After initially denying that there was even a temple at the site, contesting that it was not even Aurangzeb who got this temple demolished, and even … - Vikram Sampath

I think the Congress party unwittingly gave away that space of historiography to the stranglehold of Marxist historians. And in a discipline like this, which thrives on multiplicity of views, which thrives on dissent, discussion, debate, differences of opinion, healthy discussions, I think the thralldom with which academic history has been largely controlled by clique of Leftist historians, it has distorted history and created several fault lines.

Another cellar was found in the mosque, which seemed much like the remains of an old temple. But the team had simply not anticipated what they were going to discover next. It was going to shake up the entire matter and create a nationwide sensation. As the day was drawing to a close the team reached the wazu khana, which was situated on the eastern side of the mosque. The wazu khana is an ablution pond where worshippers wash themselves and rinse their mouths before praying at the mosque. The plaintiff advocates noticed a well-like structure in the middle of the wazu khana. The wazu khana had been covered from all four sides by a nine-inch wall. When they demanded that the water levels there be reduced so that it could be inspected from inside, the mosque officials and the defendant side flew into fits of rage. ‘Now don’t overdo things. Enough is enough, we will not comply to everything that you ask us to do. We have cooperated enough and thus far, and no further’, they screamed. ‘It became so clear to everyone,’ Hari Shankar Jain says with a mysterious smile, ‘that there was something there that they wished to hide. Else, till now, they had been grudgingly opening up cellar rooms and even the central premises. But it was clear as broad daylight that on our making this demand, some raw nerve had been touched.’

Hence, even more than five decades after his death, Savarkar intrudes contemporary political debates like a few characters of our recent past have. Conferment of the country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, still becomes the topic of intense contention, necessitating its inclusion even in the election manifestos of political parties. From being called a cowardly stooge who wrote groveling apologies, a casteist and Islamophobic bigot who allegedly pioneered the two-nation theory, a British-collaborator who drew pension from the government to personal slurs of a megalomaniac who penned his own biography in a pseudonym and someone who justified rapes—the basket of toxic allegations is mind bogglingly wide-ranging. The demonization is so absolutist in nature that there hardly seems to be any trace of positive virtue that his opponents can find in him.