Communal conflict and riots swept through the country like a carpet of bombs, like a tsunami of hate, like a pandemic, in the aftermath of Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. In one of the most devastating chapters of Indian History, more than 2,000 people lost their lives.
But the conflict lived on – in courts of law, in the heart of politics, in fragments of a broken collective conscience and it transmuted and donned different garbs.
Even after a unanimous 1,045-page judgment was passed by a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court in 2019 allotting the 2.77 acres of disputed land to Ram Lalla Virajman (and ordering that five acres of land in a prominent area of Ayodhya be given to the Sunni Waqf Board to build another mosque), it would not abate.
In their verdict, the apex court might have attempted a fence-mending, balancing act of sorts, but what has followed since is a fresh frenzy of legal disputes over religious claims: some fairly new, some a frenetic re-visitation of older conflicts, including a barrage of petitions contesting the religious origins of ancient mosques in Varanasi and Mathura.