Twenty years ago on this day, a frenzied mob of kar sevaks razed the Babri Masjid under the bemused, even jubilant, gaze of the leading lights of the sangh parivar while the central government, then headed by PV Narasimha Rao, appeared to be in deep slumber. The event unleashed a tidal wave of communal violence in several parts of the country and injected into the body politic a virus of polarisation along religious lines that has yet to be extirpated.
Read Dileep Padgaonkar's blog on the Babri Masjid demolition.