FORMER chief justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud has made an admission of communal bias in his reading of history. He told journalist Sreenivasan Jain in an interview that the making of the Babri Masjid in the 16th century was an act of desecration. The communally pregnant assertion parrots India’s Hindu extremists who claim the mosque was built by destroying a Hindu temple. No Indian court or professional historian has backed the claim. The view expressed by the former chief justice sadly bears resemblance to quack ‘historians’ from the Hindu right who periodically write about the Taj Mahal being a Hindu temple. What is particularly disturbing about Mr Chandrachud’s comments is that he was on the five-member bench that delivered a unanimous verdict on the Ayodhya dispute in 2019, paving the way for the construction of a temple to Ram at the site of the razed mosque. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated it on the eve of the 2024 elections. In the Ayodhya judgement, the bench had clarified that there was no evidence of any structure being demolished to build the Babri Masjid and that there was a gap of several centuries between the underlying structure mentioned by the Archaeological Survey of India in its report and the Babri Masjid. In the interview, Mr Chandrachud cited the ASI’s rejected report as the basis for his claim.

When Mr Jain said the Hindus appeared to have been rewarded for desecrating the mosque for decades, Mr Chandrachud countered him by asking: “What about the fundamental act of desecration — the very erection of the mosque. You forget all that happened? We forget what happened in history.” As chief justice Mr Chandrachud broke a constitutional propriety by inviting Mr Modi for a televised prayer to a deity revered in his Maharashtra state. In a slow release of his religious inflections, he had admitted to seeking a Hindu deity’s ‘blessing’ to deliver the Ayodhya verdict.

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2025