The moment
The Babri Masjid was built at Ayodhya in 1528–29 under the Mughal emperor Babur, on a site that Hindu tradition holds to be the birthplace of Rama. Images of Rama were placed inside it in December 1949 and the building was locked; from the 1980s a campaign to replace it with a temple, carried by L. K. Advani's chariot procession of 1990, drew mass support. On 6 December 1992 a crowd of Hindu volunteers, put at about 150,000, tore the mosque down in a few hours while police stood by, and the riots that followed across India killed between 1,700 and more than 2,000 people. In 2019 the Supreme Court gave the site to a trust to build a temple, which opened in January 2024, and granted five acres elsewhere for a mosque.
People: L. K. Advani