The Secularists and the Ayodhya Excavations Report

The Secularists and the Ayodhya Excavations Report
Dr. Koenraad Elst

In India, frequent political incidents pit Hindu nationalism, or even just plain Hinduism and plain nationalism, against so-called “secularism”. But what passes for secularism in India is often the diametrical opposite of what goes by the same name in the West. Recent incidents over the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy confirm the disingenuous character of Indian secularism.

1. Introduction: secularism and the Ayodhya excavations
Genuine secular states have equality before the law of all citizens regardless of religion; India has different civil codes depending on one’s religion. Thus, for Christians it is very hard to get a divorce, Hindus and Muslim women can get one through judicial proceedings, and Muslim men can simply repudiate their wives. The secular alternative, a common civil code, is championed by the Hindu nationalists. It is the so-called secularists who, justifying themselves with specious sophistry, join hands with the most obscurantist religious leaders to insist on maintaining the present unequal system.

In India, sharia-wielding Muslim clerics whose Arab counterparts denounce secularism as the ultimate evil, call themselves secularists. Just as the word deception differs in meaning from its French counterpart déception (= disappointment), the word secularism has a sharply different meaning in Indian English as compared to metropolitan English. The point is illustrated once more in the contrived controversy about the recent archaeological findings at the contentious temple/mosque site in Ayodhya. Here, the supposed Hindu fundamentalists have been abiding by the findings of science, while the so-called secularists have been on the opposite side.

On 22 August 2003, the Archaeological Survey of India handed a highly sensitive report to the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court. The ASI had been mandated by the Court to excavate the foundation level underneath and around the demolished Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. This mosque, attributed to the Moghul dynasty’s founder Babar (1528) was taken apart in 1992 by Hindu activists eager to see a temple built right there, at what they consider the birthplace of the deified hero Rama.

Last winter, the Court had secretly ordered a search of the site with a ground-penetrating radar by the company Tojo Vikas International Ltd., which had gained fame with its role in the construction of the Delhi underground railway. Canadian geophysicist Claude Robillard concluded from the scans that “there is some structure under the mosque” (Rediff.com, 19 March 2003). The Court then ordered the archaeologists to verify these findings in greater detail. If you expected secularists to welcome this replacement of bickering between religious hotheads with the objectivity of a scientific investigation, the subsequent developments provide you with an opportunity to learn.

2. Preceding stages of the debate

2.1. A consensus amply confirmed
Strictly, there was no need for this excavation, for the existence of the medieval temple had long been firmly established. There was testimony upon testimony of Hindus bewailing and Muslims boasting of the replacement of the temple with a mosque; and of Hindus under Muslim rule coming as close as possible to the site in order to celebrate Rama’s birthday every year in April, in continuation of the practice at the time when the temple stood. None of the written sources, whether Hindu, Muslim or European, contradicted the pre-existence of a Rama temple at the site. Until 1989 there had been no dispute about it: “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”.

There was already plenty of archaeological evidence as well. In the 1970s, an ASI team led by Prof. B.B. Lal dug out some trenches just outside the mosque and found rows of pillar-bases which 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. (There are many examples of this practice inside and outside India, including the two other mosques at sites reclaimed by Hindus: Krishna’s birthplace in Mathura and the principal pilgrimage site of Shiva in Varanasi.) In 1992, during excavations around the mosque in June and during the demolition on 6 December, many more pieces of temple remains, mainly sculptures of Hindu gods and godlings, were discovered.

2.2. Denial
Yet, in 1989, all the existing evidence was brushed aside in a statement, The Political Abuse of History, by 25 academics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), mostly declared Marxists. They denounced the history of Islamic iconoclasm in Ayodhya as a myth but didn’t offer any newfound data to overthrow the consensus. Yet, the sympathy of the Indian and international media for their purported motive of “upholding secularism” assured the immediate adoption worldwide of the new party-line: the demolished Rama temple had merely been a malicious invention of the ugly Hindu nationalists.

Note that they didn’t just settle for a political rejection of any plans to replace the mosque with a temple. They could have argued that the demolition of the temple happened long ago and could not now be a reason for reversing the event. That exactly had been the verdict given by a British-Indian judge in 1886 when ordering a status quo at the site. But under the prevailing power equation, they expected to get away with a plain denial of history rather than a mere insistence on divorcing history from politics.

Ever since, the “secularist” historians have been bluffing their way through the controversy. In December 1990, the government of Chandra Shekhar invited the two lobby groups involved, the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Babri Masjid Action Committee, to discuss the historical truth of the matter. Misled by the media into believing that the Hindu claims were pure fantasy, the BMAC office-bearers arrived ill-prepared. They were speechless when the VHP team presented dozens of documents supporting its case. For the next meeting, they invited a team of proper historians chaired by Marxist professor R.S. Sharma, who declared that they hadn’t studied the evidence yet. This was a strange statement from people who had just led 42 academics in signing a petition confirming once and for all that there was no evidence whatsoever for a temple. At the meeting scheduled for 24 January 1991, they simply didn’t show up anymore. In a booklet issues months later, pompously called A Historians’ Report to the Nation, they tried to save face by nibbling at the evidential value of a few of the numerous documents presented by their opponents (and of course, historical evidence is rarely absolute), but failed to offer even one piece of evidence for any alternative scenario.

When more temple remains were found in 1992, a cry went up among the Marxist academics that the sculptures had been stolen from museums and planted at the site. The central government (Congress) locked the pieces away. During the scholars’ debate in 1990-91, the VHP-mandated team had discovered no less than 4 documents on which references to the “birthplace temple” had been altered or removed. Here the secularists had their great chance to get back at them and expose them in turn as cheaters who had planted false evidence. Yet, the minister in charge, Arjun Singh, though a militant secularist and eager to embarrass the BJP, forewent the opportunity to have the sculptures investigated by international experts to certify the allegation of forgery. Once more, it was sheer bluff and the secularists didn’t want it subjected to scrutiny.

During the demolition, an inscription came to light detailing how it was part of a temple to “Vishnu, slayer of Bali and of the ten-headed one”, built in ca. 1140. Rama is considered an incarnation of Vishnu, and the two enemies he defeated were king Bali and king Ravana, often depicted as ten-headed in recognition of his brilliant mind. This evidence too was locked away and strictly ignored by the secularists until 2003, when People’s Democracy, the paper of the Marxwadi Communist Party, alleged foul play. It seemed that the Lucknow State Museum mentioned in its catalogue a 20-line inscription dedicated to Vishnu, satisfying the description of the piece discovered during the demolition, and missing since the late 1980s.

