By Shashi Tharoor

In early January, India’s Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s directive to consolidate 15 lawsuits by Hindu activists seeking the right to investigate the possible existence of sacred Hindu places of worship beneath the Shahi Eidgah, a mosque in Mathura. The Court emphasized that the move benefits all parties, by avoiding multiple proceedings and reducing the risk of conflicting judgments. More fundamentally, however, the Court seems to be attempting to safeguard judicial stability at a time of proliferating religious disputes and prevent the escalation of tensions.

India is full of mosques established during periods of Islamic rule, between roughly the eleventh and eighteenth centuries. Many Indians believe that Muslim rulers, including the Mughal Empire, often deliberately erected mosques over Hindu temples and shrines that had been looted and destroyed. The issue is a sensitive one in Indian politics, and the family of organizations known as the “Sangh Parivar,” a movement associated with the Hindutva (Hindu-nationalist) cause, has actively stoked passions.

For the first four decades after independence, the issue largely simmered on the back burner. But in the 1980s, tensions boiled over, as a popular movement emerged to reclaim the Ram Janmabhoomi – the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Rama – in Ayodhya. A long campaign of agitation culminated, in December 1992, with the destruction of a sixteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, by a rampaging mob of Hindutva fanatics.

In 2019, after a protracted court case, the Hindu side was given permission to erect........

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