Rama's birthplace at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh has been the site of the most consequential religious dispute in modern India, and the atlas states the sequence rather than the merits.
The Babri Masjid stood on the site, and an inscription attributed its construction to Mir Baqi, a commander of the Mughal emperor Babur, in the sixteenth century. The claim on the other side is that the mosque was built over a temple marking Rama's birthplace. Litigation over the site is documented from the nineteenth century. In 1949 images of Rama appeared inside the mosque overnight; the building was locked and the dispute became a title suit that ran for decades.
The Vishva Hindu Parishad and allied organisations made the site a national campaign through the 1980s. On 6 December 1992 a crowd assembled at Ayodhya demolished the mosque. Riots followed across India, with deaths generally estimated around two thousand, and bombings in Bombay in March 1993 killed over two hundred more. The Liberhan Commission, appointed days after the demolition, reported in 2009.
The Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment on 9 November 2019. It held that the demolition was an egregious violation of the rule of law, that the evidence did not establish that the mosque was built by demolishing a temple, and that the Archaeological Survey of India had found an underlying non-Islamic structure without establishing what it was. It awarded the disputed site to the Hindu parties for a temple and directed that five acres elsewhere in Ayodhya be allotted for a mosque. A temple was consecrated on the site in January 2024, with the Prime Minister present.
Roughly a hundred and seventy-five million Muslims live in India, and Rama is worshipped by very large numbers of Hindus who took no part in any of this. Both facts belong in the account.