Thirty-three years ago, on December 6, 1992, a 16th-century mosque was reduced to rubble by a frenzied mob orchestrated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its political fronts. The demolition was not a spontaneous outburst of Hindu sentiment; it was the meticulously planned culmination of a hate campaign that branded Indian Muslims as “Babur-ki-aulad” and the Babri Masjid as a symbol of historical humiliation.
What is less remembered today is that the Indian state and, later, its highest judiciary became willing accomplices in legitimising this crime. The Supreme Court’s 2019 Ayodha verdict, far from delivering justice, handed the site to the very forces that had violated the Constitution, desecrated a place of worship, and breached solemn assurances given to the Court itself.
Here are the principal lies that were sold to the nation—and the irrefutable facts that were deliberately ignored.
Lie 1: Babri Masjid was built after demolishing a Ram Janmabhoomi temple in 1528–29
This is the foundational myth of the entire movement. Narendra Modi continues to repeat it. On November 25, 2025, while participating in the flag-hoisting ceremony at the new Ram temple, he spoke of “the pain of centuries” and a “yajna whose fire burned for 500 years.”
Yet not a single pre-19th-century Hindu text—devotional, historical or theological—mentions the destruction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya by Babar or Mir Baqi. Goswami Tulsidas, who lived in Ayodhya and completed the Ramcharitmanas in 1575–76 (almost half a century after the alleged demolition), is silent on any such event. The greatest modernisers of Hinduism—Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo—never referred to any such destruction. Even Adi Shankaracharya, who established the five great peeths to revive Vedic dharma, did not count Ayodhya among the holiest sites.
Most crucially, the Supreme Court’s own 1,045-page judgment of November 9, 2019 categorically refused to endorse the claim that the mosque was built after destroying a temple. The Court found no evidence that the mosque was constructed on the ruins of a temple dedicated to Ram’s birthplace.
The Court did, however, record two devastating facts:
1. Muslims were illegally dispossessed of the mosque only on the night of 22/23 December 1949 when idols were smuggled inside and planted under the central dome.
2. The mosque was destroyed on December 6, 1992 “in breach of the order of status quo and an assurance given to this Court” — an “egregious violation of the rule of law”.
Having recorded these findings, the Court still awarded the entire disputed site to the destroyers of the mosque. What the kar sevaks could not achieve through crime in 1992, the Supreme Court gifted them through jurisprudence in 2019.
Lie 2: The Ram temple was needed for “restorative justice” after centuries of Muslim iconoclasm
The narrative portrays medieval India as one long saga of Hindu temples destroyed by Muslim rulers. Yet after roughly a millennium of so-called “Muslim rule”, the first British census of 1871–72 found Hindus and Sikhs still forming 73.5 % of the population and Muslims only 21.5 %. Large-scale forced conversion or demographic replacement simply did not happen.
More importantly, the armies of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals were overwhelmingly commanded and financed by Hindu nobles and soldiers. Aurangzeb’s campaigns against Shivaji were led by Rajput generals Jai Singh and Jaswant Singh. Akbar’s wars against Rana Pratap were fought by Man Singh. The prime minister (Diwan-i-Ala) of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb was a Kayastha Hindu, Raghunath Ray.
Aurangzeb’s farmans granting land and cash to Hindu temples (including Mathura and Banaras) are still preserved. The Gauri Shankar and Jain Lal temples opposite Delhi’s Red Fort continued to function throughout his reign.
The idea of perpetual Hindu–Muslim civilisational conflict over temples is a 19th-century colonial construct, enthusiastically adopted and magnified by Hindutva ideologues in the 20th century.
Lie 3: The Ram temple movement represented the united will of all Hindu traditions
Four out of the five Shankaracharyas—the highest ecclesiastical authorities of Sanatan Dharma—boycotted the January 2024 pran pratishtha ceremony, declaring it unscriptural and politically motivated. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, whom the RSS routinely hails as a pillar of modern Hinduism, condemned the very ritual of pran pratishtha in his Satyarth Prakash as idolatrous and contrary to the Vedas.
The RSS’s monochromatic, Brahmanical version of Hinduism was rejected by large sections of Hindu society, including many Dalit, OBC and Adivasi communities who have historically faced exclusion from Ram temples.
Lie 4: Ayodhya has been a site of Hindu–Muslim conflict since the 16th century
The exact opposite is true. During the 1857 rebellion, Ayodhya witnessed exemplary Hindu–Muslim unity. Maulana Ameer Ali and Mahant Baba Ramcharan Das of Hanuman Garhi fought together against the British and were hanged from the same tree. Acchhan Khan and Shambhu Prasad Shukla led rebel forces side by side.
The British, alarmed by this unity, deliberately began to circulate stories of eternal Hindu–Muslim enmity. The Babri Masjid dispute itself remained dormant for centuries. It was revived only in the late 1940s when Hindu nationalist groups, with the connivance of local officials, placed idols inside the mosque in 1949—an act the Supreme Court later declared illegal.
Even after that provocative act, Muslims of Ayodhya did not resort to violence. They trusted the courts and the Constitution. The courts ultimately failed them.
Conclusion
The demolition of Babri Masjid was never a Hindu–Muslim fight. It was a direct assault by the RSS on the secular Indian state. Muslims did not mobilise to “defend” the mosque on December 6, 1992 because they trusted the assurances given by the RSS-BJP to Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and to the Supreme Court itself. Those assurances were brazenly violated while central armed forces watched as mute spectators.
Prime Minister Rao twice promised—once in Parliament and once from the Red Fort—that the mosque would be rebuilt at the same spot. That promise was also broken.
Today, the criminals of 1992 are hailed as heroes, and December 6 is celebrated as “Shaurya Divas”. A protected 464-year-old monument lies obliterated, and the Constitution’s guarantee of equality before law stands badly bruised.
The battle of Ayodhya was not about Ram’s birthplace. It was about whether India would remain a secular republic or become a Hindu Rashtra built on manufactured history and sanctified majoritarianism.
Thirty-three years later, that question remains unanswered.
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Link for some of S. Islam's original writings in and video interviews/debates: http://du-in.academia.edu/ShamsulIslam. Facebook: https://facebook.com/shamsul.islam.332. Twitter: @shamsforjustice. http://shamsforpeace.blogspot.com/. Link for procuring Shamsul Islam’s books in English, Hindi & Urdu: https://tinyurl.com/shams-books
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