However, museum director Jitendra Kumar declared that the piece had never left the museum, eventhough it had not been on display, and he showed it at a press conference for all to see (Hindustan Times, 8 May 2003). In spite of many similarities, it differed from the Ayodhya find in shape, colour and text contents. So, the only allegation of fraud against the archaeologists or against the Hindu nationalists which was more than a knee-jerk reaction of the losers against the winners in the debate, the only one in which some homework had been done and the outlines of a real intrigue had been sketched, proved to be mistaken.

2.3. Findings, no findings
Meanwhile, the Court-ordered excavations had started. In the months when the digging took place, the newspapers reported new findings once in a while. Thus, “an ancient stone inscription in the Dev Nagari script and a foundation were discovered in the ongoing excavation in the acquired land in Ayodhya today”, while “stone pieces and a wall were found in other trenches” and “a human figure in terracotta, sand stone netting, decorated sand stone in three pieces were found in one trench” (The Hindu, 5 May 2003).

In this light it is understandable that a Babri Masjid supporter, Naved Yar Khan, approached the Supreme Court with a petition to prohibit all archaeological digging at the contentious site; which was rejected (The Hindu, 10 June 2003). The “secularists” had always opposed archaeological fact-finding at the site, arguing that this would open a Pandora’s box of similar initiatives at the literally thousands of mosque sites where temples used to stand. They typically omitted to mention their fear that in Ayodhya itself, this digging was sure to prove them wrong, as it now has.

On June 11, after the ASI had been registering new findings for months, the world learned to its surprise that the final tally somehow amounted to zero. “No proof of structure in Ayodhya: ASI report”, according to Rediff.com. “Nothing found below Babri site: ASI”, titled The Asian Age. “ASI finds no proof of structure below Babri Masjid: report” , claimed the Times of India. The occasion was the ASI’s filing of an interim report, yet none of these papers quoted the report, only “sources”. Some also quoted Zafaryab Jilani, counsel for a Muslim claimant to the site, the Sunni Central Waqf Board, who alleged that “the ASI report does not speak about any such evidence”.

Yet, some of these papers clumsily let out the truth indirectly. The Marxist-controlled Chennai daily The Hindu of June 11 claimed the ASI “is reported to have said in its progress report that no structural anomalies suggesting the existence of any structure under the demolished Babri Masjid had been found in 15 of the new trenches dug up at the site”,-- but those 15 were not the only ones investigated. So, at the very end of the article, there was an almost laconical addition: “Structural anomalies were, however, detected in 15 other trenches, the report said.” But the impression the paper sought to convey, was summed up in the title: “’No evidence of structures in some trenches’”. It is as if someone is hit by two bullets, one scratching his arm but the other lethally penetrating his heart, and a newspaper reports: “Man repeatedly shot at; one bullet harmless”.

A few papers did try to be truthful in presenting the findings of the interim report, especially after taking the time to properly read it, e.g. the internet version of The Hindu, Hinduonnet.com, 22 June 2003), mentioned “structural anomalies in 46 trenches” of the 84 trenches investigated, as well as “pillar bases and drains in some of the trenches”. In Outlook India (23 June 2003), Sandipan Deb gave a more detailed overview of the report. Finding that “most papers covering the new ASI report last week said that it claims there was no structure under the Babri Masjid”, he went on to read the actual report: “Among the structures listed in the report are several brick walls ‘in east-west orientation’, several ‘in north-south orientation’, ‘decorated coloured floor’, several ‘pillar bases’, and a ‘1.64-metre high decorated black stone pillar (broken) with yaksha [= demigod] figurines on four corners’.” He also points out that “what many people have missed out on – due to bias or sloth – is that these are findings only from the period of May 22 to June 6. This is not the full list. If they read the earlier reports, they would also find listed several walls, a staircase, and two black basalt columns ‘bearing fine decorative carvings with two cross-legged figures in bas-relief on a bloomed lotus with a peacock whose feathers are raised upwards’.”

Even readers of the papers which on June 11 starkly denied the findings could have seen that something was wrong, for on the very same day, they carried the following news item: “ASI fabricating evidence in Ayodhya, says Waqf Board” (The Hindu). All the papers carried this news, citing the Board’s counsel, Mr. Zafaryab Jilani: “ASI fabricating evidence: Waqf Board” (Times of India); “Foul play alleged at Ayodhya dig” (The Pioneer). The party most likely to be elated over the non-finding of traces of a temple should be the anti-temple lobby, including the Sunni Central Waqf Board, yet it complains that the ASI team did find evidence, only it was “fabricated”. In the free-for-all of Indian secularism, we needn’t fuss over the fact that this grim allegation against the integrity of highly qualified scientists was levelled without any evidence. The decisive point is that, against the secularist claims and against their own interest, the Muslim plaintiffs admitted that the ASI excavators had not come up from their trenches empty-handed.

2.4. Sheer bluff
“Too strenuous an effort to make a point is usually a dead give-away. And if somebody shows an absolute lack of scruple about the methods used in making a point, there is likely to be very little substance in the argument.” Thus opens Sukumar Muralidharan’s comment on the interim report in the Communist fortnightly Frontline (“Excavating truth”, 19 July 2003). While he meant to attack the VHP, his statement neatly described the behaviour of the secularists themselves in the Ayodhya debate from the 1980s till 2003.

Their effort has indeed been very strenuous. They were all over the press with petitions and statements and columns, insisting on the temple’s non-existence, or slipping claims to that effect into texts which focused on other aspects of the “communalism” problem. During the latest excavations, they had teams of historians on the spot to scrutinize the ASI team from day to day. They were issuing statements all the time, grim one day, furious the next, scholarly never.

By contrast, the VHP took a very lackadaisical attitude towards the excavations, arguably the moment of truth for the temple party. It had never attached too much importance to the history debate, firstly because it was a false and contrived debate about a demolished temple which all honest observers knew to have existed; and secondly because the Hindu claim to the site rested less on past history than on the continuous and present fact that Hindus consider the disputed site as a sacred site today. On Hindutva internet discussion forums, you could see temple enthusiasts criticize the VHP leadership for its passivity. Only at the end of the excavations did the VHP-affiliated archaeological team, led by Dr. S.P. Gupta, give a modest press conference, where the political VHP leaders sat in the back and refrained from commenting. It seems they trusted in India’s national motto, “truth shall prevail”, even and especially against the decibels of those who rely on propaganda rather than on the quiet convincing power of the facts.

So, Prof. Muralidharan was quite right: the party which didn’t have the facts on its side, betrayed its lack of confidence in the outcome by displaying “too strenuous an effort to make a point”. But far be it from a Marxist historian to be cowed by mere facts. To his knowledge, the interim ASI findings were either false or non-existent, which is why he saw the VHP smarting under “the disarray within their ranks after the archaeological excavations at the site turned up empty”. This disarray was completely imaginary: the VHP knew perfectly well that the excavations were bringing up more confirmation by the day of the existence of the temple. But if the ASI’s findings had been negative, then the VHP would be in disarray, so Muralidharan posits not just negative findings but also the VHP’s disarray. This shows what accomplished liars the Marxists are: they posit not just one lie, as amateurs would, but also all the ramifications of that lie.

