A.1) C.  Rajagopalachari gives no evidence whatsoever.  He quotes Gandhiji as saying that the episodes of the Ramayana are "stories".  So what? You can buy books called "The tragic Story of Partition": they are just as much about history.  If they also have a moral, you can tell them to your children, and then they become "stories".  If we are not misled by the word "story", we can read on and notice that C. Rajagopalachari made a distinction between Rama as "avatar" and Rama as "king of the Ikshavaku race", i.e. between the mythological and the historical Rama.

The fact that Rajagopalachari makes the Rama scenario into a children's story, proves the non-historicity of Rama only if one is willing to conclude that real events and characters cease to be historical the moment their "story" is made into a Bombay film.

A.2.a) Periyar E.V.  Ramaswamy gives no evidence whatsoever.  He lambasts Rama as a mean character and representative of the "Aryan race" - a wholly unscientific category thoroughly discredited by the use Hitler made of it.  In fact, even on that spurious count, Ramaswamy is mistaken: Rama, like Krishna, is classically described as dark-coloured, like the purest specimens of Ramaswamy's Dravidian race.  But the point for this discussion is that Ramaswamy doesn't even deny the essential historicity of the Ramayana.  He only denies its sacredness, and asserts that its real hero was Ravana.  The purely propagandistic, unscientific and contradictory character of Ramaswamy's approach to the Ramayana, can be seen from the fact that on the one hand, he often called the Brahmins the guardians of the oppression of the Dravidians by the Aryans, and on the other, he calls the Brahmin Ravana the Dravidian hero who fights the ugly Aryan invader, the non-Brahmin Rama.

A.2.b) Jawaharlal Nehru gives no evidence whatsoever.  He merely notices that parodies of the Ramayana are staged by Dravidian separatists who propagate variations on the Aryan race theory.  This propaganda of course assumes that the successful fight of the Northern king Rama against the Southern king Ravana in fact dramatises a historical event of conquest of the South by the North.  While not a proof of the Ramayana's historicity, it is at least proof of contemporary people's conviction that it has a historical core.  Nehru says in so many words: "The Ramayana and the Mahabharata deal with the days of the Indo-Aryans, their conquests and civil wars."

Further on, he says he didn't consider the Rama episodes as factually true (When? As a child?), but in a next quote he explodes this hypothesis by saying that the Ramyana is the story of "the Aryan expansion in the South", which he doesn't conceive as a myth but as history.  So, he says the Ramayana is dramatised history.

A.3) Dr. Sukumar Sen gives no evidence whatsoever.  But at least, here we meet the first scholar among the authorities invoked to substantiate the AIBMAC case.

From what Dr. Sen writes, we learn that Valmiki was a historical character and that in his time, the Rama story already existed.  However, no testimony of Rama of the other Ramayana characters is available in the Vedas (though Sita appears as an earth goddess).  But Rama shows up occasionally in other writings, including the Mahabharata.  And there were many Rama traditions, variations on the Rama theme, upon which Valmiki drew to compose his most classical version of the story.  In spite of the current efforts to pit Buddhism against Rama, there are Buddhist versions of the Rama "legend" and Buddhist sources relate with pride that Buddha was of the same Ikshavaku lineage as Rama.

Dr. Sen notes that Sita appears in the Vedas as an earth goddess.  But all he really knows, is that the name Sita appears there.  It is perfectly possible that the worship of Sita together with Rama is not a continuation of any Vedic Sita worship, but concerns a later human being who was called Sita just like anyone can be called after a god or goddess, and who became the wife of the historical character Rama.  From the fact that old texts mention a god Shiva, we also do not infer that therefore Shivaji cannot have been a historical character.

The fact that there are many versions of the Ramayana, is no evidence against its historicity at all.  Try the experiment of telling one story to several people and letting them renarrate it to others: after a few steps in this transmission process, substantial differences will have crept in.  Consider also the plural versions of stories in scriptures of other cultures.  For instance, in the Bible, there are two different Creation stories; two wholly different genealogies of Jesus are given; in fact, every single story from Jesus' life is related differently by the different Gospel-writers, a mere thirty to sixty years after Jesus' death.  And yet, no serious scholar concludes therefrom that Jesus did not exist.

A.4) P.S.  Sridhara Murthy doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  His text is full of crank statements and crackpot theories, all built on top of the Hitlerian theory of the Aryan race.  Thus, he calls Shiva "the only non-Aryan original Indian god": may we remind him that Shiva was depicted as white, like the "Aryans", while the Vishnu incarnations Krishna and Rama are depicted as dark, like the "non-Aryans"?

His crank tendencies develop into a full-fledged conspiracy theory (of course pure conjecture without any proof) where he combines his visceral hatred for the Brahmin Aryan "race" with the inconvenient fact that central characters in the Rama tradition (Rama, Valmiki, Vishvamitra) were non-Brahmins, and that the bad guy, Ravana, was a Brahmin: the Brahmins "were desperately looking for an epic hero who could attract the non-Brahmin common folk and show how the Vedic tradition can condescend to honour and worship one practisinng certain ideals.  The image, character and personality of Rama just fulfilled this need.  Rama was manufactured to fill the vacuum.  Valmiki, Rama and Vishvamitra had to be, therefore, non-Brahmins...  They also had to notify the common folk that in the Vedic religion even Brahmins and scholars when found guilty would not be spared and would be branded as villains and demons.  So Ravana had to be depicted as a Brahmin and a scholar."

This is quite a mad line of reasoning.  It says that, if Brahmins depict others in a scornful way, it proves they consider them inferior; and if they don't, but make them into heroes (even assuming that it is "they" who created the Ramayana), it proves the same thing, only it now involves a ploy to hide this scorn from the people who are its objects.  This tendency, quite persistent in Mr.  Murthy's text, to explain any course of events in such a way as to prove invariably the same thing, is called paranoia.

More of this Brahmin conspiracy theory is the contention that the episode of Rama's abandoning Sita "was designed by the Vedic religion to hint the people that Buddha's conduct was, after all, wrong".  The "hint" is based on the fact that Buddha too left his wife.  He writes this four sentences after stating that "Rama's conduct was in direct contrast with that of Buddha".

Mr.  Murthy also makes a lot of the now-abandoned 19th century theory that Ravana was a Buddhist, and quotes with approval the wholly unsubstantiated statement that "Rama legend represents the victory of Hinduism over Buddhism".  While we don't subscribe to this interpretation, we do notice that the Ramayana is once more presented as an embellished version of an actual historical process.

