On the morning of February 27, 2002, a train on its way from Ayodhya, a small city in north-central India, to my home state of Gujarat in the West stopped at a small, dusty station called Godhra. Travelers disembarked for snacks and chai; vendors climbed on board to sell their wares. No one really knows what happened next, but as the train tooted its horn and departed the station, the emergency brake was pulled.
Two of the train’s carriages were on fire; their doors were locked from the inside. At least fifty-eight people died. In Ayodhya, a Mughal-era mosque called the Babri Masjid had stood for five hundred years.
At some point during the British Raj, an idea spread among radicalized Hindus that the mosque had been built over the bones of an old Hindu temple, perhaps even the very birthplace of Ram, a much-revered Hindu deity. Over the decades, demands grew to “return” the land to Hindus, even though its modern-day ownership lay with the Muslim Waqf Board, an administrative body that oversaw the care and maintenance of Indo-Islamic monuments. In 1992, a mob of more than a hundred thousand Hindu karsevaks stormed the ancient monument and tore it down.
Religious violence broke across India in response. The right-wing party, the BJP, which had led the call for the mosque’s demolition, gained immense popularity after this moment. And each year after, groups of these karsevaks would travel to Ayodhya and protest at the demolition site.
The hope was to pressure the Indian.