heard from Hindu sages.

The lawyer asked him whether that story had any description of a temple at Ram’s birthplace. Mr. Das quoted a verse from a colloquial version of the Ramayan, the sacred text of Ram’s life, written by a 16th-century poet, Tulsidas.

Citing a quote from Ram, Mr. Das chanted: “My birthplace is this beautiful city, to the north of it flows the sacred Sarayu,” the river by Ayodhya.

Just funding the case took a toll on the Nirmohi Akhara, said another senior sadhu in the sect. The sect sold a plot of land near Ayodhya to buy a jeep to ferry witnesses to the court. “We lost a lot of money in litigation,” the sadhu said in an interview.

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