In 1990, at a time when India was becoming rapidly more polarized, the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), LK Advani, led a religious-political march across the country. The ‘Ram Rath Yatra’ took place in support of demands for a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram to be built on the site of the Babri mosque in the temple town of Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.
It toured India from September to October 1990 and left in its wake communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims in the north of the country. Two years later, the Babri mosque was destroyed by a mob of fanatics, and in 2019 the Supreme Court handed the site exclusively to Hindus (See ‘Control alt delete’, NI 542).
