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17. Militant Hinduism

Ayodhya and the Momentum

of Hindu Nationalism

john stratton hawley

This essay was previously published as “Ayodhya and the Momentum of Hindu Nationalism,”
based on a version that appeared in SIPA News,Columbia University School of International and
Public Affairs, Spring 1993, 17–21.

The galvanizing event in the recent history of religion in India was the destruction
of the so-called Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, a sleepy pilgrimage town on the
Gangetic Plain southeast of Delhi. There, on December 6, 1992, Hindu militants
pulled down a Mughal mosque stone by stone as two hundred thousand people
watched and cheered. They were clearing the ground for a massive temple to Rama
on the site they believe to be this god ’s birthplace—a site, therefore, where no
mosque ever belonged.
The dispute about Rama’s birthplace is a long and intricate one. Many Hindus
would date it to the construction of the mosque itself, by a lieutenant of the Mughal
emperor Babar in 1528. Why but for the fact that Ayodhya was a major Hindu place
of pilgrimage, they say, would this little town have warranted such a grand Muslim
edifice? Activists typically go on to claim that a Hindu temple on that exact site was
destroyed to make way for the mosque. This claim, plausible enough when one con-
siders the history of other sacred places in India and around the world, has nonethe-
less been hotly disputed on the basis of the evidence at Ayodhya itself. Academics
have weighed in on both sides of the debate.
Turmoils at Ayodhya have had a way of coinciding with major political shifts.