Sentence after sentence in Muralidharan’s text is filled with denial and hateful insinuation against scientists doing their jobs. Thus, it was hardly a controversial fact that the Tojo company had carried out radar scans at the site, but under Muralidharan’s pen, even this becomes questionable: “In February, Tojo Vikas (…) claimed to have deployed some of its devices in Ayodhya and discovered ‘structural anomalies’” (emphasis mine). Nor is there any benefit of the doubt for the ASI, whose professional excavations with the most careful modern methods are put down as follows: “With the ASI’s ongoing excavations, the entire archaeological record has been destroyed.” If at all the ASI has behaved properly, it must have been due to outside pressure: “Indications, however, are that the relentless vigil exercised by observers on both sides has induced a degree of discipline amongst the ASI excavators.” The Marxist hate campaign targets the ASI, a scientific institution, as much as it targets the VHP.

2.5. Ad hoc crank theories
Like the secularist dailies, Frontline reports on the ASI findings without reference to any ASI documents, citing its own handpicked experts instead: “After the thorough excavation of 52 trenches in the area – each four metres square – the ASI filed a preliminary report before the Lucknow Bench on April 24. With inputs from this and other sources on the ground, a team of historians put forward the conclusion that every significant fact recorded either pertained to the Babri Masjid or to the many preceding years of Muslim settlement. These findings, announced at a press conference organised by the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in Delhi on May 6, have so far remained uncontested.”

It may be true that nobody bothered to reply to the wild claim made at the press conference of the Communist outfit SAHMAT, but the implication that everyone has accepted the claim is as ridiculous as the claim itself. The archaeologists have found objects dating as far back as 1300 BC, and then all through the Sunga, Kushana and Gupta periods, all of them predating the genesis of Islam, let alone the arrival of Islam in Ayodhya in 1192. Yet, the SAHMAT historians want us to believe that all those ancient artefacts belonged to a Muslim settlement. Just how silly can you get? The reader should start to understand that in India, “secularism” is another word for “buffoonery”.

At the same time, this secularism also has traits more commonly found in revealed religions, such as a terrifying intolerance of those who break ranks. Thus, reporting on Prof. B.B. Lal’s statement in 1990 that pillar-bases had been found during excavations in the 1970s, Muralidharan claims: “The professional community of historians and archaeologists was appalled at the veteran archaeologist’s apostasy.” (emphasis mine) Well, not all of them, to be sure, but at least the vocal Marxist group which was then still firmly in control of the guiding history institutions.

For those unfamiliar with modern Indian history: the Marxists, already pushy for acquiring as much power in the institutions as they could grab, were handed a near-monopoly on institutional power in India’s academic and educational sector by Indira Gandhi ca. 1970. Involved in an intra-Congress power struggle, she needed the help of the Left. Her confidants P.N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan packed the institutions with Marxists, card-carrying or otherwise. When, during the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77), her Communist Party allies threatened to become too powerful, she and her son Sanjay removed them from key political positions but, in a typical case of politicians’ short-sightedness, they left the Marxists’ hold on the cultural sector intact.

Their power position also led to a development of which Muralidharan inverts the meaning, viz. that “the ASI proved curiously reticent about yielding up the records that could clear the confusion”. Why was this? He insinuates that over a decade ago the ASI, the same institution which has now embarrassed the secularists by finding temple foundations, was unwilling to reveal evidence of the mendaciousness of B.B. Lal’s claims. The real reason is the exact opposite. Of course the ASI proved reticent: the records confirmed B.B. Lal’s statement, while the ASI administrators, then still beholden to the Congress-cum-Leftist establishment, had preferred to stick to the secularist party-line and pretend that no pillar-bases had been found.

To drive a final nail in the coffin of his own credibility, Muralidharan quotes Marxist archaeologist D. Mandal who has, at least since the publication of his booklet Ayodhya after Demolition (Delhi 1993), led the Marxist charge against the evidence of the pillar-bases. In Mandal’s view, these were but “brickbats laid haphazardly”. You see, most people who plan a building first conceive a plan and then lay foundations in a pattern dictated by the building-plan. Hindus, by contrast, are like perennial children playing in the sand: they put some stones in the ground here, and a few more there, then a next generations puts in a few more, all without rhyme or reason and definitely without building anything on all these buried stones, so as to keep the site empty for any incoming Muslim invaders to build their mosque on it. Fifty-three years after India adopted a Constitution which calls on all citizens to “develop the scientific temper”, the country’s academic positions are occupied by crackpots.

Half-educated people, including many journalists, tend to judge a statement by the status of the speaker rather than by its contents. That is one reason why Marxist academics have been quoted as Gospel in the media, no matter how transparently unbelievable their explanations were. D. Mandal’s cranky theory has reappeared in many newspaper stories, e.g. in the Times of India: “Babri pillar bases do not support temple theory” (17-6-2003). At least the article acknowledged the existence of some pre-Babri artefacts, viz. the pillar-bases, but it insisted on denying the existence of the temple. Now, how can there be foundation structures such as pillar bases in the ground unless they had been put there to support a building? The paper cites an unnamed “ASI official” as saying: “The excavated structural bases are neither aligned nor belong to a single period.” For most human beings, it must be inconceivable to just put a pillar base into the ground once in a while, and then another one, without alignment, without any plan to make them support a preconceived building. I suppose this has to be the secularist way of doing things.

2.6. The world press as blind amplifier
And yet the world press, like a babe in the wood, never thought of taking a critical look at all this secularist buffoonery. The Reuters despatch for 11 June 2003 was titled: “Dig finds no sign of temple at Indian holy site”. And this is BBC News: “‘No sign’ of Ayodhya temple”. Here again, no information from the horse’s mouth, only from “widespread reports across the Indian media”. The next day, June 12, the peripheral part of the world press was relaying the story, e.g. the Flemish tabloid De Morgen called the fact that a temple had been forcibly replaced by a mosque “an evil fairy-tale”, for: “The temple, it turned out yesterday, is a phantom. For three months, experts have dug for traces of it, all in vain.”

Many Western media have devoted more attention to the interim report on June 11 than on the final report on August 25. Within the logic of the media, even politically neutral media, this was normal. The interim report was the first, and India being only of marginal interest, many editors didn’t think the issue worthy of a second look when the final report came out. Moreover, the handful of Delhi correspondents who control almost the whole information flow from India, had presented the interim report to them as having very clear-cut conclusions, viz. “no evidence for the temple at all”. By contrast, the final report was falsely presented as indecisive, hence less newsworthy. Indeed, it is likely that those who misinformed the world about the interim report’s findings had foreseen and planned that this would help in neutralizing the pro-Hindu effect of the final report.

