In the winter of 1989, a cold breeze blew as the evening arrived early -- usual for those months. I was sitting in my office in Agra when the phone rang. The Mathura Correspondent was on the line. He informed us that the police had roughed up some kar sevaks at the police station on the bypass road. The kar sevaks had been stopped from going to Ayodhya. I instructed him to immediately visit the spot with a photographer. What the correspondent and the photographer saw took a few hours to reach me as those were pre-mobile phone days.

According to the Mathura team, a bus from Maharashtra packed with kar sevaks was heading towards Ayodhya. The police informed the correspondent that when the bus was stopped for checking, the kar sevaks started chanting the slogan “Ayodhya is just the beginning, Mathura and Kashi remain”. It led to a heated argument, resulting in the police using force. The kar sevaks had a completely opposite view. While covering the incident in Mathura, we couldn’t foresee that, one day, Mathura and Kashi would become as important focal points as Ayodhya was in 1980s and 1990s. The Ayodhya movement was reaching a crescendo, but most people were convinced that the law enforcement agencies would be able to maintain order. Babri Masjid, termed a disputed structure by Lal Krishna Advani, would remain safe.

On December 6, 1992, that veneer of belief lay in tatters. Even then, no one had imagined that within a........

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