In the racist anti-Aryan theory of both Ramaswamy Naicker and Sridhara Murthy, one need not look for consistency.  Since all possible facts prove the same thing, there is no need for them to co-ordinate facts.  For instance, even while inferring, from the fact that Rama was a warrior, that he must have been hostile to the Buddhists and Jains because of their absolute "non-violence", Mr.  Murthy makes much of a Jain king who "repulsed" Mahmud Ghaznavi's nephew who came on conquest.

He says that Jains ruled Ayodhya well into the 12th century AD, and lists 10 Jain temples existing in 1330.  None of these was claimed to be where we say the Janmabhoomi is, so we have no quarrel with that.  In fact, some of these Jain temples have also been destroyed by Muslim conquerors, and add proof to our well-founded proposition that Muslim conquerors have massively destroyed temples of all Pagan sects, including Jainism and Buddhism.

In his booklet, published in 1988, which seems little more than a rehashing of Mrs.  Surinder Kaur's The Secular Emperor Babar, published in 1977, Mr.  Murthy quotes some more big names.

A.4.a) S.K. Chatterjee gives no evidence whatsoever.  He gives the opinion that "there is evidently no historical core below the surface, no scholar of Indian history now thinks that Rama, the hero of Ramayana, was a historical person who can be relegated to a particular period of time".  This opinion is already amply disproven by all the people, including scholars, who have said that the Ramayana is a dramatisation of the "Aryan conquest of South India", which amounts to a basis in history.  So, his statement is flatly untrue.  Equally untrue is the statement that the Ramayana is "a literary creation by some single poet who has been named Valmiki": there were many poetic creations built around the Rama story available in different parts of India, by the time Valmiki composed his classical version.

So, S.K. Chatterjee may have been an authority on some things, but on the Ramayana he was not above making flatly untrue statements.

The contention that the Rama story cycle was invented out of thin air, goes against all we know of ancient culture.  The same mistake was made about Homer's Iliad, the story of the conquest of Troy by the Greeks.  The official teaching was that it was fiction, until Schliemann started digging and found Troy.  Generally, all the ancient epics are embellished and dramatised amplifications or modifications of a true story.

A.4.b) Dr. B.R. Ambedkar gives no evidence whatsoever.  He gives the opinion that the Ramayana "in its second edition, from a purely historical work, also became a didactic work aiming to teach a right code...  [In the third edition, it was], like the Mahabharata, made into a repository of legends, knowledge, philosophy..." What Ambedkar says, is quite the opposite from what S.K. Chatterjee says: the Ramayana most certainly grew around a historical core.

A.4.c) Dr. Jyoti Prasad Jain gives no evidence whatsoever.  He wants to claim all the temples of Ayodhya for the Jains. Mr. Murthy and the AIBMAC infer from that that he may be a good ally against the Hindus.  Unfortunately for them, Dr. Jain shares our view that Babar and other Muslim rulers destroyed many Hindu (including Jain) temples.  He restates the well-known fact that Babar mutilated Jain idols.  Mr. Murthy promises to disprove this well-known fact "in the following pages", but in the following 29 pages, he doesn't return to this subject at all.

A.4.d) The Gazetteers do not give any evidence whatsoever, according to Mr. Murthy.  Yet, some of the Court petitions filed by Ayodhya Muslims base themselves on the 1905 Gazetteer by Neville, which is here dismissed as written by someone who has "neither studied history nor archaeological reports".  His only argument is that the report does not tally with the 1960 Gazetteer.  And this is where it does not tally: the 1905 Gazetteer says that Babar stayed in Ayodhya for "a week", while the 1960 Gazetteer says he stayed there for "a few days" (this last version is explicitly taken from Mrs. Beveridge's translation, which was published years after Nevill's Gazetteer).  It certainly proves that Nevill was a non-historian: he does not even correct his figures in the light of a Gazetteer published 55 years later!

If our AIBMAC friends want to wage this debate on the strength of the confabulations of a crackpot like Mr.  Sridhara Murthy, we could have given them plenty.

In fact, in spite of the scorn Mr. Murthy heaps on them, the Gazetteers do prove that the British surveyors, who were generally non-partisan and conscientious people, saw no reason to doubt the veracity of the local tradition that the Babri Masjid had been built on a demolished Hindu temple.  All the relevant British Gazetteers state that Babar or his subordinate demolished a temple to replace it with the Babari Masjid.

A.4.e) The pillars in the Babri structure, and their iconography, give no evidence whatsoever - at least not in favour of the anti-Mandir hypothesis.  For a detailed rebuttal of Mr. Murthy's statements (based on the findings of a "research team" led by Sher Singh) on pp.31-35 and pp.41-43, we refer to our own evidence, notably annexure 28.  Briefly: Mr. Murthy is wholly mistaken in stating that the same stone has been used in other masjids (Kasauti is but a popular and imprecise name, the stone used here is schistose), and that the sculptures are Buddhist.  His sources are wholly outdated since the archaeological work of A.K. Narain and B.B. Lal.

A.5) Dr. R.L. Shukla gives no evidence whatsoever.  His text starts with a political tirade.  Then, he heaps scorn on a number of archaeologists and historians, calling them "fanatic", "notorious", "nonsense", "opposed to social change" etc., all kinds of personal attack which are totally irrelevant to the discussion.  Short, this man has no scientific temper, and his pamphlet does not belong in a compilation of scientific evidence.  Then, without naming his source, he extensively restates some of the research results of the excavation campaigns led by Prof. A.K. Narain and Prof. B.B. Lal.  It is well-known by now that the latter has publicly stated that the Babar Masjid has replaced a pre-existing building, quite possibly a temple, and has claimed that the Ramayana has a historical core (as in his article in Manthan, October 1990).  So, all the archaeological findings, including the as yet unpublished ones, do not at all add up to evidence that no Mandir was there, on the contrary.

A.6) The Jataka story gives no evidence whatsoever.  It was apparently included because it locates the dynasty of Dasharath and Rama in Benares rather than Ayodhya.  Of course, in a cultural tradition not guarded by a central authority, variations occur, and these may include the localisation of the main events.  But there is no living tradition anytime in the past millennium that locates Rama in Benares.  We base our claim on the Ram Janmabhoomi site not on some long-forgotten isolated statement dug up from ancient manuscripts, but on a well-established living tradition.

A.7) V. Raghavan and C. Godakumbura give no evidence whatsoever.  They give some more variations on the Rama story, proving once more that the Ramayana was not "a literary creation by some single poet who has been named Valmiki", as S.K. Chatterjee claimed.  The book, especially the parts omitted in the AIBMAC compilation, but mentioned in the table of contents, also describes how Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia venerate Rama and narrate and enact his story (in spite of restrictions recently imposed by Malaysia's Islamic government).

