The longest running religious dispute in modern India was decided in this state, and the way it was decided is as significant as the outcome.
The Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, built in the sixteenth century, stood on a site many Hindus hold to be the birthplace of Rama. Images were placed inside the mosque overnight in December 1949, the building was locked by the authorities, and worship of those images continued while Muslim prayer did not. Litigation ran from then on. In December 1992 a very large crowd assembled by Hindu nationalist organisations demolished the mosque, and riots across India followed in which around two thousand people died.
The Supreme Court of India gave judgment in November 2019. It held unanimously that the placing of the idols in 1949 and the demolition in 1992 were both unlawful acts, that the evidence did not establish that a temple had been destroyed to build the mosque, and that a structure of some kind had preceded it. It then awarded the disputed land to a trust to be constituted for the building of a temple, and directed that five acres elsewhere in Ayodhya be provided for a mosque.
The judgment is studied as much for its structure as its result, since it finds the possessory claim proved on the balance of evidence while condemning the acts that produced the situation, and commentators disagree sharply about whether those findings sit together.