3. Escaping the ASI’s final conclusions

3.1. Denial encore
After all the wild claims made about their findings, the experts themselves have finally spoken. Their report confirms that the disputed site contains the foundations of a large building complex. And this time too, the religious purpose of the building can be inferred from the numerous religious artefacts found in between the pillar-bases. In a normal setting, the ASI findings should finish once and for all the campaign of history denial by the Marxists and their Muslim camp followers. But the world of Indian secularism is a fantasy land where hard facts don’t count for much. So, a great many diehards unflinchingly reject the findings of science. We will look into what few arguments they could muster.

Predictably, the unflinching deniers were parroted by many incomprehending foreign correspondents, e.g. the Flemish daily De Standaard (26 Aug. 2003) relays an Associated Press report opening thus: “Four months of excavations could not answer the question whether there ever stood a Hindu temple underneath the mosque of Ayodhya.” In fact, the excavations did answer the question of the temple’s existence unambiguously. Perhaps the journalist didn’t express himself carefully, calling the report indecisive when he meant that the most vocal segment of public opinion was indecisive, i.e. divided. If not, it is the kind of bold-faced lie so common throughout the secularist interventions in the debate for fourteen years, but one would have hoped to see it banished from the debate by this very report. And effectively, other reporters and commentators of a less extremist temper have made concessions to the newly published conclusions of science, though they downplay them and continue their struggle against the Hindu project of a new temple.

3.2. Deflecting attention
The editorial of the Hindustan Times (“Structural flaws”, 27-8-2003) refuses to accept that any discovery worth the name was made. But it sets out first of all to deflect attention from the historical findings by emphasizing the alleged political implications over the obvious historical contents of the report.: “The ‘discovery’ of an ancient ‘structure’ underneath the demolished Babri Masjid by the Archaeological Survey of India has far more political overtones than historical or legal ones. (…) Nor does the ‘discovery’ make any difference to the various court cases, including those concerned with the title deeds of the site.”

Whether the findings have any legal implications is for the judges to decide, not for the newspaper editors. And it is they who ordered the excavation in the first place, clearly on the assumption that the findings do make a difference to the court cases. Rajiv Dhawan, an anti-temple lawyer quoted by BBC News (Jyotsna Singh: “Experts split on Ayodhya findings”, 26-8-2003) indirectly admits the relevance of the findings to the court case: “However, Mr. Dhawan says, as the land was owned by the Sunni Waqf Board (an elected body of Muslim theologians) until 1945, the Hindus could have only moral right over the land if the existence of a temple were proven.”

But the dominant position certainly is to minimize the importance of the ASI findings. This is a general phenomenon in the whole secularist press: instead of a thorough analysis and a lively debate worthy of the importance and unicity of the report, the page is turned as quickly as possible. This is, of course, a strong indication that the report is unusable for the secularist propaganda, simply because its findings go against what the secularists have been saying for all these years. Like spoilt children, they are used to having it all their own way, and when reality interferes, they close their eyes and shut off their ears and refuse to know. And they will lie and cheat in order to prevent others from knowing.

For anti-temple lawyers too, this same hurry to get past the archaeological findings is the favourite approach. In their case it is almost defensible, as their concern is not the truth but courtroom victory. Jyotsna Singh reports: “But although the study is expected to have far-reaching implications in moves to solve who holds claim over the site, legal experts say it cannot be taken as a conclusive evidence. ‘As far as the legal case in concerned, it is a title suit about the ownership of the land between Hindus and Muslims’, lawyer Rajiv Dhawan told the BBC. ‘The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) report cannot be taken to be conclusive. This is only part of the evidence. The report will be analysed, its authors will be cross-examined to find out whether they are right or wrong. It will be a long, drawn-out process’, he said.”

At first sight, Dhawan seems to be announcing a very thorough analysis of the findings. It is of course sheer bluff when a lawyer pretends that his cross-examination is going to decide on the truth of archaeological findings, for how does he hope to make scientists renounce in a boisterous courtroom the conclusions they arrived at in the quiet and concentration of their study? By threatening and bullying them? But he doesn’t intend to seriously discuss archaeology. The whole juristic point is precisely that the archaeological truth is not the point: “Mr Dhawan said the legal case did not relate to the question of whether a temple existed on the site or not.”

Another way to deflect attention from the evidence is to dismiss the whole historical dimension of the Ayodhya dispute as an unwanted extra load imposed on everyone by history-crazy Hindu fanatics. Thus, Jyotsna Singh claims: “The existence of the temple became part of Hindu rhetoric in the dialogue process begun in 1989 between the All India Babri Mosque Committee and the hardline Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).” This is a plain lie, which I assume she has borrowed in good faith from influential secularist sources. In reality, the existence of the medieval temple was a matter of long-standing consensus. What became part of someone’s rhetoric in 1989 was its denial, launched by the secularists and picked up by the Muslims.

By the way, note how our BBC correspondent reserves the qualification “hard-line” for the Hindu side and withholds it from the Muslim side. It’s always useful when a medium is so candid about its partisan predilections.

3.3. The interim report’s “negative findings”
The Hindustan Times editor then goes on to denounce the report as contrary to facts established earlier: “Doubts have already been cast on the findings, not least because there was no hint of such a ‘structure’ in the earlier reports on the excavation although their accuracy may be questioned. Even then, if a massive structure of the kind which has been mentioned in the final report had been located, surely reports about it would have filtered out.”

So, this is one paper which chooses the option of total denial of the findings, continuing the line taken since at least 1989. As its only argument against the veracity of the final report, it uses the media’s misrepresentation of the interim report on June 11. Reports about the structure did of course filter out, but the Hindustan Times didn't want its readers to know about it in June, and it won’t tell them about it in August. This is really quite rich: the Hindustan Times falsely pretended that the interim report’s finding was negative, and now uses the purported interim report’s negative result as a “fact” contradicting and overruling the final report’s positive findings.

The same argument has been used by the lawyers of the Muslim lobby groups, such as the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board: “’This report is totally inconsistent with the interim reports submitted earlier’, Board secretary Mohammed Abdul Rahim Quraishi (…) said in a statement.” (Hinduonnet.com, 25 Aug. 2003) As a general rule, you can predict what the secularist position on any issue will be once you know what the militant Islamist position is. The two are rarely very different.

