While there is solid evidence that the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple, rubble of which was used in the Masjid’s construction, this fact has been denounced as “Hindu chauvinist propaganda”, and an entirely fictional claim was upheld that the Masjid had been built on an uncontroversial site, so that there was of course no trace of evidence for a preceding temple demolition. Indian Marxists could reasonably have taken the position that while the temple demolition was a historical fact, this was no reason for a counter-demolition today. However, inebriated by their power position, they went farther and denied the temple destruction altogether, against the evidence, thinking they could get away with it. As usual, they could count on their Western contacts to cover them: to my knowledge, not a single Western academic has critically examined the Indian Marxist claim that the historical temple demolition at the Babri Masjid site was Hindu chauvinist fiction. All of those who have actually written about the Ayodhya affair, have acted as amplifiers to the Indian Marxist propaganda, explicitly or implicitly defaming those Indian colleagues who stuck to the evidence that a Hindu temple at the controversial site had indeed been destroyed.

In their well-known and oft-quoted statement on the Ayodhya controversy, the JNU historians have rejected the contention that there was a temple on the disputed spot before the Babri Masjid was built there. This is a wildly improbable contention. There is a general cultural pattern that would have made people build a temple there, a very important one. If you go to Ayodhya and walk to the Masjid/Janmabhoomi, you will find yourself walking uphill, even after passing the Hanuman Garhi which itself is on a little hill. Relative to the flatness of the entire Ganga basin, the disputed split is quite an elevated place, and it overlooks Ayodhya. Now, either prince Rama was a historical character, born in the castle of the local ruler, which would logically (i.e. strategically) have been built on this elevation, and then his birthplace temple would also have to be there. Or we do not assume Ram's historicity (without necessarily excluding it) and we also do not assume that he was born there, which is the JNU historians' position, and then the question is reduced to whether people would have refrained from building a temple on this hilltop. Ayodhya is a place of pilgrimage and temple city of long standing. The JNU historians themselves cite evidence that it housed important temples of the Buddhists, Shaivas and Jains. In such a temple city par excellence, it is virtually impossible that the geographical place of honour would have been left unused. The contention that there was no temple on the Babri Masjid site goes against all we know of ritual patterns in the lay-out of sacred places the world over: it violates the principle of coherence.

It is in the Ayodhya debate that I have learned the power of historical scholarship. After the 1989 statement by the JNU historians, starring Romila Thapar, the historical position, though having been a matter of consensus between all the parties involved, was suddenly tabooed. There had already been partial archaeological excavations confirming that there had been a temple on the site where the Babri Masjid was built. Even if you decided to doubt the consensus, the balance of evidence was already clearly on the side of the temple. Yet, the whole mediatic and political class, and all the foreign India-watchers, suddenly had to pretend that the historical position was but a ridiculous Hindutva concoction. Well, through all this commotion, the historical facts remained what they were, and they were amply confirmed by the excavations of 2003. There are still a few Leftists maintaining that there had never been a temple at the site, but most people concerned just look the other way, embarrassed at having been led by the nose so badly. And with such a death toll as a result. .... But no, the “eminent historians” preferred lies and bloodshed (and apparently also the rise of the BJP). It is not often in history that the intervention of intellectuals has had so much effect at the mass level.

One consequential instance in India was the Ayodhya scholars’ debate in the winter of 1990-1991, organized by the Janata (Left-populist) government headed by Chandra Shekhar. This was won hands down by the scholars affirming the existence of a Hindu temple underneath the Babri Masjid, first against a delegation of Muslim leaders unfamiliar with historical methodology, selected by the Babri Masjid Action Committee, then against a group of Marxist academics called in by that same Committee for saving the day. The latter’s position was but an elaboration of the official orthodoxy created by a group of academics from JNU when they issued a statement, The Political Abuse of History (1989), denying the existence of temple remains underneath the Babri Masjid. It had been taken over as Gospel truth by most of the academic and journalistic India-watchers in the West, including Truschke’s mentors. They kept the lid on the debate’s outcome... After Court-ordered excavations in 2003 had definitively confirmed the existence of the temple, acknowledged in the Court verdict of 2010, they have all turned conspicuously silent on Ayodhya.

