The Ayodhya Debate: Focus On The 'No Temple' Evidence - Part II
Two sides to the story by Koenraad Elst

Tampering with the evidence
Before concluding, we want to register a remark on a minor but quite significant chapter in the exchange of evidence: the VHP- mandated scholars have, in their argumentation, pointed out no less than four attempts where scholars belonging to the anti-temple party have tried to conceal or destroy documentary evidence. Those are of course cases where the attempt failed because it was noticed in time, but the question must be asked how many similar attempts have succeeded. At any rate, there has not been any attempt from the anti-temple side to counter or even deny these four specific allegations, nor have they been able to point out any similar attempt by the pro-temple party to tamper with the record.

With one possible exception: immediately after the announcement of the discovery, in the post-demolition debris on 6-7 December 1992, of Hindu sculptures and an inscription explicitly supporting the temple thesis, seventy academics issued a statement alleging that this evidence had been stolen from museums and planted there. Well, who knows. But in the six years since then, this archaeological material has been in the custody of politicians openly hostile to the Hindu Revivalist movement (such as Human Resources Minister Arjun Singh, 1991-96), who would gladly have made the material available for inspection by scholars capable of proving the allegation. So far, however, the attack against the professional integrity of the scholars who presented these findings (grouped in the Historians' Forum chaired by Prof. K.S. Lal) remains unsubstantiated; unless proven, the allegation is a case of defamation.

The politics behind the debate
The political equation behind all this intrigue is rarely understood by non-Indians. Thus, it requires quite a historical excursus to explain why declared Marxists like Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar are making common cause with Islamic fundamentalism in its struggle against Hindu heathenism.(25) Leaving aside the larger framework of the alliances and power equations in India's political arena, we may for now draw attention to a significant asymmetry in the political backgrounds of the pro- and anti-temple parties.

Reducing the "belief" in the pre-existence of a Hindu temple at the site to a political agenda is, apart from being a case of the "genetic fallacy", also counterfactual. Among those who uphold the temple thesis, you find scholars who did not support the movement for replacing the mosque structure with temple architecture, and who explicitly distanced themselves from the Vishva Hindu Parishad's campaign, e.g. Prof. A.R. Khan and archaeologist Dr. Ram Nath. By contrast, I am not aware of anyone in the anti-temple party who supported the right of Hindus to build a temple at the site: every one of them explicitly subscribes to the position that Hindu attempts to reclaim this Hindu sacred site should be thwarted.

Of course, the opponents of the replacement of the Babar mosque (already back in use as a Hindu temple since 1949) with new temple architecture could have taken that political stand without dragging in the historical question, e.g.: "The fact that a Hindu temple stood at the site still does not give Hindus the right to claim it back"; and some of them have indeed fallen back on that position when they saw they were losing the debate on the historical evidence. But in 1989-91, the field seemed ripe for the more aggressive position, which was to deny the Hindu history of the site altogether; nobody had expected that the VHP would be capable (and in effect, it was not capable, but it found some independent scholars who were capable) of collecting and presenting the available as well as some newly-found evidence for the temple.

The VHP-mandated scholars, for their part, have not been aggressive enough to take the struggle into the enemy half of the field by focusing public attention on the quality of the evidence presented by the BMAC-mandated scholars and their allies in academe and the media. That is why the latter have gotten away with creating the false impression, at least among those unacquainted with the actual contents of the debate, that the pro-temple case is weak and fraudulent while, purely by implication, their own case must be unassailable.

The role of foreign scholars
It is not reassuring to watch the ease with which foreign scholars have absorbed or adopted the non-temple thesis from their Indian colleagues (whom they assume to be neutral observers) even without being shown any positive evidence. In academic circles in the West, my own restating the status quaestionis in terms of actual evidence has only earned me hateful labels and laughter, and this from big professors at big universities whose prestige is based on the widespread belief that scholarship goes by hard evidence, not politically fashionable opinions. Never has any of them offered hard evidence for the newly dominant view, or even just shown a little familiarity with the contents of the debate.

Until 1989, there was a consensus about the existence of a medieval Hindu temple and its destruction by Islamic iconoclasm, as laid down in the Encyclopaedia Brittannica (1989 edition, entry Ayodhya): "Rama's birthplace is marked by a mosque erected by the Moghul emperor Babur in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple." Western scholars who did primary research, notably the Dutch scholars Hans Bakker and Peter van der Veer, found nothing which gave reason to question that consensus. Had they cared to follow the debate in India, they would have looked in vain for the presentation by the no- temple party of any historical or archaeological fact which is radically incompatible with (and thereby constitutes a refutation of) that consensus view.

A painful example of a scholar intimidated into conformity by the demonization of the temple thesis can be witnessed is this climbdown by Peter van der Veer, who had at first accepted the pre-existence of the Ayodhya temple on the basis of the local tradition: "While Bakker and I could naively accept local tradition, this cannot be done any longer."(26) In fact, the local oral history was confirmed by other types of evidence as presented by B.B. Lal, S.P. Gupta, Harsh Narain et al., but none of these are known to Van der Veer (as per his own text and bibliography) because his only source turns out to be S. Gopal's Anatomy of a Confrontation, which conceals the pro-temple evidence. More importantly, Van der Veer and Bakker are attacked nominatim in S. Gopal's book (27), which falsely associates them with the Hindu fundamentalist bad guys all while diverting attention from the historical evidence, which it spurns as "pointless".(28) Being associated with Hindu fundamentalism is about the worst defamation one can inflict on an Indologist, and this is the sole reason for Van der Veer's change of heart. At any rate, he offers no historical evidence at all which could justify his retreat from the well-established consensus.

