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.

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.

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.

The Liberhan Commission, named for the judge who oversaw the inquiry, was set up shortly after the destruction of the mosque to investigate the destruction. Last June, nearly 17 years later, it handed its report to the government. But the report had been kept secret.

Senior members of the B.J.P. accused the government of leaking the report for political gain. P. Chidambaram, India’s home minister, denied the accusation and said the report had been very closely held.

L. K. Advani, the octogenarian standard bearer of the B.J.P., whose political career took off when he took up the cause of the Ram temple, denied that the destruction was planned. “It is completely untrue that it was a meticulously planned conspiracy,” he said. “There was no plan, no conspiracy.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 24, 2009, on page A14 of the New York edition.