The 1992-93 Bombay Riots

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Two waves of communal rioting struck Bombay, now Mumbai, in December 1992 and January 1993, together the city's worst civil violence since Indian independence. The first wave, from 6 to 12 December 1992, followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya by Hindutva activists on 6 December, a mosque razed on the claim that it stood on the god Rama's birthplace, and struck Muslim neighborhoods across the city. The second wave, from 6 to 20 January 1993, was far deadlier and more organized: the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party and its cadres played an organizing role in systematic attacks on Muslim residents, businesses and places of worship, and the state government's own later inquiry found that sections of the Bombay police acted with open bias against Muslims during this phase.

The Maharashtra state government appointed a Commission of Inquiry under Justice B.N. Srikrishna in 1993 to examine the violence; after repeated interruptions it delivered its findings in February 1998, having examined 502 witnesses and 2,903 exhibits. The Commission named individual police officers and Shiv Sena leaders, including Bal Thackeray, for their roles in the January violence, though few of its recommendations were acted on by the state government of the day. It also linked the anger the riots left behind to the serial bomb blasts that struck Bombay in March 1993, reading the two events as connected episodes in the same season of violence rather than separate incidents.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Srikrishna Commission's own count, nine hundred dead, five hundred seventy five Muslims, two hundred seventy five Hindus and fifty people never identified, remains the one systematic reconstruction of the riots' toll and the figure this atlas records. It is not, however, a settled final number: the Commission's own report and later academic accounts note that an unknown further number of bodies, particularly from the deadlier December 1992 phase, were never recovered or formally counted, so the true toll may run higher than the officially compiled figure.

No international body has made a genocide or crimes against humanity determination for the riots, a legal vocabulary rarely applied to communal violence within a single city. The Maharashtra government's own Commission of Inquiry is the one formal government investigation on record, and its findings on police bias and named individual responsibility were largely not acted upon at the time they were delivered. The gap between a formal state inquiry that named names and a state that took little action on its own findings is itself part of the riots' recorded history, a documented reckoning that stopped short of consequence rather than a case that went uninvestigated altogether.