Conclusion
Future historians will include the no-temple argument of the 1990s as a remarkable case study in their surveys of academic fraud and politicized scholarship. With academic, institutional and media power, a new consensus has been manufactured denying the well- established history of temple demolition by Islamic iconoclasm to the Babri Masjid Ram Janmabhoomi site; at least among people with prestige and influence but no first-hand knowledge of the issue. But the facts will remain the facts, and their ongoing suppression is bound to give way.

References
1. On the archaeological aspect, see Ayodhya Archaeology after Demolition by Prof. D. Mandal, Delhi 1993, and Archaeology of Babri Masjid, Genuine Publ., Delhi 1994, by Mrs. Surinder Kaur and Mr. Sher Singh, amateurs with whom other anti-temple authors like Sushil Srivastava have refused to be associated; and on the pro-temple side, The Baburi Masjid of Ayodhya by R. Nath, Jaipur 1991.

2. E.g. S. Guhan in Jitendra Bajaj, ed.: Ayodhya and the Future India, Madras 1993, p.89.

3. R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians' Report to the Nation, People's Publ., Delhi 1991. To my knowledge, the argumentation offered by the BMAC office-bearers themselves during the first round of the talks, in December 1990, was never published.

4. S. Gopal, Romila Thapar, K.N. Panikkar, Bipan Chandra et al.: , JNU 1989; and S. Gopal, ed.: Anatomy of a Confrontation, 2nd ed., Penguin 1992.

5. A.A. Engineer: Babri Masjid Ramjanmabhoomi Controvercy, Ajanta, Delhi 1990, and Politics of Confrontation, idem 1992.

6. E.g. Harsh Narain: The Ayodhya Temple-Mosque Dispute, Penman, Delhi 1993, and S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, What Happened to Them, vol.2, The Islamic Evidence, Voice of India, Delhi 1991.

7. Available in two editions: The Great Ram Janmabhoomi Evidence, VHP, Delhi 1991, and History vs. Casuistry, Voice of India, Delhi 1991.

8. Gyanendra Pandey: Hindus and Others (Viking/Penguin 1993), p.9-10; "New Hindu History of Ayodha", Economic and Political Weekly, 18-6-1994; "The New Hindu History", in J. McGuire, P. Reeves & H. Brasted: Politics of Violence (Sage Publ., Thousands Oaks, Colorado 1996), p.143-158.

9. This first volume includes articles by Harsh Narain, Ram Swarup, Jai Dubashi and Arun Shourie, apart from the main body by Goel himself. In appendix, it also reproduces a list of Hindu temples demolished in Bangladesh in autumn 1989, prepared by the Hindu-Buddhist-Christian Unity Council of Bangladesh, as if to prove that Islamic iconoclasm is not ancient history.

10. In a review in the Calcutta Telegraph (ca. 30-1-1991), Manini Chatterjee of the Communist Party (Marxist) calls Hindu Temples, vol.1, (along with my own book Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid) a "very bad book", but fails to even attempt a refutation.

11. S.R. Goel: , vol.2, p.266-267 of the first edition, the one which Chetan Bhatt uses; there is a much-expanded second edition (1994).

12. C. Bhatt: Liberation and Purity, p.169.

13. C. Bhatt: Liberation and Purity, p.175.

14. C. Bhatt: Liberation and Purity, p.278.

15. C. Bhatt: Liberation and Purity, p.278.

16. E.g. in his De Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar identified the Celtic gods with the Roman gods familar to his readers. Likewise, a Muslim commentator of the Quran (Md. Faruq Khan: Qur'ān Majīd in Hindi, Rampur 1976, p.242, quoted by Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2, p.364) identifies the Arab goddesses Al-Lāt, Al-Manāt and Al-Uzza typologically with Hindu goddesses like Saraswati and Lakshmi.

17. S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2 (1st ed.), p.429.

18. C. Bhatt: Liberation and Purity, p.278.

19. S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2 (1st ed.), p.ii.

20. See S.R. Goel, ed.: Time for Stocktaking: Whither Sangh Parivar?, Voice of India, Delhi 1997.

21. R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians Report to the Nation, cf. supra, largely copied in Pradeep Nayak: The Politics of the Ayodhya Dispute, Commonwealth, Del

22. Quoted by R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians' Report, p.19, italicizing the words "the fortress".

23. R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians' Report, p.20.

24. R.S. Sharma et al.: Historians' Report, p.16.

25. Thapar and Sharma are quoted as representatives of Indian Marxism in Tom Bottomore's History of Marxist Thought, Oxford 1988, entry "Hinduism"; Habib has subtitled his latest book Towards a Marxist Perspective.

26. P. van der Veer: Religious Nationalism, p.161. Reference is to his book Gods on Earth, and to Hans Bakker's book Ayodhya.

27. S. Gopal: Anatomy of a Confrontation, p.30.

28. S. Gopal, ed.: Anatomy of a Confrontation, p.20.

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