NEW DELHI — The leaking of a long-awaited confidential report on one of the most divisive attacks in modern Indian history raised a furor in India’s Parliament on Monday, with lawmakers demanding to know how the report made its way to a newspaper and cable news channel.

The report, 17 years in the making, is an investigation of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a mosque in the town of Ayodyha, by radical Hindu activists who claimed the site as the birthplace of the god Ram. They claimed Muslim rulers had destroyed the temple and replaced it with a mosque in the 16th century.

After years of heated protest over the site, a Hindu mob stormed the mosque in 1992, reducing it to rubble. The destruction of the mosque set off violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims that left more than 1,000 dead, mostly Muslims.

The scale of the violence was among the worst since the partition of British India, and bitterness and recrimination over the event have reverberated for years.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

According to the Indian Express newspaper and NDTV, a private cable news channel, the report portrays the destruction of the mosque not as a spontaneous act by grassroots activists but as something planned and carried out with the implicit approval of senior members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which was at the time a relatively small, right-wing party.

Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.

But the destruction of the mosque galvanized many conservative Hindus, who helped propel the party into national prominence, and eventually into a coalition that defeated the long-governing Congress Party.