IF there was one thing absolutely clear in the 2019 Babri Masjid judgement by India’s supreme court, it was the conclusion by the five-member bench of the absence of any evidence, legal, historical or archaeological, that the 16th-century mosque was built by destroying a Hindu temple.
The Archaeological Survey of India did claim to find older pillars from around the site of the mosque. The court concluded they were several centuries older than the time of the mosque’s construction and there was no valid explanation that they showed the destruction of a Hindu temple.
The dead rubber question has resurfaced, however, after former chief justice of India Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud claimed last week that erecting the mosque during the reign of the first Mughal emperor Babur was itself an act of desecration.
This was a loaded claim coming from a judge who was on the five-member bench that handed the site of the mosque, which Hindu zealots had destroyed, to those that had supported its destruction against the supreme court’s orders to keep the mosque safe. In the end, though the court decided that it was a criminal act to destroy the mosque, it went on to pave the way for the temple’s construction and its eventual inauguration by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the eve of the 2024 elections. Elements so conspired that the BJP lost the seat from Ayodhya to an opposition Dalit candidate.
The Babri Masjid has gone to the winner of the curious court case and temple has come up in its place; possibly it was the only way to contemplate any peace at all given the current ideological preferences of the ruling elite. And yet it may not bring closure to the trauma that continues to be inflicted on the country by state institutions, not excluding the judiciary. In the same interview with intrepid journalist Sreenivasan Jain, justice Chandrachud made another troubling assertion. He was asked why he had allowed another Mughal-era mosque in Varanasi to be surveyed, yielding to Hindu revivalist demands and violating the law that all historical monuments built before independence would be protected by law.
The judge said this was in deference to the fact that Hindus were praying from inside the mosque’s compound. The following day, Jain paused the clip where the judge made the assertion and ran a fact-check, which clarified that the claim was wrong.
Justice Haider Abbas of the Allahabad High Court — who dealt with the Ayodhya case for years — had told me very lucidly that the claim about Lord Ram being born at the exact site of the then intact mosque was simply not justiciable. India’s secular constitution and its secular laws carry a different brief from religious courts of some other countries. Secular law cannot determine and is not equipped to decide whether a certain god existed, much less that he or she was born at a particular place in this or that district. However, justice Chandrachud’s decision bequeathed 2.77 acres of land, which had been contested for decades, to Ram Lalla Virajman or the infant deity Ram. The Holy Roman Empire owned a lot of land, but it never had Jesus as its owner.
Justice Chandrachud’s decision bequeathed 2.77 acres of land, which had been contested for decades, to the infant deity Ram.
Just as professional historians or a surgical oncologist cannot supplant judges to decide lawsuits it’s best for the judiciary to keep its distance from pretending to know more about history or oncology than those trained and qualified for the purpose. Suppose Romila Thapar or Harbans Mukhia — though they would frown witheringly at the idea — had led the supreme court bench that decided the fate of the Babri Masjid dispute in favour of Hindu extremists. You could bet your last penny that the outcome would be happily different, and, in any case, only well-grounded historical facts would be entertained.
After all, the Ayodhya contest was turned into one about faux historical evidence and ownership claims. But could one have marshalled historical evidence about matters of faith? There are science books about how we may have evolved from fish. But there are only religious books and oral traditions about how we were created.
Justice Chandrachud did two other things that betrayed an inkling of where he stood in the saffron surge now visiting India. He says he took the advice of his family deity before delivering the Ayodhya judgement. Then he did what judges would cringe at being made to do. As head of the Allahabad High Court, he had kept a distance between political leadership and the judiciary. In his last days as chief justice, Chandrachud abandoned the rule. He invited Prime Minister Modi to his home to be watched by the nation jointly offering prayers to Hindu deity Ganpati.
Be that as it may, regardless of Chandrachud’s troubling views — and he is surely not alone in the judiciary to hold them — it is actually less than relevant with enlightened societies as to who desecrated whose temples or mosques or churches many centuries ago. The predominantly Hindu Indian state of Kerala hosts among the oldest mosques and synagogues.
The St Mary’s Thiruvithamcode Arappally in Kanyakumari, the oldest church in India was founded by Thomas the Apostle in 63 AD. However, many churches in Europe, admired for their architecture, were, in fact, usurped from old pagan temples. Hindu rulers destroyed Buddhist and Jain temples. Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has converted a former church into a mosque. On the flip side, Muslim Indonesians don’t just preserve their Hindu and Buddhist temples, they flaunt them as a core of Indonesia’s heritage.
Each day a story from the Ramayana is enacted at special venues. All the actors and actresses are Muslim, including orthodox Muslims. The Indian prime minister has taken credit for a grand Hindu temple built in the UAE. However, it was the Muslim rulers of the UAE who showed up as more enlightened.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2025
