25 years on, India has still to live down the shame of razing Babri Masjid

The CBI is deliberately prolonging the criminal trial while the BJP does its best to use the Ayodhya dispute to once again stokes the flames of hatred

India is perhaps the only country in the world where a real crime – committed in broad daylight, with evidence recorded by video cameras and presented in court by prosecutors – counts for less than an imaginary transgression that supposedly happened five centuries ago and left behind no witness accounts or contemporary records to establish what transpired.

On December 6, 1992, top leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party – the party that today runs the government at the Centre – gathered in Ayodhya as part of a well-planned conspiracy to demolish a historic monument that was part of the cultural and