Make it Worth

The Edit

Make it Worth is an edit addressed to the youth of Bharat, asking them to stand up for their values and their history. It marks the struggle Hindus undertook to reclaim the Ram Janmabhoomi temple, taken from them centuries earlier.

The Subject

The Ram Janmabhoomi dispute had been in the courts, in one form or another,
since 1885, when Mahant Raghubar Das petitioned for permission to build a canopy
on the site and was refused. The modern title suits ran from the 1950s. In 2010
the Allahabad High Court divided the disputed land three ways between the
parties, a judgment that satisfied nobody and was appealed by all of them.

The appeal was heard by a five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court —
Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi with Justices S. A. Bobde, D. Y. Chandrachud, Ashok
Bhushan and S. Abdul Nazeer — across forty days of daily hearings in 2019, the
second-longest hearing in the court's history. The verdict came on 9 November
2019: unanimous, awarding the disputed site for the construction of a temple and
directing that five acres elsewhere in Ayodhya be allotted for a mosque.

What is unusual about the ending is how quiet it was. A dispute that had
produced riots, a demolition and thousands of deaths across the preceding
century concluded with a judgment read out in a courtroom, and was accepted. The
restraint the edit is built on — a billion people leaving the decision to five
judges and then abiding by it — is the part of the story that is easiest to miss
and hardest to arrange.

How I Made It

The edit's centre of gravity is restraint rather than triumph. What it singles out as the special part of the struggle is that a billion Hindus handed the power to decide their destiny to just five Supreme Court judges, and waited for the mandate to come.