The possibility of Hindu-Muslim agreement on the Babri Masjid site — that piece of ground in Ayodhya whose disputed status had produced decades of communal tension, a Supreme Court case that lasted years, and ultimately the 1992 demolition that triggered riots killing thousands across India — was the kind of development that Indian civil society dared not hope for too loudly, given the history of how such hopes had been disappointed.

Reports in 2011 of quiet conversations between representatives of both communities about possible compromise arrangements at the site reflected a persistent, often invisible strand of Indian inter-communal life: the people who refused to accept the framing that the dispute was inevitable, who were attempting through conversation and goodwill to find the kind of local resolution that courts and political parties couldn't engineer.

The Allahabad High Court had issued its judgment on the site in September 2010, dividing the disputed land between the Hindu and Muslim claimants in an arrangement that satisfied almost no one legally but perhaps created some political space for other approaches. The judgment was appealed to the Supreme Court, which would take years more to reach its own conclusion.

In that gap, the conversations continued. Indian civil society had a long tradition of ordinary citizens attempting to manage what politicians found useful to leave unresolved — because unresolved communal tensions generated electoral energy that resolved ones did not.

The Ayodhya dispute would ultimately be resolved by Supreme Court judgment in 2019, awarding the site to the Hindu trust while directing land for a mosque elsewhere. Whether the years of civil society conversation contributed to making that resolution possible to implement without violence was one of those historical questions whose counterfactual was impossible to establish.