All you need to know about Babri Masjid

It's been 22 years since the demolition of the Babri Masjid, but in the latest sting operation by Cobrapost, it was revealed that senior BJP leaders LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi knew about the plan and the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Kalyan Singh also had information a day prior to the demolition. The Babri Masjid was demolished on December 6, 1992.

Little Brief about Babri Masjid

The Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, a city in Uttar Pradesh. It was destroyed in 1992 when a political rally developed into a riot involving 150,000 people, despite a commitment to the Indian Supreme Court by the rally organisers that the mosque would not be harmed. More than 2,000 people were killed in ensuing riots in many major cities in India including Mumbai and Delhi.

About Babri Masjid

The mosque was constructed in 1527 on the orders of Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India, and was named after him. Before the 1940s, the mosque was also called Masjid-i-Janmasthan. The Babri Mosque was one of the largest mosques in Uttar Pradesh, a state in India with some 31 million Muslims. Numerous petitions by Hindus to the courts resulted in Hindu worshippers of Rama gaining access to the site.

The political, historical and socio-religious debate over the history and location of the Babri Mosque and whether a previous temple was demolished or modified to create it, is known as the Ayodhya Debate.

2010 Court Verdict

A land title case on the site was lodged in the Allahabad High Court, the verdict of which was pronounced on 30 September 2010. In the landmark hearing, the three judges of The Allahabad High Court ruled that the 2.77 acres (1.12 ha) of Ayodhya land be divided into 3 parts, with 1/3 going to the Ram Lalla or Infant Lord Rama represented by the Hindu Maha Sabha for the construction of the Ram temple, 1/3 going to the Islamic Sunni Waqf Board and the remaining 1/3 going to a Hindu religious denomination Nirmohi Akhara. While the three-judge bench was not unanimous that the disputed structure was constructed after demolition of a temple, it did agree that a temple or a temple structure predated the mosque at the same site. The excavations by the Archeological Survey of India were heavily used as evidence by the court that the predating structure was a massive Hindu religious building.

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