I had written: "I can reiterate this (the existence of a Hindu temple before it was displaced by the Babri mosque) with greater authority - for I was the only Muslim who had participated in the Ayodhya excavations in 1976-'77 under Prof BB Lal as a trainee. I have visited the excavation near the Babri site and seen the excavated pillar bases. The JNU historians have highlighted only one part of our findings while suppressing the others..." ... By JNU historians, I meant the Leftist historians such as Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, DN Jha, Bipin Chandra and RS Sharma who do not want to see a solution to the Ayodhya issue. Till the Allahabad High Court judgment came out on September 30, 2010, these historians maintained that there was no temple beneath the Babri mosque.

The notion that Babur’s officer destroyed a temple dedicated to Rama’s birthplace at Ayodhya and then got the emperor’s sanction to build a mosque on the site – the Babri Masjid – was elaborated in 1936 by S.K. Banerji. However, the author offered no evidence that there had ever been a temple at this site, much less that it had been destroyed by Mir Baqi. The mosque’s inscription records only that Babur had ordered the construction of the mosque, which was built by Mir Baqi and was described as “the place of descent of celestial beings” (mahbit-i qudsiyan). This commonplace rhetorical flourish can hardly be construed as referring to Rama, especially since it is the mosque itself that is so described, and not the site or any earlier structure on the site.

In an astonishing act of daring, a handful of Left historians attempted to counter a centuries old belief, and vociferously assert that Babri Masjid was built on vacant land. They remain undeterred despite the mounting evidence stacked against them. Some of these historians even appeared as experts of the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) during negotiations between the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), BMAC, and the Government in 1990-1991. Yet throughout they have maintained the charade of being "independent historians." (p 5)

The fact that Hindu temple materials (14 black-stone sculptured pillars) have been used in the Babri Masjid is not an unusual feature requiring a special explanation; on the contrary, it was a fairly common practice meant as a visual display of the victory of Islam over infidelity. It was done in many mosques that have forcibly replaced temples, e.g. the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi (in which a part of the Kashi Vishvanath temple is still visible), the Adhai-Din-ka-Jhonpra mosque in Ajmer, the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi, or, outside India, the Jama Masjid of Damascus (which was a Christian cathedral)... There are Hindu temple materials in mosques attributed to Babar in Sambhal (replacing a Vishnu temple, and dated by archaeologists to the Sultanate period, just like the Ayodhya “Babri” Masjid) and Pilakhana. Local tradition affirms that the Babri Masjids in Palam, Sonipat, Rohtak, Panipat, and Sirsa have replaced Brahminical or Jain temples. The contemporary Tarikh-i-Babari describes how Babar’s troops “demolished many Hindu temples at Chanderi” when they occupied it.

It is obvious that an inscription of this quality, if it had been cited in support of the Hindu claim to the Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi site, would have been dismissed by the Marxist historians as ridiculous and totally groundless. They would not view it as a serious obstacle to their foregone conclusion that there is absolutely definitely no indication whatsover at all that a Hindu temple was forcibly replaced with a mosque. But in this case, we are asked to see it as evidence that Shaivas attacked Jain temples, and that Hindu tolerance is a myth.

Whether the temple was destroyed by Mohammed Ghori in 1194, or by Babar, or by a ruler in between these two, or even by more than one of them (since Hindus were tireless rebuilders if given a chance), this all makes no difference to the facts pertinent for the Hindu case: one, there was a temple there since at least the eleventh century, attested by archaeology : two, the use of temple materials in the Babri Masjid entirely fulfills a set pattern of temple destruction followed by replacement with a mosque; three, Hindus continued to worship on the spot to the extent possible, as witnessed by travelers and locals, something they would never have done except on a specially sacred spot and in continuation of a pre-Masjid tradition.

Until 1989, there was a complete consensus in all sources (Hindu, Muslim and European) which spoke out on the matter, viz. that the Babri Masjid had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple."