The version which is given, "is not widespread" and even now "only known to traditional performers".  The writer "obtained it from a dancer" in one particular village.  If such a lone tradition in the backwoods of Sri Lanka must count as clinching evidence on the Ayodhya issue, then the numerous local testimonies should count even more as evidence, right? The cited text incidentally also says that "some of it may have a historical basis".

A.8) Malladi Venkata Ratnam doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  What he does give is a crank theory: that Ayodhya is really the Greek word Agadon, that Rama ruled in Egypt, and more such totally unsubstantiated flights of the imagination.  Look, if we had wanted, we could have included some Hindu crank theories as well: that Rome really is Ram-nagar, that the Taj Mahal was built by Hanuman, that Menes the first pharoah is merely our Manu, and what not.  But we decided to give some genuine scientific evidence.  And we did not expect to find some of the unfortunate deadwood of Hindu scholarship in our opponents' "evidence".

A.9) Sushil Srivastava doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  He creates a wholly artificial problem by reading the Ayodhya Mahatmya directions for the location of the Janmasthan as if they were written for (and by) people who use a compass rather than orient themselves roughly by solar directions.  In one paragraph, Mr.  Srivastava has to use the word "exactly" (North, West, etc., with zero degrees aberration) seven times, in order to arrange for the Mahatmya directions not to lead us "exactly" to the Babri Masjid site.  And with all that hair-splitting, he only manages to move the "exact" location of the indicated Janmasthan two dozen yards, so that "Kaushalya Bhavan is nearer the Janmabhoomi than the Babri Masjid is".  Methodologically, we can only notice that he distorts the text by acting as if it says "exactly North" etc., in a modern sense of the term "exact".

Further on, Mr. Srivastava himself declares that it is but logical that Muslim officers chose "the central spot" as "the best location" for erecting their place of worship: does he not realise that the many Hindus, Jains and Buddhists there must have had the same idea during the preceding centuries ?

It may be of interest that in a part of his book which was not included in the AIBMAC evidence, Mr. Srivastava floats the theory that the Masjid was not built by Babar, but sometime in the 14th century.  The theory that the Masjid was not built by Babar, seems to be implicitly assumed also in documents A.4 and A.11.  Since the enemies of Hinduism will use absolutely anything to sow doubts, we may as well reply to that theory.

We may point out simply that this theory makes absolutely no difference to our case.  The Hindu attachment to the site is in no way dependent on who destroyed the temple and built the "Babri" Masjid.  Looters may quarrel over the booty, but for the victim the damage has been done all the same.  Those testimonies (among the ones we have presented in support of the local consensus that the Masjid had been built on a Hindu sacred place to which the Hindus kept returning) which include the belief that Babar built the Masjid, are not rendered unreliable, since this belief can be explained perfectly from the inscriptions on the Masjid which claim the honour for Babar.

If anything, this theory would deprive the already discredited "argument from silence" about the temple demolition in Babar's diary from its last bit of force.  The argument that Babar was a "secular emperor", would also lose its relevance.  If we look at the record of the preceding Muslim dynasties in temple-destruction, the destruction of a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya would only be true to type.

We may at once put to rest the fable, with which Mr. Sushil Srivastava sympathises (as well as the writers of A.4 and A.11) that Babar was a secularist (unless a "secularist" is defined as "someone who has utter contempt for Hinduism", as seems appropriate these days).  In his diary, he himself writes that his attack on Chanderi was a Jihad to convert a Dar-ul-Harb ("land of strife") into a Dar-ul-Islam.  On the eve of his Jihad against Rana Sanga, he vowed to give up drinking and had the cups and vessels destroyed: "These vessels were broken into pieces in the manner in which, if Allah wills, the idols of the Pagans will be smashed." He also comments on his victory against the Rajput confederacy in 1527, and after quoting copiously from the Quran, he writes: "After this success, ghazi (slayer of infidels) was written amongst the royal titles.  Below the titles entered on the Fath-Nama, I wrote the following quatrain:

"For Islam's sake, I wandered in the wild,
prepared for war with Pagans and Hindus,
resolved myself to meet the martyr's death.
Thanks be to Allah ! A ghazi I became."

If this Babar was a secularist, can the present-day Babri advocates be communalists ?

A.10) Arvind N.  Das gives no evidence whatsoever.  He does, however, repeat the trick of the JNU historians (see document A.16) in their famous statement, of quoting the convenient part of B.B.  Lal's findings (that Ayodhya was not inhabited before the 7th century BC) but concealing his other finding, that there must have been an 11th-century building right where the Babri structure stands.  Mr. Das quotes Mr. Srivastava (see document A.9) without any criticism.  After deliberately concealing the findings at the site, he suddenly goes on to assume that a building was there, and to postulate that it cannot have been a Hindu temple.  And then he opines that the stone pillars and old reports suggest that there was "a Buddhist stupa" here.  Of course, the Chinese travellers whom he mentions, have never located a stupa at that site, they have merely described a strong Buddhist presence in Ayodhya.  And of course, if Mr. Das had not been 100% illiterate on Indian culture, he would have known that a Stupa is a solid structure, not a pillared one.

And then he brings up the big lie of a centuries-long vast struggle between Brahmins and Buddhists, systematically spread by Hindu-baiters: "The possibility of the destruction of this site by Brahmanical onslaught, which desecrated even the Mahabodhi temple at Gaya, cannot be discounted".  Of course, the Mahabodhi temple was never destroyed by Hindus.  It was abandoned when the Buddhists, who had continued to live and work in Hindu India for many centuries, were exterminated by the Muslim invaders, especially Bakhtiar Khalji who destroyed the Buddhist universities, levelling both the buildings and their inmates.  This was exactly what the Muslim invaders had done in Central Asia.  They didn't fabricate an opposition between Hindus and Buddhists, as our secularists have been doing: for them, these were both Kafirs.  They killed Brahmins as they killed Buddhist monks, they broke Buddha statues as the broke Shiva idols, they levelled Buddhist temples as they levelled Vaishnava temples, and they wrote it down with equal glee and pride, so that we at present have all the evidence, and nobody can deny it.

The same thing counts for Jain establishments: Pagan institutions of every sect have suffered under the Islamic onslaught.  Famous Buddhist and Jain institutes that have been destroyed by the Muslims without leaving a trace, used to flourish at the following places: Bukhara (from bihara, vihara, i.e.  Buddhist monastery), Samarkand, Khotan, Balkh, Bamian, Begram, Jalalabad, Peshawar, Takshashila, Mirpur-Khas, Nagar-Parkar, Sringar, Sialkot, Agroha, Mathura, Hastinapura, Kanauj, Sravasti, Ayodhya, Sarnath, Nalanda, Vikramshila, Vaishali, Rajgir, Odantpuri, Bharhut, Paharpur, Jagaddala, Jajnagar, Nagarjunikonda, Amaravati, Kanchi, Dwarasamudra, Bharuch, Valabhi, Palitana, Girnar, Patan, Jalor, Chandrawati, Bhinmal, Didwana, Nagaur, Osian, Bairat, Gwalior and Mandu.  Smaller establishments add up to several hundreds.

