Demolition Of The Babri Masjid

Date

1992

Category

Religion & ideology

Region

South Asia (India)

Era

Contemporary

Significance

The Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, was torn down by a Hindu nationalist mob on 6 December 1992, unleashing some of independent India's deadliest communal violence.

Tens of thousands of activists, mobilised by hardline Hindu organisations that claimed the mosque stood on the birthplace of the god Rama, overwhelmed security cordons and demolished the domes with hammers, pickaxes, and bare hands as leaders looked on. The destruction triggered riots across the subcontinent that killed around 2,000 people, most of them Muslims, and reverberated as far as Pakistan and Bangladesh, where Hindu temples were attacked in retaliation. The episode marked a decisive moment in the rise of Hindu nationalism as a mass political force and dealt a lasting blow to India's secular self-image. It fuelled cycles of retaliatory bloodshed for years, including the Mumbai bombings of 1993, and became a defining fault line in the country's politics. Decades later a court awarded the disputed site for a Hindu temple, closing one chapter of a dispute that had reshaped Indian public life.

Empires active in 1992

• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Yugoslavia
  1918 CE – 1992 CE

Related religion & ideology events

• Ayatollah Khomeini Issues the Rushdie Fatwa
  1989
• The Second Vatican Council
  11 October 1962 – 8 December 1965
• Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto
  21 February 1848
• Founding of the Muslim Brotherhood
  March 1928
• Founding of the Tablighi Jamaat
  c. 1926
• The Azusa Street Revival and the Birth of Pentecostalism
  1906–1909

Further reading

A Little History of Religion

The wider story

A Little History of Religion

Richard Holloway

Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.

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