A shameful example of the total reliance of Western scholars on outright partisan secondary Indian sources while passing judgment on a Hindu nationalist position was the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute... Until the late 1980s, there was a complete consensus among all Hindu, Muslim and Western sources about the fact that the mosque had been built in forcible replacement of a temple, a very common occurrence throughout Muslim-conquered territories. This consensus, nowadays mischaracterized as the Hindu nationalist position, was since confirmed by new findings and remained strictly unchallenged by any counter-findings. Note indeed that all the official and unofficial argumentations against the temple limited themselves to downplaying the impact of some of the evidence for the temple, and never offered even one piece of positive testimony for an alternative scenario. Yet, the dominant Marxist circles decreed that there had never been a temple at the site (e.g. Sharma et al. 1991) and lambasted Western scholars who had earlier confirmed the consensus as handmaidens of Hindu fundamentalism (Gopal 1991:30),-- enough to send these scholars into prudent retirement from the Ayodhya debate, vide Van der Veer 1994:161. Lately the Marxists have had to swallow that maximalist position and revert to the more reasonable political position that temple demolitions of the past do not justify mosque demolitions in the present; but for more than a decade, their leaden dogma has stifled the history debate, viz. that the temple demolition was merely a "Hindu chauvinist fabrication". Those who stuck to the old consensus view, the one confirmed by the evidence, have had tons of mud thrown at them not just by Indian Marxists but by their Western dupes as well, e.g. Hansen 1999:262. Not one of the latter ever took issue with the actual evidence, behaving instead as obedient soldiers carrying out and amplifying the Indian Marxist ukase. At the time of this writing, Indian archaeologists are digging up more Hindu religious artefacts from underneath the temple/mosque site (Mishra 2003), yet the Financial Times (Dalrymple 2003) carries a long article extolling Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib, ridiculing the consensus view on Ayodhya along with the non-invasionist "myth", denouncing Ayodhya consensus representative K.S. Lal (conveniently dead and unable to defend himself), and bluffing about "all the evidence" disproving the Ayodhya temple's existence but not actually mentioning any of it.

This was logical, for the site has a sacred significance for Hindus as the putative birthplace of Rama, while it had no special status for Muslims. Historical documents confirm that Hindus continued to go on pilgrimage to the site all through the centuries of Muslim occupation, while no Muslim ever went on pilgrimage there... This was a strange claim to make, for two reasons. Firstly, it was untrue. Until then, all parties concerned had agreed that the mosque had been built in forcible replacement of a temple. What is nowadays rubbished as "the VHP claim" was in fact the consensus view. Thus, in court proceedings in the 1880s, the Muslim claimants and the British rulers agreed with the Hindu claimants on the historical fact of the temple demolition, but since it had happened centuries earlier, they decided that time had sanctioned the Muslim usurpation and nullified the Hindus' legal claim. Further, numerous documents and several archaeological excavations confirmed the history of the temple demolition (with the court-ordered excavations of spring 2003 removing the last possible doubts). The sudden denial of this history by a circle of Marxist historians was not based on any new evidence but purely on political compulsions. It seems that their long enjoyment of a hegemonic power position in academe had gone to their heads, so they thought they could get away with crude history falsification. Secondly, the question of the site's history was beside the point. The decisive consideration for awarding the site to the Hindus, both for the Hindu campaigners themselves and for Rajiv Gandhi, was not the site's sacred status in the Middle Ages, but its sacredness for Hindus today. It is the Hindus of 1986 or indeed of 2004 who have been going on pilgrimage to Ayodhya, and they are as much entitled to find a Hindu atmosphere there, complete with Hindu architecture, as Muslims are entitled to find an Islamic atmosphere in Mecca. The VHP has been blamed for politicising history, but it was its opponents who complicated matters by bringing in history, and false history at that... Nonetheless, the Marxist historians had their way. In their shrill manifestoes, these secular fundamentalists slandered the genuine historians who stood by the facts, and they denounced the Hindus' perfectly reasonable expectation that a Hindu sacred site be left in the exclusive care of the Hindus. They did this with such titanic vehemence that the pragmatists were thrown on the defensive. ... Rajiv Gandhi didn't give up, though. In 1989, he allowed the Shilanyas ceremony, in which the first stone of the planned temple was put in place. In 1990, as opposition leader, he made Chandra Shekhar's minority government organize a scholars' debate on the history of the site, obviously on the assumption that this would confirm the Hindu claim. And so it did, for the anti-temple historians showed up empty-handed when they were asked to provide evidence for an alternative scenario to the temple demolition. In a normal course of events, i.e. without the interference of secularist shrieks and howls, this would have set the stage for the peaceful construction of a new temple in the 1990s, with some compensation for the Muslim community, and the conflict would have been forgotten by now.

It has always been our position that the Babri Masjid was never built by demolishing any mandir or any Hindu place of worship. The Supreme Court has also affirmed our position in its judgment… The Supreme Court has clearly stated that namaz was offered in the masjid till the night of December 22, 1949 (when idols were placed inside the central dome). The Supreme Court also accepted that placing of the idols in the masjid…was an illegal act. It accepts in its judgment that demolition of Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, was an illegal, unconstitutional and criminal act. It is indeed regrettable that after accepting all these facts, the apex court in an extremely unjust verdict handed over land of the masjid to people who had placed idols in the mosque in a criminal manner and were party to its criminal demolition.