As for the Bodh Gaya temple, Mr. Das should know that, after centuries of disuse, it was taken over by a Hindu priest in the late 19th century, when a project of the Burmese king to renew it fell through because of the Burmese war.  Is that what he means by "desecrated"? In spite of British attempts to keep the Buddhists (identified with Japanese expansionism) out, and in spite of small-human individual interests coming in the way, the temple was peacefully restored as Buddhism's foremost shrine in the world.  Since 1953, the temple is managed by a mixed Hindu-Buddhist management committee, constituted under the Bihar Bodh Gaya Temple Act, passed in 1949 on the basis of earlier agreements worked out between the Mahabodhi Society and the Hindu Mahasabha.

While Hindu society was never guilty of finishing the Buddhist presence at this sacred place, and could have invoked the British rulers' assent to the non-Buddhist control of the place (as our AIBMAC friends invoke the British assent to the status-quo in citing the 1886 court ruling), we didn't mind restoring it to the Buddhist community, not so much because they belong to the same sanatana tradition as we, but because we are sensitive to their veneration to that place.  We do not claim this sensitivity as merit, it comes naturally to all human beings.  It is only a mistaken commitment to fanatical dogmas that is disturbing the AIBMAC people's sensitivity in the case of our own three shrines.

A.11) The unnamed authors of the chapter "Birthplace of epic hero" (among them, apparently, is Sher Singh, the chief authority for Sridhara Murthy's opinions, see A.4), give no evidence whatsoever.  But it is nice of them to quote H.R.  Nevill, who notes that "it is locally affirmed that...  the Janmasthan was in Ramkot and marked the birthplace of Rama.  In 1528 AD Babar...  destroyed the ancient temple and on its site built a mosque." In fact, that is what we have been saying all the time.  Why aren't the Babri polemists coming up with a document stating that "Babar saw this empty land and on its site built a mosque"? That would be evidence.  But this here is secondary evidence for our own viewpoint, that the Babri Masjid was built on a forcibly destroyed temple.

The AIBMAC has underlined the statement that "no record of the visit to Ayodhya is to be found in the Musalman historians".  If this means that they consider this statement to be vindicated by the authority of Mr.  Nevill, from whom it is quoted, we want to draw attention to the fact that Mr.  Nevill nonetheless sticks to the opinion that Babar did visit Ayodhya, which must have occurred about the time of his expedition to Bihar".  Mr.  Nevill was one of those competent scholars who are aware that an "argument from silence" is the weakest kind of argument.  He took care not to be deceived by it, especially because he had other, positive evidence to take into account: the inscriptions on the Masjid that mention Babar as its patron.

As we notice with agreement, these authors are convinced that Mahmud Ghaznavi destroyed absolutely every temple that he came across, for they demand from Mrs. Beveridge an explanation on "how the three important Hindu temples could survive the attack of Mahmud Ghaznavi".

These authors are quite incompetent as historians, for they simply can't read their own evidence, and keep on drawing wrong conclusions.  They say Mr.  Nevill had "grave doubts about [the Ramayana's] historicity", which is a very non-neutral attitude, when in fact Mr.  Nevill had written quite neutrally, without any uncommon gravity :"It is not yet possible to say whether any of this story is really historical".  The research on ancient history was outside the scope of Mr. Nevill's job as Gazetteer-writer.

They falsely accuse Mrs. Beveridge of hiding Mr. Nevill's opinion from the reader.  She does indeed not give every other author's opinion, which is quite legitimate if you prefer facts to opinions.  An example: "She also wants to keep the readers in the dark about another statement made by Nevill regarding the construction of this mosque." This is the statement which she conceals: "In 1528 Babar built the mosque at Ayodhya on the traditional spot where Rama was born." Of course, Mrs. Beveridge herself has not said anything else.

Or has she? This, according to the pro-Babri writers, is the difference: "There is no mention of destroying any ancient temple [in Nevill]", while Mrs. Beveridge had said that Babar had destroyed a temple which marked Ram's birthplace.  Well, two pages earlier, they themselves have quoted Nevill stating that Babar "destroyed the ancient temple and on its site built a mosque".  So, Mr. Nevill needed two sentences to say that Babar destroyed a temple and that it was considered Ram's birthplace, while Mrs. Beveridge says it in one sentence.  That is then with a lot of grimness presented as distortion.

If we leave out Ramaswamy Naicker, then this is already the third outright crank document which the AIBMAC offers as "evidence".  We think this is, in effect, a tactic to make us waste our energy on stupid non-evidence, and to distract the eventual reader's attention from the real evidence, which we have given, and from AIBMAC's own utter lack of any genuine evidence.

A.12) Rajesh Kochhar doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  He makes a large number of assumptions, in fact many more than he can explicate.  If his contention that Ayodhya lay in Afghanistan is true, all the work done so far about the "archaeology of the Ramayana sites", has to be re-done.  But the interesting point is that this writer does not give the slightest trace of an argument for his case.  All he says is that the "Aryans" must have lived in Afghanistan in the time allotted by the Puranas to Rama, about 1900 BC, and that sites have been excavated there.  This says absolutely nothing about any Ram indications (even while tacitly assuming that the Ramayana does have a historical core).

Moreover, he is not up-to-date concerning the "Aryan" theory and the Indus civilisation.  Thus, he still says that the Indus people did not know the horse, that typically Aryan animal.  This is not true: remains of horses have meanwhile been found at two sites.  The entire Aryan Invasion theory is now being questioned internationally, though we have no illusions that Hindu-baiters will soon stop exploiting this theory, for which a lot of opinion but not a single piece of proof has ever been mustered.

He himself does not give a single reference to any proof for this theory, but because of his attachment to the Aryan Invasion dogma, he does overrule available literary evidence that conflicts with it: "Archaeological evidence does not prove that Puranic history is bunk.  It does, however, prove that its geography is all wrong.  Obviously, the Ayodhya of today cannot be the same as the Ayodhya of ancient times." How so, obviously? You can only say that its geography is all wrong, if you know what the right geography was.  But the "right geography" at present only means that which conforms to the still-prevailing paradigm, the Aryan Invasions theory.  There is absolutely nothing in this document that substantiates an alternative geography, from which the Puranic geography could then be shown up as wrong.

