CHENNAI, India — Much like Charles Dickens' immortal classic "Tale of Two Cities," India's own saga of two religious shrines has been fraught with tragedy. On a cold December morning in 1992, a nearly 500-year-old mosque at Ayodhya, central India, was razed to the ground. Fanatical Hindus owing allegiance to equally fanatical political parties used crowbars and spades to destroy the mosque, pulling it down systematically brick by brick.

The mosque was built in 1527 on the orders of Babur, India's first Mughal emperor. The site where the mosque went up reportedly had been a Hindu temple, and still is revered as the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.

Unlike Gautam Buddha or Mahavir, Ram is a creation of mythology, not strictly borne out by history. It is possible that several extant versions of the Ram myth have been inspired by a real person, divine or semi-divine.

The destruction of the Babri Mosque led to murder and mayhem. Thousands of people, mostly Muslims, were killed. The animosity between Muslim and Hindu that has existed since the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 into Pakistan and India grew worse.

A legal claim filed in Allahabad High Court by three parties — the Sunni Central Board of Waqf, Hindu Ramlalla Virajman and Hindu Nirmohi Akhara — to the land where the mosque stood dragged on for years before a verdict was handed down recently. The three-judge court split the land into three parts, giving one to each claimant.

The judgment ended up appearing more political than legal. Responding to Hindu belief, the court declared that the site where the mosque stood was indeed the place of Ram's birth.

Romila Thapar, a distinguished historian on early India, wrote in an article, "Hindus deeply revere Ram as a deity, but can this support a legal decision on claims to a birthplace, possession of land and the deliberate destruction of a major historical monument to assist in acquiring the land?"

What is even more disturbing is that there is no conclusive historical evidence that Ram was born on that piece of land or that a Hindu temple even existed there. Excavations on the disputed site carried out by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) could not find signs of a 12th-century Hindu temple, the structure that Babur is said to have destroyed in the 16th century to make way for the Babri Mosque. The ASI's findings have been countered by others including historians and archaeologists.

For the court to have tailored its judgment to suit largely Hindu aspirations affirms that the legal process was far from just. One of the judges went on to say that history and archaeological evidence were not absolute necessities in deciding such suits.

The three aggrieved parties had expected that the court would rule in favor of one of them. They did not expect an order trifurcating the land.

Columnist Dileep Padgaonkar wrote in The Times of India: "Once faith and belief are factored into the resolution of a legal tangle, you embark swiftly and surely on the slippery slope of majoritarian (read Hindu in this case) conceit."

The verdict will create an unhealthy precedent in a country where land grabs are increasingly becoming the norm. It is now a simple matter for a group to claim rights to a plot by saying it was the birthplace of some divine being. In India, there are thousands of such beings.

What is of most regret is the court's silence on the 1992 destruction of the Babri Mosque. It was a criminal act that could never be condoned.

This silence could encourage others to indulge in similarly wanton acts, although a few political parties — as well as Home Minister P. Chidambaram — have taken pains to set right this glaring omission by reiterating that the destruction was a crime.

As a footnote, I would like to add that although India's government, doubly nervous that the court decision came on the eve of the already much-criticized Commonwealth Games in Delhi, put the country on a high security alert, nothing untoward happened. Peace prevailed. Obviously, those who had lived through the destruction had grown wiser, and they could not be bothered by opposing religious and communal sentiments.

Yet, it is imperative that those who shamed the nation in 1992 be punished. Only then will Muslims feel comfortable. Who knows, they might even be able to forget and forgive the perpetrators of that heinous crime.

Gautaman Bhaskaran is a Chennai, India-based journalist.