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The dust of the domes had not settled before the consequences began arriving, and they arrived at every scale the republic possesses, constitutional, communal, and criminal, the winter of 1992 and 1993 becoming the republic’s darkest season since partition. This article files the aftermath, the dismissals and the doctrine they produced, the riots and their commissions, and the legal architecture built over the levelled site, the connective tissue between the batch’s catastrophe and its distant verdicts.
The constitutional response was the era’s most sweeping use of central power. President’s rule, proclaimed over Uttar Pradesh on the evening of December 6 itself, was extended within days to the three other BJP governed states, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh, on the reasoning that governments of the demolition movement’s party could not be trusted with the secular order’s protection, and the dismissals’ challenge produced, in the Supreme Court’s SR Bommai judgment of 1994, the constitutional landmark of the sequence, the court upholding the dismissals, subjecting President’s rule to judicial review thereafter, and declaring secularism part of the constitution’s basic structure, the demolition thus hardening, by reaction, the very doctrine it had assaulted. The centre’s parallel measures, the bans on the RSS, VHP, and Jamaat e Islami among others, ran their course through tribunals with the usual mixed fates, and the Narasimha Rao government coupled crackdown with promise, the prime minister’s assurance that the mosque would be rebuilt entering the record beside the site’s realities, an assurance history filed under the era’s unredeemed currency.
The human bill was paid in the cities, and the ledger states it plainly. The riots that ran from December 6 through January 1993 killed, by the aggregated official and scholarly counts, on the order of two thousand people across India, the majority Muslim, with Bombay the epicentre, its December and January convulsions taking around nine hundred lives and its horror documented by the Srikrishna Commission, whose report found the January phase organised and named the Shiv Sena’s role, findings that produced, in the pattern this batch has established, negligible prosecution. Surat, Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Calcutta, and the towns of UP itself, Kanpur’s toll the state’s worst, filled the map, the violence’s sequel arriving in March 1993 with the Bombay serial blasts, the underworld’s declared retaliation killing two hundred and fifty seven and welding, in the security state’s files and the public’s memory, the chain this series records without endorsing any link’s logic, demolition, pogrom, and bombing, each atrocity licensed in its authors’ minds by the previous one, the spiral the subcontinent knows best.
Over the levelled site itself, law replaced the mosque. The union government acquired the disputed premises and sixty seven surrounding acres by the Ayodhya acquisition act of 1993, freezing the ground under central custody, and the Supreme Court’s Ismail Faruqui judgment of 1994 upheld the acquisition while declining the presidential reference’s invitation to adjudicate history, its observation that a mosque was not essential to Islamic practice for acquisition purposes becoming a contested fixture of the later arguments, and the title suits, revived, proceeded at Allahabad for a further decade and a half, the High Court’s three judge bench delivering in 2010 the partition verdict, the site split three ways among the deity, the Nirmohi Akhara, and the Sunni Waqf Board, a solomonic disposal that satisfied no party, was stayed by the Supreme Court within months, and set the stage for the final adjudication the next article reports.
Politics, meanwhile, metabolised the catastrophe with the heartland’s characteristic speed. The UP election of 1993, held under the President’s rule the aftermath began with, produced the era’s most remarkable result, the alliance of Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party and Kanshi Ram’s BSP, Mandal’s two streams united, halting the BJP’s wave in the demolition’s own state within a year of the domes’ fall, the backward and Dalit coalition’s brief government, and its violent unravelling at a Lucknow guest house, belonging to the batches ahead. The demolition had aimed to consolidate a Hindu vote across caste, and the state’s first verdict after it reasserted caste’s primacy, the two currents’ war resuming over the rubble, unresolved.
For the UP Files, the aftermath’s file closes on the era’s net accounting, a mosque destroyed, some thousands dead, a doctrine strengthened, a party system remade, and every underlying question deferred to courts that would take another generation to answer. The answer, when it came in November 2019, is the next article, and the series carries the winter of 1992 into it, as the judgment itself did.