According to the findings of the excavation campaign "Archaeology of the Ramayana sites", Valmiki's description of Rama's exile journey does fit the archaeological findings at five sites, and if not Rama's, then at least Valmiki's Ayodhya must be today's Ayodhya (about the historicity of the Ramayana and its localisation, see Prof. B.B.  Lal's article in Manthan, October 1990).  And in Valmiki's time, we know for fact that at least Buddhists and Jains stayed in Ayodhya (among other things, coins with Jain imagery of the 3rd century BC have been found, i.e. roughly contemporary with Valmiki) There is no reason to believe that they would, after that, have lost track of their sacred city (where five of the Jain Tirthankaras were born).  So, these are already two indications that there is a continuity from Valmiki's Ayodhya to today's Ayodhya.

With that, Mr.  Kochhar's claim becomes in effect that Valmiki situated Rama in an area he himself knew, the present Ayodhya, without therefore pretending it was the historical location of the events around which he wrote his Ramayana.  That is not logically impossible.  But then that is the only thing that can be said in favour of his theory.  There is not even a single hint at any kind of evidence for his suggestion that Rama lived in Afghanistan.

A.13) Chidananda Dasgupta doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  He does a lot of abusing and accusing, and totally glosses over the real issue in this context: the historical fact that the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya was forcibly replaced with a mosque, not as an isolated incident, but as the local application of a thousandfold practice which was kept up throughout the area of Muslim conquest.  The part which the AIBMAC has underlined is merely an abuse against "the" Brahmins; but the sentence goes on to bracket them with the Ulema, who are said to have an equal disregard for competent historical opinion.  At any rate, somebody who fills a page with curses against people who disregard historical evidence, should have come up with some evidence himself, instead of taking a position that is thoroughly discredited by the authentic evidence which we have offered.

Since much of Mr.  Dasgupta's tirade is directed against us, we want to state clearly that it is not we who "demand that history books should be burnt".  It is those who want to rewrite and "decommunalise" history, and to whitewash the awful record of the Islamic conquerors and rulers, who make efforts to conceal authentic Muslim history-writing, which details with what horrible fervour and for what pious motives thousands of temples were destroyed, and millions of Kafirs slaughtered.

In our bundle of evidence, we have mentioned that some of the Muslim testimonies for the Ram Mandir tradition have narrowly escaped oblivion, since attempts were made to conceal or destroy them.  Some of the maps in the revenue records have been tampered with.  The "eminent JNU historians", oft-quoted champions of the Babri cause, have been caught in the act of manipulating evidence (see articles by Prof. A.R. Khan in IE, 25/2 and 1/4/90, and appended to this text).  It is not those who have firm evidence, who need to resort to such dirty tricks or to "burning the history books".

A.14) Prof. R.S. Sharma doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  In this interview with Pranava K. Chaudhary, he calls the Ram temple "fictitious".  This is unscientific of him, because it leaves unexplained the solid tradition of testimonies to the contrary, as well as the archaeological evidence.

The Times of India has gone around collecting anti-Mandir statements from "authorities", as if we are still in the Middle Ages, when quoting an authority counted as proof.  All these big names still have to come up with the first piece of proof for the hypothesis that the Babri Masjid was built on an empty spot, that the Hindus under Muslim rule went there for worship for no reason at all, that all the Muslim and foreign testimonies were untruthful, and that the local tradition for the pre-existence of a Ram Mandir was somehow concocted.

Prof. R.S. Sharma states that "in 1981, A.  Fuhrer uncritically adopts some motivated local tradition that the three Ayodhya temples including the one at Rama's birthplace were destroyed by Muslims.  But there is absolutely no basis for such sweeping statements." This "motivated" local tradition had been noted already in 1858 by Balfour.  About the Janmabhoomi, it had been noted by local Muslims in 1735 and even earlier by Aurangzeb's granddaughter.

We could of course make inferences and postulate a wilful ignorance on the professor's part.  But we don't like personal allegations, so let us rather put it this way: if even a renowned professor who has just recently published a book on "Rama's Ayodhya and Communal History" can be ignorant of all the plentiful documentary evidence ("absolutely no basis", he says), how can we be expected to take serious all the amateurs whom our AIBMAC friends have brought together to provide "evidence"?

A.15) Sher Singh doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  But at least he makes a try.  He claims that "the whole mischief was started by P. Carnegy in 1870.  He alleged that the columns used by the Muslims in the construction of the Babri mosque belong to the Janmasthan temple".  In reality, that much had already been said in 1767 by Father Tieffenthaler.  And it has very recently been proven by Dr. S.P. Gupta, with the most modern methods for the use of which Mr. Sher Singh makes an appeal.

Sher Singh is the chief expert on which Sridhara Murthy bases his remarks on the archaeological part of his crank tirades.  This is already his third appearance in this list of documents (the AIBMAC sources are not so numerous as they had seemed, after all).  He wants the JNU historians to make a C14 testing of a beam in the Babri structure, which the 1960 Gazetteer considers as made of Sandalwood, and taken from the earlier Ram Mandir.  In fact, this wooden beam was put in during the repairs carried out on orders of the British government, after the 1934 riots.  A C14 dating could only confirm that.  After having led a research team working on this controversy, Sher Singh should have known these things.

A.16) The 25 JNU historians don't give any proof whatsoever.  All they can do, is try to cast asperrsions on the arguments which Hindus have been giving.  A coherent alternative hypothesis which takes into account all the known facts, is not available in the JNU historians' oft-quoted statement.  Their statement has been taken care of by Prof. A.R. Khan (articles in Indian Express, 25/2 and 1/4/90, appended to this text) and by the Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst (Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid).  Nevertheless, even after Prof. Khan exposed this document as "elusive in character", criticised its methodology, and drew attention to "not only concealment of evidence but also distortion of evidence", the entire pseudo-secularist intelligentsia has continued to quote "the eminent JNU historians" as the final word on this issue.

The AIBMAC should have shown in what way this document substantiates their case, then we could give a precise reply to that deduction.  So far, we can only say that this statement beats around the bush flamboyantly.

It talks a lot about there being no proof for Rama's existence, his time and place of birth, his elevation to divine status etc.: all these things do not concern us here, we have been asked by the Government for evidence of the medieval Ram Mandir and its destruction by Muslim invaders who built the Babri Masjid on top of it, and we have given that evidence.  We repeat that we do not have to justify why we consider a place sacred, we expect our sacred places to be respected as much as members of other religions would do.