3.4. Ad hominem
The Hindustan Times editor also questions the integrity of the archaeologists: “Insinuations have also been made about the ASI coming under political pressure. Since the first among the ruling parties at the Centre has long been insistent on the existence of a demolished temple at the disputed site, it is obvious that a government organisation would have been uncomfortably aware of the stance, although that doesn’t mean that it affected its professional judgment.”

Even if the archaeologists had wanted to manipulate the findings, one wonders how they would have been able to pull it off. They were permanently scrutinized by archaeologists and historians employed by the Muslim parties. Moreover, many of the excavators were Muslims, unlikely to be willing accomplices in a pro-Hindu manipulation. Thus, according to the Press Trust of India (11 June 2003): “There were 131 labourers including 29 Muslims engaged in the digging work today”.

Jyotsna Singh of BBC News (“Experts split on Ayodhya findings”, 26-8-2003) quotes Prof. Irfan Habib with the same allegation: “The ASI is using the same language that the VHP uses by calling the mosque a disputed structure. The ASI has said what the Hindu nationalists wanted to hear. There is a legal issue and this is a long debate. The ASI report has only confirmed the fears about the objectivity of this exercise."

This allegation against the integrity of the archaeologists is loosely made, without any evidence, on no other grounds than that their findings are to the liking of the Hindu nationalists. As if it could have been otherwise. The findings have uncovered the material remains of historical facts, and these facts were public knowledge for centuries, viz. that a Hindu temple had been forcibly replaced by a mosque. Before and after 1989, the Hindu nationalists have simply stood by this public knowledge, while the secularists led the Muslims into disbelieving their own chronicles (which amply attested their pride in having performed the Islamic duty of iconoclasm at Ayodhya) and denying the facts.

Jyotsna Singh casts suspicion on those who hesitate to join in this slandering exercise by identifying them with the “Hindu hardliner” party: “Archaeologists supported by Hindu hardliners dismissed these allegations, saying the report justified their long-held observations.” In reality, at the present state of the argument, any neutral observer or judge would throw out the allegations against the archaeologists and condemn Irfan Habib and his ilk for libel. The accused is innocent until proven guilty, and no proof nor even the faintest indication has been given for foul play by the archaeologists.

Jyotsna Singh’s presentation exemplifies a more sophisticated form of secularist disinformation. A false semblance of even-handedness is created: she mentions some who uphold and some who deny the allegations against the archaeologists. But first of all, to report on a document only in the most general terms (“the report said there was indeed evidence…”: one sentence) and then devote half your space to a discussion of the archaeologists’ integrity, you are already leaving the public with the impression that bias rather than hard evidence is the news of the day. Moreover, the two sides quoted are presented very differently.

On the pro-archaeologist side, she quotes Dr. S.P. Gupta. She tells us nothing about his status as a leading archaeologist, e.g. as former director of the Allahabad museum, and merely puts him in an ideological corner: “S.P. Gupta, of the Indian Archaeologist Society (IAS), a VHP-backed organization”. By contrast, Irfan Habib is introduced as simply a “professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University”. Though he collected the scholars’ team that had to save the Babri Masjid Action Committee during the government-sponsored debate in 1990-91, we are not expected to know that he is as closely involved with the Muslim lobby as Gupta is with the Hindu lobby (likewise, Prof. Suraj Bhan’s status as a BMAC employee is left unmentioned by the Times of India: “No evidence of temple at Ayodhya: expert”, 25 Aug. 2003). Nor is Habib’s support base described as “hardliner”.

Now that we are at it, we may as well quote Jyotsna Singh’s report on the “Hindu” findings: “SP Gupta, of the Indian Archaeologist Society (IAS), a VHP-backed organisation, said: ‘The ASI report is nearly the same as our reports, because we are also archaeologists. We have seen the digging. It is a science so our observations based on scientific facts are bound to be similar.’ A colleague of Mr. Gupta, K.N. Dixit, added: ‘Our excavations in Ayodhya in 1978 proved the existence of a temple dating to the 11th century. The ASI report just pushes it back by 50 or 100 years.’ Another archaeologist, R.K. Sharma, said the motifs found ‘proved the existence of a 7th century Shiva temple’."

Gupta’s team also seems to agree with the ASI team on a point which refutes the charges of manipulative pro-Hindu bias for both of them. An archaeologist who would like to please the VHP with the desired digging results at the Rama Janmabhoomi site, would claim to find habitation down to a depth corresponding to the traditional date of Rama, viz. at least 3700 BC. Yet, the ASI reports only on finding remains of human habitation down to the level corresponding to 1300 BC. This is compatible with the Western chronology of ancient India, with the “Aryan invasion” in ca. 1500 BC and Aryan heroes like Rama obviously a little later. But it so happens that Hindu nationalists have recently gotten rather excitedly involved in the debate over ancient history, insisting on a high chronology. That school should not be pleased with the ASI findings.

3.5. False explanations for Islamic iconoclasm
Let us return to the Hindustan Times editorial of August 27. The editor makes an implicit concession to reality: "The point, however, is not whether a temple has been found, but its historical relevance." He wouldn't have written that if he had been confident that no temple had been found. In that case, he would have focused on the truth of the matter and not hidden behind the question of its "relevance".

Then follows an explicit concession to reality: "On this count, the ‘discovery’ adds nothing to what is already known. It is an accepted fact that Muslim invaders had demolished any number of temples..." Which at once he tries to explain away: "... when tolerance of the faiths of others was virtually unknown." As if a tick of the clock, viz. the arrival of the Middle Ages, could cause the widespread destruction which India suffered. Tolerance remained the rule in medieval Hinduism: for all its untouchability and other flaws, it did tolerate Syrian Christians, Parsis and Jews in its midst (who, unlike in their countries of origin, also tolerated one another), and the lively debates between its own numerous sects rarely if ever spilled over into physical confrontations. The problem was not the age but the Islamic doctrine of iconoclasm. Unfortunately, secularists have developed a habit of staring past uncomfortable historical facts, particularly those disturbing the progressive image of any anti-Hindu group or movement or religion.

And then another old lie, peddled so often in the preceding years by the secularists: "Moreover, the places of worship were regarded with suspicion since they were the meeting places of ordinary people and, hence, could facilitate the hatching of a conspiracy. So if Babur’s general, Mir Baqi, did demolish a temple and built a mosque in its place, it is not surprising.”

But conspiracies were typically the work of those close to the ruling clique (and not of "the ordinary people", as this pop-Marxist interjection wants us to believe), which in those days meant they were Muslims and their places of worship were mosques. Yet these mosques were never destroyed by Muslim rulers. The conspiracy gambit is one of those escape routes of those who realize that the massive Islamic destruction of Hindu temples cannot be denied forever, but who refuse to pin any blame on Islam itself.

