I have not had the time to write my own piece on this occasion, so I will take this opportunity to add a few thoughts of my own before Dr Hamid’s piece; my own personal view is that there is a very strong likelihood that the so-called Babri mosque (which was probably NOT built by the emperor Babar, but may have been built by one of his leutenants or by a later Muslim general or emperor, we simply do not know for sure) was very likely built on the site of a Hindu temple. This was the conclusion of the ASI excavation of this site and since countless mosques were indeed built on the ruins of temples by invading Muslim armies, this would not be surprising in any way. It is also known that Ayodhya was a site of pilgrimage for Hindus and was revered as the birthplace of Ram. The Hindu inhabitants of India were subjected to many atrocities by their Turkic Muslim colonizers (more so by the earlier Delhi sultanate, less in the time of the Mughals, but both sets of rulers (Delhi Sultans and Mughal emperors) were classic colonizers). The conqureing Turko-Afghan colonizers were always far smaller in numbers than their Hindu subjects and as with other colonizers in other parts of the world, they used both terror and co-option to establish their ruler. Over time, especially in the later stages of the rule of the apostate emperor Akbar, many Hindu rulers were incorporated into the ruling elite in exchange for cooperation and “bending the knee”. But there was rarely any doubt about who was boss in that arrangement and later emperors, especially Aurangzeb, were more orthodox than Akbar and Aurangzeb re-introduced Jizya (a poll tax paid by all non-Muslim subjects) and tried (with mixed success) to establish a more “Islamic” ruling elite. Aurangzeb faced a very determined Maratha revolt that he fought for decades and finally suppressed at great cost, but without complete success. This Maratha revolt (particularly in the person of the first Maratha ruler, Shivaji) had a HIndu-revivalist color, though both sides freely used their opposite religious group as allies in subordinate positions (i.e. some senior Hindu generals fought on the Mughal side and some Muslims fought on the Maratha side). This prolonged conflict so weakened the Mughal empire that after the death of Aurangzeb the empire started to fall apart. It was dealt a death blow by the Persian invader Nadir Shah and thereafter it was the Marathas who became the largest empire within India, with most of the rest of the country in anarchy or ruled by smaller local rulers. Parts of the Muslim elite, feeling this loss of power, invited the Afghan ruler Ahmed Shah Abdali to “re-establish” Muslim rule, but while he won a crucial victory against the Marathas at the third battle of Panipat, he was not able to establish stable rule over most of India and even in Punjab (where he had tried to establish provincial authority since before the Panipat war) was snatched from him by multiple Sikh revolts. The end result was that by the late 18th century large chunks of India were ruled by Marathas and Sikhs. If this process had continued, it is likely that much of India would have been divided between resurgent Hindu and Sikh rulers, with local Muslims (whether descendants of the ealier Mughal and Turko-Afghan conquerors or local adventurers such as Haider Ali and his successor Tipu Sultan) ruling several smaller kingdoms. But by this time another, more advanced power had arrived on the scene, i.e. the East India company, who were able to take advantage of European superiority and Indian anarchy to establish a unique English empire that was owned by a trading company, albiet one supervised to an increasing extent by the British government. This British rule froze the 18th century Indian ruling elites in place as puppets or subjects of the British empire, saving the Muslim elite from further depradation at the hands of Marathas and Sikhs. After the Bengal army of the EIC mutinied in 1857, the British crown formally took over the empire, ending the period of company rule. By the early 20th century this British rule was firmly established, but two world wars in Europe and rising nationalism in India finally brought that empire to an end in 1947. At that point the latent divisions between the old Muslim elite and their former Hindu subjects again raised their head, as both parties tried to figure out what an independent India would look like. Many Indian nationalists, now armed with new European nationalist ideals, wanted a united Indian Republic, but given the history of the preceding 700 years, this Republic would include at least two major groups with very divergent views of the past (and therefore, of the future); on the one hand were Hindu nationalists who saw this period as a period of colonization, first by the Muslim and then by the British, and dreamed of a “Hindu rashtra” that would restore what they regarded as the “status quo ante”, a Hindu India. But the intervening 700 years had seen something like 20-25 percent of the population becoming Muslim. The majority of these Muslims were local converts, especially concentrated in the Northwest and North East of the country (forming a small majority in Punjab as well as Bengal), but their elites ( especially in the old Mughal heartland in the Ganga-Jamna region and to a lesser extent in Hyderabad and a few other Muslim ruled states) identified as descendants of the Turko-Afghan colonizers and saw themselves as the natural rulers of this land, unwilling to be subordinate to any democratic or autocratic Hindu rule. Meanwhile the Hindu side included several strands of Hindu nationalists who saw the Muslim elite as foreign colonists and local converts as barely tolerable at best and outright traitors at worst. As can be imagined, any post-British arrangement would have to bridge this divide and somehow create one India out of what had been a patchwork of conflicting states and communities. This was not out of the question, but it would certainly not be easy. The main pro-independence party (the Congress party) included Westernized secularists (both Hindu and Muslim, more Hindus than Muslims though, who felt these divisions would be overcome by a common non-demoninational Indian identity), moderate Hindu nationalists (who were willing to accommodate Muslims as fellow citizens, but who also espoused many traditional Hindu causes, such as cow-protection and a dominant Hindu cultural vision of India), moderate Muslim nationalists (who agreed that Hindus and Muslims will live together in a united India, but with Muslims holding on strongly to their religious identity and even retaining hopes of eventual Islamization of India, albeit by peaceful means)