The JNU document also philosophises about how there existed inter-communal amity as well as intra-communal strife.  Very well, people are people and cannot be reduced to their religious denominations.  Therefore, many common Muslims don't observe the Quranic injunctions against friendship with Kafirs (Quran 3:28, 3:118, 5:51, 5:144, 9:7, 9:28, 58:23, 60:4).  Some Muslim rulers also preferred a stable kingdom with communal amity to their Islamic duty of persecuting the Kafirs (though they were severely criticised for this Islamic laxity by the guardians of orthodoxy, e.g. Akbar by Ahmad Sirhindi, who had a wealth of verses at their disposal for proving the Muslim's duty to fight the Kafirs: Quran 2:191, 2:193, 4:66, 4:84, 5:33, 8:12, 8:15-18, 8:39, 8:59-60, 8:65, 9:2-3, 9:5, 9:14, 9:29, 9:39, 9:73, 9:111, 9:123, 25:52, 37:22-23, 47:4-5, 48:29, 69:30-37).

In particular, the Nawabs, who belonged to the Shia sect, which shortly before had been persecuted by Aurangzeb, were not too zealous in their observance of Quranic rules regarding the Kafirs.  That is why they allowed the Hindus to worship in the Masjid courtyard, understanding that the Hindus were very attached to this sacred place.  But all that peaceful co-existence between Shias and Hindus does not add up to proof that the Babri Masjid was built on empty land.

About the three instances of Nawabi officials giving grants to Hindu institutions, cited in the JNU pamphlet as evidence of the Nawabs' secularism, Prof. A.R. Khan (History Dpt., Himachal University, Shimla) has remarked :"It may be noted that in the first two evidences the authors have deliberately concealed the fact that both the diwans were Hindus.  [By contrast], while mentioning about the gifts by the officials of the Nawabi court to Hindu priests (in their third evidence), they have not forgotten to state that the officials were Muslims.  This not only amounts to concealment of evidence but also distortion of evidence." (IE 25/2/90)

The JNU text does not go into the archaeological evidence, in fact it denies that there is any for the relevant period: "So far no historical evidence has been unearthed to support the claim that the Babri mosque has been constructed on the land that had earlier been occupied by a temple." As Mr.  I.  Mahadevan has pointed out (IE 6/12/90), the JNU historians have selected from the ASI report what suited them, the absence of any remains of habitation from before the 7th century BC, and left out the finding that there was again a building on the disputed spot from the 11th century AD onwards.

It is true that the first brief ASI report on the excavation led by Prof. B.B. Lal does not mention the pillar-bases; but it does mention the floors made of lime and kankars.  While not mentioning the pillar-bases, the report does mention remains of at least a building.  In the present discussion, that is a very pertinent fact: the Masjid replaced a building.  It is up for discussion what kind of building it was, but at least, the choice of possible scenarios has been narrowed down and no longer includes the possibility that the Masjid was built on empty land.

Concealing this all-important fact in a statement that pretends to put distorters of history to shame, is quite a feat.  If there was an open intellectual arena in India, rather than a Left-controlled one, the JNU historians would have lost their big name for their attempts at distortion, and maybe also their big mouth.

The JNU historians, all 25 of them, seem to be not aware of the existence of a great many testimonies firmly establishing that the Masjid or at least its courtyard were used by the Hindus for Ram worship since well before the British period.  Or they gloss over it.  They certainly don't bring up arguments to disprove or somehow undermine this testimony.  Since the JNU historians disregard both the relevant archaeological findings and all the documentary evidence, their entire document in no way affects our case.

A.17) Sakina Yusuf Khan doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  But as a journalist, she deserves to be fired.  The article "No pillar-bases at Ayodhya: ASI report" is blatantly undeontological in several respects.

First of all, while purporting to give B.B. Lal's views on the recently disclosed presence of pillar-bases just near the Babri building, it disregards Prof. Lal's recent unambiguous support for the presence of pillar-bases of the 11th century, made public in an article in Manthan as well as in an interview with BBC television.  Instead it quotes an earlier report, more than ten years old, in which the details of the findings of the medieval period are not given, and acts as if this is counter-evidence against the recent statements by Dr.  Gupta about the pillar-bases.

Secondly, it pretends that the ASI report gives as its verdict: no pillar-bases.  In reality, such a statement is nowhere present in the report.  Since the excavations were primarily concerned with the Ramayana period, the report was very brief on the findings from the medieval period.  That is why it only mentioned the kankar/lime floors, not the pillar-bases, and proclaims its own intention not to go into the full details: "The entire later period was devoid of any special interest." The pillar-bases have been left unmentioned not by way of a verdict, but because at that time, the ASI was not so interested in them.

A.18) Praful Bidwai doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  And that is very serious, because he sets out to lecture people precisely on the issue of history falsification and concoction of evidence.  What would Goebbels do if he came back today, and found himself bereft of any evidence to support his case? What absolutely cheap lie would he certainly launch to put his enemies on the defensive? Simple, he would say: "VHP campaign of lies: Goebbels is already here".

Praful Bidwai starts out with a heavy allegation against us: "Concocting archaeological 'evidence' that a Ram temple existed at the disputed site".  How can archaeological evidence be "concocted"? Not that we are interested in his magic formula, we have the real evidence.  But maybe the pro-Babri faction would like to give it a try.

He attacks Dr. Gupta's presentation of the archaeological evidence in Indian Express (2/12/90), saying without any proof or even illustration that its conclusion is based on logical fallacies.  He says that Dr.  Gupta failed to show how the pillars had a load-bearing function, that they belonged to the site and to a religious building.  But Dr. Gupta has argued these points quite convincingly in that article, and in more detail in annexure 28 to our evidence.  Moreover, it is only logical that pillars bear weight, that religious sculptures indicate use in a religious building, and it was a general practice to re-use parts of a demolished temple in the very mosque built on top of it.  If Praful Bidwai wants to propose an alternative scenario (which he implicitly does by casting doubt on the scenario for which Dr. Gupta has given evidence) which goes against common sense, the burden of proof is on him.

Praful Bidwai repeats the JNU historians' exercise in character assassination (reply to Dr. Gupta's article, IE 5/12/90) by insinuating that Dr. Gupta falsely claims participation in the excavations.  The fact of the matter, made clear in Indian Express on 6/12/90, well before Praful Bidwai published his article, is that Dr. Gupta could not formally be registered as a member of the team, for the statutory reason that he worked for the National Museum, not for the ASI, so he was given "observer" status.  Bidwai also levels insinuations against Prof. B.B.  Lal and Mr. Mahadevan, who had aptly called the JNU's statement a case of, in their own terminology, "political abuse of history" (IE, 6/12/90).