At any rate, in the case of the Hindustan Times editorial, the whole concession about medieval Muslim iconoclasm was only meant as a background setting for blaming the Hindus: “However, that doesn’t justify the emulation of medieval norms, as on December 6, 1992.” This is an all too predictable diversion: now that a report puts the spotlights on the demolished Hindu temple, the Indian media insist on eclipsing it behind their evergreen pet reference to “December 6, 1992”, when the Babri Masjid was demolished.

3.6. The Buddhist gambit
More or less since the beginning of the historical dispute, some secularists have felt that the denial of Islamic iconoclasm in general and of its application to Ayodhya in particular would be unsustainable. So, to weaken the Hindu position vis-à-vis the historical debt which Islam has incurred, they attributed a similar iconoclasm to Hinduism, with Buddhism as the victim. But in the present round of the Ayodhya debate, there has not been more than a vague hint at this scenario, and for good reason.

There was a little problem with this thesis, viz. the inconvenient fact that Buddhism has flourished in India for 17 centuries under almost uninterrupted non-Buddhist Hindu rule, and that many Buddhist monasteries and universities were still functioning in India at the time of the Muslim invasions. It was the Muslim conquerors who destroyed the entire Buddhist establishment of North India in just a few years following the fatal battle of Tarain (1192), where Mohammed Ghori defeated Prithviraj Chauhan to storm into the Gangetic plain. But here again, the secularists counted on their own overwhelming grip on the influential media to get away with their newly launched myth. So now, numerous people in India and abroad (most damagingly in Buddhist countries which should have been India’s natural allies) actually believe that there was a time when Hindus attacked and demolished Buddhist temples and slaughtered Buddhist monks.

From there, it was but a small step to claiming that, if the Ayodhya site had been taken by Muslims from a native Indian religion at all, the aggrieved party must have been the Buddhists, not the Hindus. Or better still, if there had been a Hindu temple at the site when the Muslim conquerors came to level it, that temple itself had forcibly replaced an earlier Buddhist building as part of the massive Hindu persecution of the poor hapless Buddhists. However, in the documentary record, there is not the slightest indication of a Buddhist presence at that particular site, eventhough elsewhere in Ayodhya the Buddhist presence (including that of the prominent philosophers Asanga and Vasubandhu) is well-attested.

The material implication of either scenario is that distinctively Buddhist temple remains should be found below the mosque, either directly below it or underneath a layer of Hindu architecture. However, the archaeological search in the 1970s and in 1992 has not uncovered any such exclusively Buddhist artefact. And in 2003 again, nothing specifically Buddhistic has surfaced at the site.

To be sure, it is rather artificial to conceive of Buddhism as a separate tradition from Hinduism, and in their artistic conventions, the two have a lot in common. So, some artefacts could be Buddhist as well as Hindu, e.g. the new ASI report, in describing the “massive structure below the disputed site”, states that one of the architectural fragments belonging to the 12^th century, is “similar to those found in Dharmachakrajina Vihara of Kumaradevi at Sarnath which belongs to the early 12^th century” (quoted by Anjali Mody: “ASI report raises more questions”, The Hindu, 27 June 2003). Kumaradevi was the Buddhist wife of Govindachandra, king of Kanauj, and the remains of the building she patronized have been interpreted as those of a Buddhist monastery. But this interpretation has been disputed (as Mody recounts), and the said type of architectural fragments could not decide the matter precisely because it formed part of a pan-Indian culture in evidence in both Hindu and Buddhist buildings. By contrast, what was found at the contentious site in Ayodhya, when not part of this indistinctive pan-Indian register, was distinctively part of the non-Buddhistic traditions of Hinduism. Interestingly, in the pre-medieval layers, indications of Shiva and Devi (goddess) worship have been found, so the history of the temple site was not exclusively Vaishnava. But is was definitely not Buddhist.

So far, the Buddhist escape route has not been tried anymore after the ASI report was presented. Apparently the evidence for the site’s non-Buddhist history is just too overwhelming, and the secularists already have enough to deny.

3.7. A tactical retreat from the evidence debate
Some commentators simply accept the scientific findings. Thus, in his regular column in the Indian Express (“A tale of three cities”, 28 Aug. 2003), T.V.R. Shenoy acknowledges that the ASI report “makes it clear that a temple existed on the site dating back at least to the tenth century”.

Others hasten to assure us that they won’t let the scientific findings stand in the way of their ongoing crusade against Hindu nationalism and particularly against the project of building a new temple, but they do renounce the struggle against the scientific evidence as such. Among these, surprisingly, we meet the editorialist of the Times of India (“Temple tide: ASI report a green signal for saffron”, 27 Aug. 2003), who effectively throws in the towel as far as the historical aspect of the Ayodhya affair is concerned, for he opens thus: "Let's drop the charade." In the next sentences, he still tries to identify the scientific findings with the VHP, he also puts the word “evidence” in quotation marks, but he never actually tries to challenge the truth of the findings anymore.

That doesn’t mean that this war-horse of secularism is giving up the struggle, but it shifts the debate definitively to the purely judicial level: "The 'findings', of course, have no force in law", etc. And then the editor reverts to some good old moralizing on the 1992 demolition, clearly avoiding any further focus on the evidence. For on the issue of the historical facts, he knows that his side has lost the debate for good. We must at any rate thank him for admitting that all those years of polemic against the historical consensus on the temple demolition were merely a “charade”.

The Pioneer (“What lies ahead”, 27 Aug. 2003) betrays the same attitude. It likewise acknowledges the ASI’s findings, it even rejects the allegations of bias and fabrications against the ASI, but then swiftly shifts the focus to the judicial dispute: “For, the ASI’s findings can scarcely be the sole determinant in finding light at the end of the Ayodhya tunnel.” So, it’s back to Court now with the message: “We were wrong, Your Honour, to deny the existence of the temple, but we plead you still don’t grant the Hindus the right to rebuild it.”

All very well, but we should not forget that that point could have been reached fourteen or more years ago. What the recent excavations have merely confirmed was already well-known in 1989. The only problem was the mendacious denial of the historical facts by screaming and bullying secularists. Which, in turn, emboldened the Muslim hardliners into the most intransigeant position in the political arena, in Court and on the streets. Think of the riots and the waste of energy that India could have been spared if the secularists had not obstructed the course of justice (or intercommunal negotiations, or a political settlement) with their denial of the historical reality underlying the Ayodhya dispute. I venture to forward the view that these secularists have blood on their hands.

3.8. A mosque before the mosque?
Jyotsna Singh (“Experts split on Ayodhya findings”, BBC News, 26-8-2003) reports: “Although there is no dispute that objects were recovered from the site, the interpretation is the key. Professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University, Irfan Habib, told the BBC: ‘The floors of the mosque have been declared to be a temple. Broken bricks and stones used for filling up the floor of the mosque have been declared as pillars of the temple. Glazed pottery common to Muslim architecture has been completely ignored. Flower motifs are common to Muslim architecture but the ASI has interpreted it as a Hindu pattern.’"

