For the discipline of history three kinds of evidence are of vital significance: archaeology, written texts and inscriptions, and popular tradition. It should therefore be fair to examine the status of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babari Masjid dispute in terms of the historical evidence derived from these sources.
That Ram was a mythological, rather than a historical figure is hardly a matter of dispute; it is possible, however, that some, or many of the characters portrayed in the Ramayana did actually exist and some of the events described there did actually take place though their scale and historical significance may have differed from the one mythology came to attach to them at some stage. For argument we shall assume Ram to be a historical figure.
The first epic woven around the story of Ram is of course the Ramayana of Valmiki. According to this text, Ram the King of Ayodhya, was born in the Treta Yuga, that is several thousand years before the Kali Yuga which began in 3102 BC. However, the archaeological excavations, undertaken by the former Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, Prof. B.B. Lal, have established that there was no evidence of any kind of habitation in modern day Ayodhya before the eighth century BC when the first signs of settlement of a rudimentary nature appear. This is in sharp contrast to the highly sophisticated urban setting against which the events described in the Ramayana are supposed to have taken place. Clearly then Valmiki could not have had this Ayodhya in mind where Rama was born.
Indeed, it is not even clear where the Ayodhya of Ram is located, for several texts place it at the banks of the river Ganga rather than Saryu where the present one stands. Against this extremely uncertain background the claim of absolute certainty of the exact place of Ram's birth appears more than little suspect.
It is possible of course that popular tradition has for long established the particular spot where Babari is said to have built his mosque as Ram's birth place and where a temple is supposed to have been erected, (though, when and by whom this was done is entirely unknown)
Meanwhile let us look at the evidence about the construction of the mosque at the site of the temple. The structure known from the Persian verses inscribed on the inner as well as the outer faces of the mosques... The verses, however, merely state that Mir Baqi had built the mosque but do not refer to the destruction of any temple nor to any sanctity attached to the site by any group of people. Babar himself... makes no mention of building the mosque, much less to the destruction of any temple.
Abul Fazl, the courtier of Akbar and author of the great work, Ain-i-Akbari, refers to Ayodhya as the city where Ram was born, but does not locate any site of his birth; nor does he record the destruction of a temple to make way for the mosque. Indeed no historical or any other work written in medieval India, often by fundamentalist Muslim authors, mentions the construction of this mosque at the site of a temple; and no imperial descendant of emperor Babar, not even.. Aurangzeb - himself responsible for the destruction of several Hindu temples and construction of mosques at their site- makes any reference to it.
If this is surprising, even more surprising is the absence of any mention of it in the works of Goswami Tulsi Das, author of the second great epic of the theme of Ram's life, the Ramcharitamanas. Tulsi Das was an inhabitant of Ayodhya and wrote the epic in his native Awadhi dialect. A life long devotion to Ram had given him a rare boldness, such that he curtly turned down an invitation by emperor Akbar himself to visit the imperial court. If the temple built to commemorate Ram's own birthplace at Ayodhya had indeed been demolished just 60 or 70 years before he was composing his epic, the memory of it would surely have driven him hopping mad. And yet, all we have from him is dead silence! Nor do we get any reference to it in any of the medieval historical or literary works, whether the author was Hindu or Muslim, orthodox or liberal.
It is only in the nineteenth century that the legend of the demolition of the temple and construction of the mosque begins to get into the records... During the nineteenth century there is a spurt in disputes over the issue and tradition seems to have grown that the mosque had displaced the temple. The story then gets into the records like P. Carnegy's Historical Sketch of Faizabad (1870), H.R. Nevill's Faizabad District Gazetteer, and as a footnote of Mrs. A.S. Beveridge's English translation of Babur's Memoirs (1922).
Clearly, therefore, the belief or tradition, which is today the basis of the VHP-BJP claim that a particular spot (is) the exact place of Ram's birth so many thousand years ago cannot be pushed beyond the eighteenth century at the most, after leaving a margin for the origin of the tradition and its incorporation into recorded history. The BJP is aware of this weakness and therefore, refuses to summon history to its defence and would not abide even by the Supreme Court's judgement;
Incidentally there are at least a dozen temples at Ayodhya each claiming to be the birth-place of Ram and each adducing popular tradition for legitimising the claim!
Anyway, since the nineteenth century, despite occasional disputes, Hindus and Muslims had been saying and the adjacent mosque respectively. It was on December 22, 1949 at midnight that, according to an FIR lodged by Police Sub-Inspector Ram Dube of the Ayodhya Police Station, a group of 50 or 60 persons entered the Babari mosque and established there in an idol of Shri Bhagwan and painted 'Sita Ram' on the walls. The (doors) to the... mosque were then locked by the administration. Rajiv Gandhi had the locks opened in 1986.
... What actually is happening, however, is parrot-like reiteration of slogans that carry no conviction in any dispassionate quarters. BJP has latched itself on the issue which had remained a non-issue ever since its origin at the most two centuries ago