On the morning following Vajpayee's speech on 6 December 1992, approximately 150,000 karsevaks (volunteers) armed with sickles, sticks, and stones attacked the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque. Riots between Hindus and Muslims broke out in Ayodhya and spread to neighbouring districts, then to cities across India, and the invocation of Supreme Court's order in public speeches somehow made it complicit in the event of the demolition.

All parties in the Indian Parliament laid claim to the interpretation of ‘secularism’ in their response to the demolition. Since almost all political action, however religiously tinted, could be couched in the language of secularism. Even in the demolition of the Babri Mosque, the karsevaks saw themselves vindicated by a recourse to secularism—as an ideology deemed consistent with destroying a ‘colonial’ or ‘Mughal’ symbol. While the period indeed witnessed a democratic upsurge with challenges to the Congress Party's domination and the mushrooming of regional political parties, there was a crisis of the legitimacy of state structures as the calls for a Hindu rashtra also became plausible with the BJP's ascent to power in the late 1990s.

To make themselves more palatable to citizens who self-identified as secular, the BJP undertook considerable effort to appropriate judicial instruments to legitimize their claims to governance. This was particularly so because organizations such as the RSS, which constituted the BJP's support base, had a long and hostile history with the law.