Of course, any dispute about the Hindu or Muslim origin of artefacts only makes sense for the time when there were Muslims in that part of India, i.e. after the Ghorid conquest in 1192, which reached Ayodhya itself in 1194. As Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants destroyed all the temples and monasteries they came across, literally thousands of them, it is nearly impossible that a large temple overlooking a city could have survived. By contrast, it is possible that Babar did find some kind of minor makeshift Hindu temple at the site, not necessarily in a proper temple building (just as the Babri Masjid itself served as a Hindu temple in 1949-92), because Hindus often managed to wrest or negotiate concessions from Muslim rulers in times when the latter were weak and in need of Hindu goodwill. A well-known case in point is the Somnath temple in coastal Gujarat which was destroyed, restored as a temple and destroyed again no less than eight times. But at any rate, the decisive destruction of the large medieval temple took place in 1194, not in 1528. Therefore, I for one have never had any problem with the hypothesis of a mosque and Muslim habitation at the disputed site in much of the pre-Moghul Muslim period, i.e. between 1194 and 1526.

But the ASI’s search was precisely for the Hindu temple built in the preceding period. And of this temple, they did find appropriate foundations. This hasn’t kept them from acknowledging the existence of Muslim habitation as indicated by the glazed ware. Irfan Habib is attacking a claim the ASI never made, all the better to deflect attention from the central claim the ASI did make: there was a succession of Hindu religious buildings at the site, lastly a very large temple, the foundations of which far exceed the circumference of the Babri mosque. This implies that a large part of the foundations was located outside the mosque and hence cannot possibly be confused with the mosque floor, except by a highly prejudiced mind.

Along the same lines as Habib, Muslim Personal Law Board secretary Mohammed Abdul Rahim Quraishi “said a team of well-known archaeologists including Prof. Suraj Bhan had visited the site and inspected the excavated pits and was of [the] opinion that there was evidence of an earlier mosque beneath the structure of the Babri Masjid”. (“ASI ‘finds’ temple, Muslim front says no”, Hinduonnet.com, 25 Aug. 2003) The two agree on a pre-Babri Muslim presence, but note how Quraishi’s “interpretation” of the findings is already starkly at variance with Habib’s: the latter saw no mosque underneath, while Quraishi’s employee Bhan did. This indicates the non-seriousness of at least one of these interpretations, possibly both: clutching at straws, they hurriedly fell for any interpretation as long as it could contradict the ASI reading. The ASI team could settle for a single interpretation, just one, which also converges with S.P. Gupta’s, K.N. Dixit’s and R.K. Sharma’s reading: that’s what you get when you stay close to the empirical data rather than imposing a contrived interpretation on them.

But never mind, we gladly concede a Muslim presence, mosque and all, in the period from 1194 to 1528. In fact, this point had been made a decade ago by anti-temple historian Prof. Sushil Srivastava (The Disputed Mosque, Delhi 1991, p.90-92) as well as by pro-temple archaeologist Prof. R. Nath (The Baburi Masjid of Ayodhya, Jaipur 1991, p.18), independently from one another. They did not posit the existence of a mosque beneath the mosque, but suggested that the Babri mosque itself preceded Babar by two or three centuries, because its architectural style was more in keeping with fashions and construction skill levels known from 13^th-century buildings. Also, the circumstances of Babr’s and his lieutenant Mir Baqi’s brief stay in Ayodhya, viz. in the middle of a hectic war campaign, are hardly compatible with the construction of an important building.

In that case, it remains an open question why the mosque was attributed to Mir Baqi and named after Babar. Anomalies in style between different parts of the building, some in Moghul and some in earlier styles, indicate repair after serious damage, reports R. Nath (The Baburi Masjid, p.11). “Mir Baqi might have had the mosque renovated and then re-dedicated to Babur”, opines Srivastava (The Disputed Mosque, p.88), leaving open the question why this was needed at all. One possibility is that in the declining years of the Lodi dynasty, Hindus had gained control of their sacred site including the mosque building, and the victorious Mir Baqi chased them from there and restored it as a mosque.

But in science, one has to be able to live with provisional ignorance, which is always better than a false pretence at knowledge. So, let us drop all speculations and accept that there is still a lot we don’t know about the site’s history, particularly for the time between 1194 and 1528. Given that Prof. Harsh Narain, Dr. Arun Shourie and others have discovered attempts to conceal or alter Muslim documents confirming the temple tradition (discussed in the VHP evidence bundle, § 7.3: History vs. Casuistry, Delhi 1991, p.28-29), we cannot exclude that in a secret drawer in some Indian Muslim library, a written testimony to the events in question lies hidden and waiting to be found. Otherwise, we will just have to live with this hole in our knowledge.

But we may at any rate accept that there are strong indications for a Muslim presence at the site in that very time bracket, 1194-1528. Prof. Habib and Mr. Quraishi may not realize it, but their insistence on a Muslim presence before Babar actually fits the traditional consensus and the Hindu interest better. For suppose the opposite scenario: the magnificent medieval Hindu temple had remained standing all through three centuries of harsh Muslim rule until Babar’s arrival. Given the temple’s importance and its central location in what became a provincial capital of the Muslim (Sultanate) regime, its continued presence would have been a remarkable counter-example against the consensus view of Islamic iconoclasm for that period, viz. that no Hindu temple was left standing if the Muslim rulers could help it. That the Muslim occupation of this Hindu sacred site started with the Ghorid conquest, is consistent with all that we know about that conquest as an unparalleled orgy of iconoclasm.

A second reason why the pre-Moghul date of the mosque supports the Hindu position concerns the presence of Hindu temple artefacts inside the building’s walls, including an inscription describing the building as a Rama temple, which came to light during the demolition. Hindu masons who were employed in the construction, either as slaves or as paid labourers, worked remains of the demolished temple into the mosque in an apparent bid to preserve some of the site’s sanctity. But how could they do this in 1528 if the temple had been destroyed in 1192? One can think up scenarios, but it is simpler if the mosque’s construction followed more closely in time upon the temple’s demolition. This way, Habib’s and Quraishi’s insistence on a Muslim presence at the site in 1194-1528 actually adds to the credibility of the most sensational proof for the temple.

We may repeat R. Nath’s conclusion (The Baburi Masjid, p.78): “The foregoing study of the architecture and site of the Baburi Masjid has shown, unequivocally and without any doubt, that it stands on the site of a Hindu temple which originally existed in the Ramkot on the bank of the river Sarayu, and Hindu temple material has also been used in its construction.”