Bidwai's totalitarian sympathies come our clearly where he protests against the fact that Indian Express had dared to publish other views than his own: "The Express's attempt to balance this distortion by Dr. Gupta was equally unbalanced.  The paper did carry the JNU historians' reply, but only as one of three articles, the other two being pro-Gupta." Two articles were pro-facts and one was Leftist insinuation: secularist India will be damned if this continues.  Well, most papers kept their readers entirely in the dark concerning the archaeological findings that clinch the issue in favour of the Mandir.  Some give plain lies (see document A.17).  The Times of India collected replies from a number of academics, but did not inform its readers of the findings that had occasioned this sudden propaganda offensive (except indirectly in the questions put to prof. Romila Thapar).  Even if one paper gave only the Hindu view, it would still come nowhere near balancing the black-out on the Hindu view and on the documentary and archaeological facts of this matter, in the press at large.

Bidwai's indignation follows a precedent.  When, on 1/4/90, Indian Express published the JNU historians' reply to Prof. A.R.  Khan's article (in which he demolished the JNU historians' methodology and exposed some of their unmistakable attempts at deception), they started out by complaining that Indian Express had not published their original and well-known statement, saying they feared that this way, Prof. Khan's critique would be too "confusing".  Well, it had been published in at least the Telegraph, the Times of India and the Illustrated Weekly, and spread as a separate pamphlet.  And still they wanted more publicity, because the Left have come to believe in its own God-given (mmm) right to lord it over the media.

Recently, Dilip Simeon and others protested in a joint letter (ToI, 2/11/90) against the publication of "the VHP viewpoint", viz.  a not too anti-Hindu article by Swapan Dasgupta, who is not one of our members, in the Times of India, which mostly publishes rabidly anti-Hindu columns like Simeon's own.  Of course, the control over the press is crucial when you have to prevent the truth from coming out.

According to Mr.  Bidwai, these are also parts of Goebbels' propaganda: "Proving that the temple was destroyed by 'invaders'..." and "claiming that the only recompense for this act of sacrilege is the demolition of the mosque".

As for the temple destruction, we have given evidence, and Mr. Bidwai has only given swearwords and slogans.  His own allegations are mere slander until he gives counter-proof.  After regularly writing on "communalism" for a long time, Praful Goebbels has still not come up with anything, and we know why: he doesn't have anything.  In order not to be found out, he has to keep up the offensive.  Goebbels knew that if you attack people, they tend to go on the defensive rather than put you to scrutiny.

We are not claiming that the relocation of the mosque is the recompense for this act of sacrilege.  We claim that the restoration of the three sacred sites in Mathura, Varanasi and Ayodhya is merely a matter of justice: these are Hindu sacred places, not Muslim ones.  The mosques there were only built to humiliate the Hindus, and that is why the Hindu-baiters are so insistent on keeping them there.

The recognition of the Hindu rights over their sacred places is of course not a recompense for "this" sacrilege on the sites themselves.  They are at most a symbolic recompense for the thousandfold sacrilege, temple-destruction, Kafir-killing, slave-taking, abduction of Kafir women, which the Muslim invaders, egged on by their Scripture and their clerics, have systematically committed in India, as in other Pagan lands they conquered.

This simple recognition that the Hindus have a right to their own sacred places, does by far not amount to a recompense, much less to "avenging of desecration of a Hindu monument by the 'Muslims'", as Bidwai represents it.  Avenging it would mean desecrating the Muslim sacred places in West Asia.

Bidwai rejects the collective term "Muslims", "who mysteriously remain the same continuous subject in history - the present generation being responsible for its ancestors' deeds".  But no, we do not think that Muslims are automatically "continuous" with Babar and other invaders.  First of all, we are well capable of distinguishing between the mass of people who merely happen to have been born and raised in a Muslim community, and those who are conscious keepers and propagaters of specific Islamic doctrines about subduing and exterminating the unbelievers.  And even for those leaders, there is no automatic continuity: it is their own choice, whether to continue the way of Babar or that of Dara Shikoh.

While Muslims come and go, the one "continuous subject in history" is their Scripture, Quran and Hadis.  These contain dozens of injunctions to make war on the Kafirs, i.e. on us.  Now, it is indeed possible that the present generation of Muslims takes distance from these teachings, or gives a radically new interpretation to terms like "Kafir" and "Jihad".  If so, the proof will be that they can at least in a few symbolic instances undo the wrong that the past application of the outdated interpretation of their Scripture has inflicted on the Kafir societies.  Recognising the right of the Hindus to the sacred places that earlier Muslim generations had stolen from them, would indeed be "discontinuous" with Islam's fanatic past.

Mr. Bidwai finds this also Goebbelsian: "Sedulously propagating the lie that the mosque has not been used since 1936 as a place of worship, and therefore the dispute is between a (real) temple and a non-existent mosque about which the Muslims are being mean and unreasonable (unlike the Hindus)".  Of course, Mr. Bidwai doesn't give a trace of proof that this is a lie.

This "lie" is simply the official version.  We would be open to the possibility that the place was used for Muslim prayers even in the forties, but we cannot help it that the Civil Judge of Faizabad observed, in his 3/3/51 judgment : "It further appears from the copies of a number of affidavits of certain Muslim residents of Ayodhya that at least from 1936 onwards the Muslims have neither used the site as a mosque nor offered prayers there and that the Hindus have been performing their Pooja etc. on the disputed site.  Nothing has been pointed to discredit these affidavits." Certainly, Mr. Bidwai who is lecturing us on abiding by the Court verdict, cannot object to our quoting a Court verdict, based on the unchallenged testimony of local Muslims.  While sometimes even a judge's view may later prove erroneous, at any rate it is no proof of being Goebbels, to repeat the text of a Court ruling.

This will do as a comment on Praful Goebbels' slander campaign.  There is, on top of all this, the fact that, without referring to any authentic statement, he describes "Hindu Rashtra" as "a blatantly communal society run on majoritarian terror and reduction of [the minority people] to the status of second-class citizens, in which bigotry, violence and intolerance rule".  In fact, this is an accurate description not of the Hindu Rashtra to which we aspire, but of Pakistan, the Muslim Rashtra already in existence.  But it leaves out (as all Hindu-baiting texts do) an analysis of why Pakistan is like that.  It is like that because it is informed by the same anti-Hindu fervour which led to the destruction of the Ram Mandir.
 

B.1) The six documents of group B don't give any evidence whatsoever, except for our own viewpoint.

