In the 1980s, the VHP and other Sangh Parivar affiliates began an agitation to build a temple to Rama at the site, with the BJP lending political support to the movement.

This announcement threatened the electoral constituency of the BJP, which decided to use the Ayodhya dispute to unite the Hindu vote by mobilising anti-Muslim sentiment.

The yatra caused an outpouring of both religious and militant sentiments among Hindus, and became one of the biggest and greatest mass movements in Indian history.

Tens of thousands of activists nonetheless reached Ayodhya and attempted to storm the mosque, resulting in a pitched battle with security forces which left 20 dead.

The BJP made significant gains in these elections, both at the national and the state level, on the back of religious polarisation caused by the yatra.

Historical evidence to support this belief is scarce, and several historians have stated that Ayodhya became a religious centre with a number of temples only in the 18th century AD.

[4] In the 1980s a movement led by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) began advocating demolishing the mosque and building a temple there dedicated to Rama,[10] heightening religious tension across the country.

[10] Following its poor performance in the 1984 parliamentary election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) shifted toward a policy of more hardline Hindu nationalism,[11] and lent its support to the demand that a temple be built at Ayodhya.

On the strength of this agitation, the BJP won 86 Lok Sabha seats in 1989, a tally which made its support crucial to the National Front government.

[10] In August 1990, then-Prime Minister V. P. Singh, acting on the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, decided to introduce a policy of reserving twenty-seven per cent of state level government posts for people from lower castes.

[1] This effort tied in well with the philosophy of the Sangh Parivar, which professed "cultural nationalism", and believed in the unity of the highly fragmented Hindu population.

[8] As a part of its support for the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, the BJP organised a rath yatra, or "chariot journey" across the country to Ayodhya in 1990.

The city of Ayodhya, in particular, is a place of pilgrimage in the Hindu tradition, because it is seen as a site where a devotee may obtain eternal salvation, a belief used to inspire support for the Ram Rath Yatra.

Furthermore, pilgrimages or processions frequently involve an assertion of dominance over a physical space, which was also relevant to the Ayodhya dispute;[1] the ultimate aim of the yatra was to support the agitation of the VHP and its Sangh Parivar affiliates to erect a temple to the Hindu deity Rama on the site of the Babri Masjid.

VHP leaders made speeches in which they stated that Hindus of past years had shown "impotence" in allowing their holy sites to be taken over by Muslims, and asked them to be more aggressive in the present instance.

After Gujarat, the caravan went to Maharashtra, where activist fervour was even stronger because of the support of the Shiv Sena, a radical Hindu nationalist party.

The level of popular mobilisation in each state was higher than the press had previously expected, and the yatra began to receive more national news coverage.

In the towns they clambered on to roofs to catch a glimpse of the bespectacled man on the ‘Rath’.Advani's speeches during the yatra addressed Hindu nationalist themes.

He portrayed the Ayodhya dispute as a fight between Rama and the Mughal emperor Babur, and stated that no Hindu could live in peace until a temple had been built on the site of the Babri Masjid.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, the Chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, ordered the arrest of all activists bound for Ayodhya, and 150,000 individuals were jailed.

There, one volunteer placed a saffron flag on top of the mosque, while other activists attempted to tear the building down using tools such as axes and hammers.

[10] The kar sevaks were pushed away from the mosque, but a pitched battle with security followed, which lasted three days, and led to the death of 20 VHP volunteers.

[15] The bodies of the kar sevaks killed in the fight with security forces on 30 October were cremated, and their ashes carried around the country by the VHP.

[14] Following the Rath Yatra and the associated protests, the BJP withdrew its support to the National Front central government led by V. P. Singh, leading to its collapse.

[12] This BJP strategy paid rich dividends in the May–June 1991 parliamentary elections, even withstanding the sympathy wave caused by the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi that took place after the first phase of polling.

Relative to the 1989 general election, the BJP doubled its percentage of votes nationwide and made gains in states like Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in the South and Assam in the Northeast.

The report of the inquiry, written by retired judge Manmohan Singh Liberhan, indicted 68 people for the demolition, including a number of BJP leaders.

The people named in the report included Advani, Vajpayee, Joshi, and Bharathi, as well as then-Uttar Pradesh-chief minister Kalyan Singh.

It stated that the leaders of the BJP could have prevented the demolition if they had chosen to do so, and quoted a security official as saying that provocative speeches had been made at the rally.

[19] In April 2017, a special Central Bureau of Investigation court framed criminal conspiracy charges against Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti, Vinay Katiyar, and several others.