Found and Lost: the Ayodhya Evidence

The North-Indian town of Ayodhya is a scene of controversy over a Hindu sacred site, the Rama Janmabhoomi, or “birthplace of Rama”. That is where a mosque, the Babri Masjid, was built in the forcible replacement of an earlier Hindu temple, in 1528 under Moghul emperor Babar at the latest, and demolished by a Hindu crowd in 1992. The controversy pits Hindu activists against a combination of Muslim activists and the so-called “secularists”, an array of Hindu-born Marxists and US-oriented ‘globalists’ who share a hatred of Hindu assertiveness.

Interestingly, the Jaipur royal family's Palace Museum has a rare, 300-year-old cloth map of Ayodhya town, which depicts its key sites, such as the fort, the Janamsthan, Agni Kund, Laxman Kund, Janaki Kund, River Saryu, and so on. This clearly indicates that well before the British courts came into the picture, a place in Ayodhya was designated as the Janamsthan. It is understood that a rare copy of this map was made available to the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao in 1992, and it is likely to figure as crucial historical evidence in the Allahabad High Court case as well.

Paradoxically, in the colonial period, there were no such doubts about the legitimacy of Hindu claims to the site. Faizabad district judge, Col Chambers, in his ruling of 1892, stated: "I found that the masjid built by Emperor Babar stands on the border of the town of Ayodhya ... It is most unfortunate that a masjid should have been built on the land specially held sacred by Hindus. But ... it is too late now to remedy the grievance. All that can be done is to maintain the parties in the status quo. In such a case, as the present one, any innovation would cause more harm and derangement of order than benefit."

Most Hindu intellectuals shy away from facing the fact that the Muslim community is even today using political power (through 'secular' political parties) to deny legitimate Hindu claims to the site. Even worse, Muslim intellectuals and religious leaders are jointly determined to perpetuate this profound spiritual and moral offense against Hindu dharma and to maintain for as long as they can the already altered status quo over a site towards which they can have no real religious allegiance.

A Splendid Consensus

Actually, until 1989 there had been no question about the site’s history. All the written sources, whether Hindu, Muslim or European, were in agreement about the pre-existence of a Rama temple at the site. “Rama’s birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor Babar in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple”, according to the 1989 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry “Ayodhya”. In the 1970s, a team of the Archaeological Survey of India led by Prof. B.B. Lal dug out some trenches just outside the mosque and found rows of pillar bases that must have supported a larger building predating the mosque. Moreover, in the mosque itself, small black pillars with Hindu sculptures had been incorporated, a traditional practice in mosques built in forcible replacement of infidel temples to flaunt the victory of Islam over Paganism.

What is certain is that a major Hindu temple at the site was demolished by Islamic iconoclasm and replaced with a mosque symbolizing the victory of Islam over Infidels. Of that, evidence is plentiful and of many types.

The JNU fatwa

Yet, in 1989, all this evidence was brushed aside by a group of 25 academics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), mostly declared Marxists, who issued a statement denying the existence of any evidence for the temple: The Political Abuse of History. Not that they offered any newfound data to support this dramatic reversal of the consensus, all they had to show was some totally contrived reinterpretations of a few of the existing data plus the worn-out slogans against “Hindu communalism”. But the sympathy of the Indian and international media for their purported motive of “upholding secularism” assured the immediate worldwide adoption of the new party line as Gospel truth: the demolished Rama temple had merely been a malicious invention of the ugly Hindu nationalists.

The world media as an amplifier of the secularist version

The Reuters despatch for 11 June 2003 is titled: “Dig finds no sign of temple at Indian holy site”. More than 90% of the text rehashes the story of riots and other incidents punctuating the dispute. Note that the actual report is not quoted, merely what “a source” at the ASI has claimed about it. Note also the slanted phrase about “nationalist claims of a Hindu temple”, as if there were anything typically nationalist about acknowledging historical facts. The existence of that temple had been a matter of consensus among Muslims, Europeans and Hindus, both nationalist and anti-nationalist until the JNU professors issued their fatwa to disregard the evidence and deny history. Distorted or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism