Comment by People’s Democracy, 3 February, 1991

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has been playing a double game on the Ayodhya dispute. On the one hand, it has been asserting that the question of the disputed site being the supposed birthplace of Ram, is... an article of faith which cannot be subject to judicial or any other... scrutiny, and that they are not going to rest content till they demolish the Babari Masjid and construct a temple in its place. On the other hand, they have also been claiming that they have provided to the AIBMAC and the Government sufficient archaeological and documentary evidence which conclusively establish... that the mosque at the disputed site was built after demolishing a temple at the same spot...

The main contention of the VHP is based on three arguments:

1. Sacredness of the site of Ayodhya.

2. Persistent faith in Ram as documented in classical Sanskrit literature, and

3. Spot evidence at Ayodhya in the form of archaeological remains such as burnt-brick pillar-bases, (pillars) covered with black stone casings having a large number of images of gods and goddesses, such as the yakhsas, devakanyas, dvarapalas and ganas, and sacred motifs such as the purnagatha, lotus hansa, all of which belong to the 'Hindu iconography'.

Of these, the first two are totally irrelevant to the main issue. It is not denied that Brahmanical tradition, embodied in classical Sanskrit writings, mentions Ayodhya and Ram. However, not all the texts cited can be regarded as pre-15th century. Also...there are many works dealing with Brahmanical pilgrimage centres and written between 10th and 16th century, which do not mention Ayodhya as a pilgrimage centre of any distinction... The existence of a temple dedicated to Ram at the spot where the Babari Masjid stands today...

It is...intriguing that the VHP... is conspicuously silent on the crucial question. No historical sources have been given to substantiate the claim of the aforesaid five Vishnu temples at Ayodhya.

As for the alleged archaeological testimony, there cannot be a more definite contradiction of the existence of the temple than is available in the authoritative report of Shri B.B. Lal. His assessment is published in An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology... Vol. III... (Indian Council of Historical Research, 1989).

The contention about brick pillars, black stone pillars, etc. is questionable. When the pillar bases are not mentioned in any archaeological report, how are they postulated now?

The alleged 'Hindu' motifs on black stone pillars also do not bear the test of critical scrutiny. A great majority of these motifs are connected either with Shaiva, Jain or other non-Vaishnavaite sects. There is no specific evidence to connect them exclusively with the tradition of Ram worship or even with the Vishnu.

...Was the site recognised as the exact site of birth of Lord Ram when the mosque was built in Babar's time? If there was no shrine of Lord Ram here, it could not just have been so recognised.

Primary Evidence

The VHP has spoken of the relevance only of primary evidence and not of later inferences or beliefs, however great the men who held them, including Jawaharlal Nehru. And yet... the VHP is not able to give a single piece of evidence most remotely assignable to the period of full two hundred years of the construction of the mosque in any language - Sanskrit, Hindi or Persian.

The primary evidence is, on the other hand, of a totally contradictory import.

...The inscription of Mir Baqi, which gives the date of the construction of the mosque (AH 935/AD1528-29), and the second inscription outside the mosque both... show that it was a case of simple construction of the mosque, and not the destruction of any previous idol-temple or any building. If the mosque had really been built to humiliate Hindus and desecrate a shrine of Lord Ram, is it believable that Mir Baqi would not have claimed that this had been done, or that an idol temple had been destroyed? Why should the builder of the mosque have hidden the real purpose for which he is supposed to have built the mosque, more so since the VHP believes that the builder was an idol-breaker by belief and ambition? If desecration of a Hindu shrine was seen as an act of merit, it should have surely been proclaimed. That this was not done, is surely the strongest proof that the builder destroyed no temple and neither performed nor claimed the merit of destruction.

Abul Fazl, Akbar's great minister, his Ain-i-Akbari, written seventy years of the construction of the mosque, while mentioning Ayodhya as a pilgrimage centre, nowhere mentions that an exact site of Ram's birth here existed, let alone that a mosque existed here. This is admitted by VHP itself. Even more curious is this omission when Abul Fazl... mentions the graves of Prophets Ayyub and Shis in Ayodhya in the very Persian extract given by the VHP itself.

...Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas... (was written) in Akbar's reign. Could he... have let it pass without even one expression of regret that the very spot of Lord Ram's birth had been desecrated, and the shrine denied to the devotees by an act committed within a few decades before he was writing? To imagine this is to put an unacceptable strain on one's credulity.

The whole 17th century passes without the VHP being able to produce a single testimony of any sort about its case... The learned scholar-historians of the VHP should have looked up Sujan Rai Bhandari's description of Ayodhya in his Khulasatut Tawarikh (Persian text, edited by Zafar Hasan, p.43; English translation by Sir Jadunath Sarkar in India of Aurangzeb, p.31), a work written in 1795. This author carefully mentions Hindu places of worship, and mentions in its account of the Suba of Awadh, that Ayodhya was the seat of Lord Ram... and that Ayodhya was a great religious centre of the Hindus. Yet he too gives not the slightest hint of any shrine on the exact site of Lord Ram's birth that had earlier existed and had been then destroyed. Thus till the close of the 17th century, till two hundred years of the erection of the mosque had passed, no belief existed that the Babari Masjid or any other mosque had been built on Rama's birth-site.

We may now consider the VHP's 'key' evidence - passage attributed to 'Sahifa-e-Chahal Nasaih Bahadur Shahi, written by the (sic) daughter of Bahadur Shah Alamgir (sic) during the late 17th - early 18th century.'

...There has been no emperor 'Bahadur Shah Alamgir' in Indian history. Aurangzeb Alamgir ruled from 1659 to 1707 and his son Bahadur Shah from 1707 to 1712. Thus the text could not possibly have belonged to Aurangzeb's reign and so to the 17th century, but only to a latter time. The authoress, if she was 'a' (not 'the') daughter of Bahadur Shah, could have written anytime within a life span after 1712, the last year when she could have been born. The VHP is unable even to furnish the name of this erudite princess, so that she cannot simply be traced! The extract from her so-called work Sahifa-Chihal Nasaih-i-Bahadur Shahi is said to have been copied by the author of a much later Urdu work only in... 1817. The Nasaih is an obviously late fabrication, since the name of the authoress is not given and the fabricator was ignorant enough to confuse Bahadur Shah with 'Alamgir'! It is well-known that such 'counsels' were frequently fabricated in the names of kings and saints. No such work as Sahifa-i-Chihal Nasaih-e-Bahadur Shahi, or with any possible variable forms of the title, or any work of a similar nature by any Mughal princess, appears in D.N. Marshall standard and comprehensive bibliography, Mughals in India - A Bibliography Survey, Bombay, 1967, nor in any volume of C.A. Storey's Persian Literature - Bibliographical Survey...

The European priest Fr. Joseph Thieffenthaler, who describes Ayodhya in 1785, was of course still later, and cites no source.

To conclude, there is absolutely no evidence from within two hundred years and more of the construction of the Babari Masjid that it was constructed on the site of any temple, let alone on the desecrated remains of the shrine of Lord Ram's birth-site. Later legends about such a site and shrine are no substitute for historical evidence... Even if the matter rests on faith... such faith is no more than two hundreds years old at the extreme limit, while the mosque was built more than 450 years ago. The proposal for its destruction is an act of barbarity absolutely unworthy of the great Indian civilisation.

Historians: Joint Appeal Of 43 Historians

We, the undersigned historians, are of the view that there is no conclusive evidence to prove that there was a temple dedicated to Ram at the site of the present-day Babari Masjid, which temple was destroyed and replaced by the Masjid. Further more, we are of the opinion that the Babari Masjid should neither be demolished nor shifted. Such an act would be a return to the politics of medieval times and futile attempt to change historical events. We are of the firm view that the mosque should be preserved as a national monument which is more than four and a half centuries old.

Let us not repeat the barbarity of medieval ages under the guise of establishing a new identity, whether traditional or modern.

R.S. Sharma, P.V. Ranade, D.N. Jha, Amalendu Guha, Gyanendra Pandey, N.P. Verma, Rifaqat Ali Khan, S.R. Singh, Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Mrs. Suvira Jaiswal, K.M. Shrimali, Suraj Bhan, V. Ramakrishna, Pratima Asthana, Ms. Indu Banga, P.S. Gupta, O.P. Jaiswal, H.C. Satyarthi, Bipan Chandra, C.P.N. Sinha, M. Athar Ali, Asghar Ali Engineer, Satya Prakash Gupta, Sunit Sarkar, Barun De, R.K. Shukla, S.N. Sinha, Azhar Ansari, B.D. Chattopadhyaya, K.N. Panikkar