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The dispute this series left at its origin in the Ayodhya article of the sacred batch returned to national life through a sequence of dates that every account of modern India must now memorise, and this article assembles them, from the locked gates of 1949 to the chariot of 1990, as the movement built itself from a district court file into the largest mass mobilisation of independent India. The register throughout is the series’ legal one, events as the record holds them, claims attributed to their makers, the courts’ later findings cited where they exist.
The modern chapter opened on the night of December 22, 1949, when idols of Ram Lalla appeared inside the Babri mosque, an installation the faithful proclaimed a miracle and the administration’s own records, examined by every subsequent inquiry and by the Supreme Court’s 2019 judgment, treated as a planned placement carried out by named individuals with the district administration’s connivance, the deputy commissioner KK Nair’s conduct entering the historiography, and the 2019 court describing the act as a desecration of the mosque. The state’s response fixed the stalemate, the premises locked, worship by proxy priest allowed, the suits filed on all sides consolidating into the title litigation that would run seven decades, and Ayodhya returned to its pilgrimage quiet for a generation, the file open and the gates shut.
The mobilisation began in 1984, when the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the sangh family’s religious front, adopted the site’s liberation as its central campaign, convening the sant assemblies, the dharma sansads, that gave the movement its monastic command, founding the Bajrang Dal as its youth wing, and framing the demand in the idiom that carried it, not a property claim but the birthplace itself, Ram Janmabhoomi, with Kashi and Mathura, this series has already noted, named in the same breath for later. The first political yield came judicially, on February 1, 1986, when the Faizabad district court ordered the site’s locks opened for Hindu worship, a ruling executed within the hour and televised by evening, and the timing’s context belongs in the record, the Rajiv Gandhi government having weeks earlier legislated to reverse the Shah Bano judgment under conservative Muslim pressure, and the locks episode being read, by participants and scholars across the spectrum, as the same government’s compensating gesture to the other flank, the two capitulations, critics of the era’s Congress hold, legitimising both communalisms at a stroke, a judgment the party’s defenders contest and the decade’s results argue for.
The movement then built its instruments of scale. The Ram shila pujans of 1989 consecrated bricks in villages across the country for the temple’s foundation, processions carrying them toward Ayodhya through a landscape the ceremonies themselves inflamed, the riots along the routes, Bhagalpur’s horror in neighbouring Bihar the worst, entering the era’s ledger, and the shilanyas that November, the next article’s subject, converted the campaign into electoral currency. The BJP, which had adopted the temple demand at its Palampur resolution of 1989, rose on the movement’s tide from two Lok Sabha seats to eighty five, and in September 1990 its president LK Advani mounted the campaign’s supreme theatre, the rath yatra, a Toyota dressed as a chariot rolling from Somnath, the temple restored at independence, toward Ayodhya, ten thousand kilometres of rallies whose imagery, the leader as charioteer, the volunteers in saffron headbands, defined the era, and whose wake, the record must state, was traced by communal violence in town after town along the route, a correlation the movement attributed to its opponents’ provocations and its critics to the mobilisation itself, both readings preserved in the era’s inquiries.
The yatra’s interception closed the act. On October 23, 1990, the Janata Dal government of Bihar under Lalu Prasad Yadav arrested Advani at Samastipur, the BJP withdrew support from VP Singh’s government in Delhi, and the kar sevaks already converging on Ayodhya by the tens of thousands collided, a week later, with the police lines of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Uttar Pradesh, the firing of October 30 and November 2 that the next article documents. The movement had, in six years, moved the dispute from a locked courtroom to the centre of the republic’s politics, made a temple the axis of a party system, and assembled at one small city the forces whose collision, in 1992, the batch’s central article records. The UP Files proceeds date by date, as the register requires.
