By Omar Rashid

New Delhi: The Supreme Court may have paved the way for a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya through its verdict in 2019, but the foundation of the structure had already been laid with the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 by a mob of ‘karsevaks’ who had gathered in the Uttar Pradesh town on the call of Sangh parivar leaders.

The perpetrators of the 1992 crime committed in broad daylight and on camera – described by the apex court in 2019 as an “egregious violation of the rule of law” and also “a serious violation of the rule of law” – went unpunished. The fight for justice in the Babri Masjid demolition case seems to have ended on November 9, 2022, exactly three years after the apex court awarded the disputed land where the Mughal-era mosque stood for centuries to Hindus for the construction of a grand Ram temple, even as it recognised the illegality of the 1992 demolition.

It is a combination of these two events – the December 6 vandalism and the protracted legal battle over the title of the land – that eventually created the conditions for the pran pratishtha ceremony of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya to be held on January 22, an event to be presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi amid unprecedented state intervention in an ostensibly Hindu religious event. Champat Rai, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader who was one of the key accused in the Babri Masjid demolition, is today the main coordinator of the Ram Mandir event in the capacity of the general secretary of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust.

A year after the Supreme Court verdict, a special Central Bureau of Investigation court in Lucknow on September 30, 2020 acquitted all 32 living accused in the Babri Masjid demolition conspiracy case. Most of the accused persons were linked to the Sangh parivar, in particular the Bharatiya Janata Party and the VHP, which are affiliates of the Hindu nationalist socio-political outfit, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Senior BJP leaders L.K. Advani (former deputy prime minister), Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti, Vinay Katiyar and former UP chief minister Kalyan Singh, under whose watch the mosque was demolished, were among those charged and acquitted. Two Muslim litigants from Ayodhya, Haji Mehboob and Syed Akhlaq Ahmad, whose property was also vandalised in the violence unleashed by karsevaks in the hours following the demolition of the mosque, approached the Allahabad high court against the CBI court judgment. But on November 9, 2022, a division bench of the Allahabad high court dismissed their appeal. The high court bench of Justices Ramesh Sinha and Saroj Yadav ruled that since Mehboob and Ahmad could not be defined as ‘victims’, they had no locus to challenge the CBI court judgment.

The matter seems to have died there, as this was not challenged in the apex court, according to lawyers concerned with the issue.

Mehboob was not available for comment. M.R. Shamshad, a Supreme Court lawyer part of the Babri Masjid cases in the apex court, said Mehboob decided against approaching theSupreme Court to challenge the high court’s dismissal of the appeal.

This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here .