3.9. Counterbalancing the findings
Internationally, the most popular approach to the unwelcome ASI findings has been to swiftly concede the essence of the report’s conclusions, then to elaborate the thesis that even this final report isn’t conclusive because it is counterbalanced by other opinions. Whence the title in the conservative Daily Telegraph: “Archaeologists fail to end Ayodhya temple site row” (26 Aug. 2003), by its Delhi correspondent Rahul Bedi, who incidentally is a collaborator of the Communist fortnightly Frontline.

The leader of this trend was predictably the BBC. Jyotsna Singh of BBC-News (“Experts split on Ayodhya findings”, 26-8-2003) claims: “A key report by Indian archaeologists on the disputed Ayodhya religious site has split not only Hindus and Muslims but experts too.” She acknowledges: “The report said there was indeed evidence of an earlier temple built beneath a 16th century mosque that was destroyed by Hindu activists in the northern city in 1992.”

So, science has spoken, but it doesn’t have the last word. For, there is a split of opinions. Firstly and predictably: “Hindus welcomed the findings while Muslims rejected the report.” Secondly and less trivially: “Several historians opposed to the VHP's claim have questioned the validity of the ASI findings.” Then follow Irfan Habib’s comments, just discussed.

While the true fanatics led by Irfan Habib simply deny the new evidence as they have denied the old, we see the slightly more cautious secularists retreat to the next line of defence. They use these fanatics as a counterbalance to the scientific findings, which they in turn conflate with the "Hindu hardliners", to create a semblance of even-handedness with themselves in the reasonable middle position between two fanatical parties, one of these in effect including the ASI. This way, they can still maintain that there is no conclusive proof for the temple, as if dogmatic denials are equal in value with the scientific findings of a team of top archaeologists.

The BBC correspondent and most Western media claim that the issue remains unresolved. But if you read on, you find that this only means that some of the long-standing evidence deniers merely keep on denying the evidence. So yes, there are still two positions: those who stand by the evidence and those who deny it or explain it away with contrived stories. But no fair reporter would treat those two positions, science and anti-science, as being of equal validity or equal seriousness in any other controversy.

When scientific investigations pin-pricked fond beliefs, e.g. concerning the purported Roswell UFO extraterrestrials or the Shroud of Turin (a medieval artefact definitely not datable to the time of Jesus), the press did report the feeble protestations of the devotees; but it never gave them equal rank with the findings of science. It never used these opposing voices to argue that the scientific findings were less than solid and definitive.

This remains true when some of the objectors are people of academic status but whose ideological constraints are known. Of course Soviet historians have kept on denying that the Katyn massacre was Stalin's rather than Hitler's work. Given that they risked their lives if they took the opposite position, they would, wouldn't they? And their supporters in the West stood by them as long as feasible. But nobody in his right mind thought that these predictable denials by the usual suspects added any weight to the contrived case against the evidence.

Likewise, the politically motivated protests of an Irfan Habib or a Zafaryab Jilani deserve to be treated as so much sound and fury signifying nothing. Science has spoken. All responsible citizens will now repudiate the anti-scientific campaign of temple denial and allow justice to be done.

4. Conclusion
Let us look at the Ayodhya affair from a secular viewpoint.

To a secularist in the Western tradition, the whole Ayodhya controversy was a non-issue. For that very reason, he would have favoured a solution that satisfied the community which is the largest, the most attached to the contentious site, and already in possession of the site. That solution would cause the least amount of bad blood, an amount that could certainly be compensated for somehow. The Muslims would get something else in exchange, even something expensive, just to make sure that all sides would be sufficiently accepting of the deal. Appease the clerics on all sides a little bit, so they don’t cause any trouble for the rest of us. Not the most principled policy, but a highly secular one and, thank God, a bloodless one.

One such secularist, a modern man ready to deal with the matter pragmatically, was Rajiv Gandhi. He allowed the Hindus to prepare for the construction of a new temple with the ceremonial laying of a foundation stone (shilanyas) on November 9, 1989. He pressured the Chandra Shekhar government, which was dependent on Congress support, into organizing the scholars’ debate about the historical evidence, in the full knowledge that the temple party would win such a debate hands down. The thrust of his Ayodhya policy was to buy off Muslim acquiescence with some of the usual currency of the Congress culture: maybe nominating a few more Mians as ministers, banning a few Islam-unfriendly books (hence the Satanic Verses affair), raising the Hajj subsidy, providing cheap loans to the Shahi Imam’s constituency, donating government land for some Islamic purpose, things like that. In exchange, Hindus would get their temple. Muslims would have scolded their leaders for selling out, Hindus would have lambasted theirs for cheapening a noble cause with such horse-trading, but in the end, everybody would have accepted it.

Whatever may be said about and against Rajiv Gandhi, he had the calibre and the cool secular distance from religious passions to see such a policy through. Even his anti-temple confidants M.J. Akbar and Mani Shankar Aiyar, the self-described “secular fundamentalist”, could certainly be brought (or bought) into line. But in 1991 India’s top pilot was killed, and worse, in his years as India’s most important politician, dark forces had started fighting his reasonable and pragmatic policy tooth and nail. The problem was not with the obscurantist Mullahs, because in those days, a seasoned Congress leader knew how to strike win-win deals with them. The poison issued from the secularist intellectuals who raised a media storm against the historical consensus, the one factual certainty underlying all the political confusion. Their stance hardened Muslim intransigeance, emboldened the Left in its anti-Hindu strategy and created international public opinion against the temple plan.

The irresponsible and downright evil campaign of history denial by the secularist opinion-makers has prolonged the Ayodhya dispute by at least a decade. Denouncing all pragmatic deals, these secular fundamentalists insisted on having it their way for the full 100%, meaning the total humiliation of the Hindus. They exercised verbal terror against Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and all politicians suspected of wanting to compromise with the Hindu movement, making them temporize and postpone the solution. This way, they exacerbated the tensions in return for the pleasure of indulging their self-image as implacable secularists. A real secularist would have sought to minimize a religious conflict, but this lot insisted on magnifying it and turning it into a national crisis.

So, the blood of all the people killed in Ayodhya-related riots after 1989 is at least partly on their heads. The spate of violence in Gujarat in 2002, the “genocide” about which they can’t stop talking, and which was triggered by the Godhra massacre of Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, may well have been a late result of their slanderous effort to identify Ayodhya with deceitful Hindu fanaticism. Those holier-than-thou secularists are not so innocent.

But now, the historical evidence has definitively been verified. The deceit turns out to be their own. Their lies stand exposed. Their strategy to sabotage justice in Ayodhya was based on history falsification. They have disgraced the fair name of secularism. Henceforth, we should ignore them except to hear the confession of their sins.