The Persian inscriptions on the Babri Masjid show that Mir Baqi built it at the "command" of Shah Babar (Ba farmuda-i Shah Babar), and not at his own sweet will.  The date given in the inscription fits the time Babar stayed in or near Ayodhya (March-April 1528).  The inscriptions are given as evidence of "the construction of Babri Masjid in 1528 AD by Meer Baqi Tashkandi".  We have no quarrel with that.  It is standing there, so someone must have built it.

B.2) "Babar's testament", a short but highly surprising declaration of secular kingship, doesn't give any evidence whatsoever that the mosque was built on something else than a destroyed Hindu temple.  Otherwise, it proves a lot.

The English note under the Persian text says: "Dr. Tirnusi helped me in deciphering the text and also confirm the evaluation of this document I had made in the first edition of my Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors in 1940." Interesting.  What "evaluation of this document" do we find in that 1940 book?

Firstly, the copied page is in the book from which it was copied (Babri Mosque or Ram Janam Temple, by Dr. R.L. Shukla and Mrs. Nilofer Ahmad), also a copy, from yet another book, by Dr. S.R. Sharma.  It has uncarefully retained the subscribed note by Dr. Sharma, making it easy for us to check this out.  Alright, in appendix 9, Dr.  Sharma gives this testament.  But on page no.  24 and 25, the learned author has given a long list of reasons why this document is a modern "forgery and clumsy forgery".

A number of independent scholars have concluded that this document is a forgery.  Mrs. Beveridge, for one.  She has been quoted very selectively in this compilation.  She has listed no less than 15 reasons why it has to be a forgery.  Radhey Shyam (in app.4 of his book Babar, 1978) rejects a few of these, but not the conclusion.  It seems that P. Saran and S. Roy have also concluded that this document is a forgery.

What is this nonsense, including a proven forgery in a pile of "evidence"? It is certainly evidence of something.

B.3) Even Babar's own diary doesn't give any evidence whatsoever, except that he did go to Ayodhya.  As is well known, the pages with his notes from the period in which he is supposed to have been in or near Ayodhya, are missing.  Interestingly, while one page from Mrs. Beveridge's translation of the Babar Nama has been presented, the other pages of the appendix dealing with the inscriptions, as also the following two pages with footnotes, and some other relevant pages, have been cleverly concealed.  There, Mrs.  Beveridge restates what was universally believed, and what was recorded in all the successive Gazetteers dealing with Ayodhya: a temple was destroyed there to make way for a mosque.

Then again, it has not really been concealed: in A.11 it has been quoted and vehemently attacked as a "preconceived" piece of "concealment" and "distortion".

B.4) Alexander Cunningham doesn't give any evidence whatsoever that has any bearing on our case.  He declares himself that he is primarily interested in the Buddhist sites and monuments as mentioned in the travel accounts of the Chinese pilgrims, particularly Hsuen Tsang's.  The short and insignificant references to historical sites of all other religions were only incidental.  Thus Cunningham's silence on what didn't concern him, the Ram Janmabhoomi site, is absolutely no proof that the place was not considered as Rama's birth-place, hence sacred to the Hindus.  This document is absolutely irrelevant and only meant to increase the bulk of papers sent to the VHP.

And yet, it is useful.  Off-hand, Cunningham confirms that Ayodhya is considered Ram's city of birth.  And he does not trace any Buddhist monuments at the Janmabhoomi site, thus putting to rest a recent canard floated to keep us busy running around after the balloons of "secularist" concoctions.

B.5) Dr. R. Nath doesn't give any evidence whatsoever, relevant to the topic under consideration.  He shows that there were different types of mosque structures.  Well, so what?

But more interesting for our purpose is Dr. Nath's reaction to the inclusion of his text in the AIBMAC "evidence".  From a lengthy reply, the Indian Express (3/1/91) has published this excerpt: "The reference to my book is vague and I do not know which statement of mine has been quoted in what context.  I have been to the site and have had occasion to study the mosque, privately, and I have absolutely no doubt that the mosque stands on the site of a Hindu temple on the north-western corner of the temple-fortress Ramkot, by which the river Saryu (Ghagra) originally flowed."

B.6) Mrs. E.B. Joshi doesn't give any evidence whatsoever.  The 1961 Gazetteer, is a very late and not unmotivated writing, which suppresses the opinion of the previous Gazetteer authors without invoking any new findings whatsoever that might justify this deletion.  Apparently this was done under pressure from the then Government.

It becomes more curious when we see the AIBMAC citing this document that repudiates Nevill's Gazetteer, and at the same time citing Court petitions by Muslims that invoke Nevill's Gazetteer as evidence.  The judgment in document E.25 (p.14) clarifies explicitly that this Gazetteer text is admissible as evidence under U/S 57 of the Evidence Act.

In this light, Mrs. Joshi's silence over the destruction of the temple seems to be wilful suppression of a long held fact of history.

C/D) The C and D groups have to be dealt with together, since they pertain to revenue records and court proceedings which are complementary to each other.  They do give evidence.  Court after court and writer after writer has firmly taken the view that the mosque was built here after destroying a pre-existing temple, which they very much regretted.  The British Judge in 1886 put it this way: "It is very unfortunate that a mosque should have been built on land held specially sacred by the Hindus".  But with his haughty colonial unconcern, he felt that: "As that happened 356 years ago, it is too late to remedy the grievance".  The British were objective enough to see the correctness and well-foundedness of the Hindu grievance, but as a matter of colonial policy they didn't want to interfere with the status-quo.

Document D.2 proves at least that the chabootra (not necessarily the first one, given the earlier upheavals between Hindus and Muslims and between both and the British) was set up in 1857, so the Hindu claim to the site cannot be passed off as a recent "political gimmick for building vote-banks" and other such nonsense.  Hindu society has never given up its claim to this sacred site.

E/F) The E and F groups of documents don't give any evidence whatsoever, except for what we all know and what is precisely the problem: some Muslims have had official and effective possession of the site for a long time after Babar forcibly took it from the Hindus.

Among the documents relating to the 1949 Hindu reconversion of the building into a place of Ram worship, the Court Order of the Civil Judge of Faizabad, dated 3/3/1951, is conspicuously missing.  We surmise that our AIBMAC friends did not want to draw attention to the fact that the Judge was skeptical regarding the Muslim claim of having offered Namaz in the building up till December 1949, and on the contrary cited the unchallenged testimony of local Muslims to the effect that the building had not been used since 1936.  But then that is all we have to say about these judicial documents, because we have no intention of walking into the trap of exchanging the scholarly debate on the evidence for the quarrels of the judicial dispute.

All the legal squabbles over land titles etc. emanating from the situation created by force in 1528, including the matter of the effective use of the building before 1949, are completely irrelevant to the issue about which the Government of India has requested evidence, viz. the forcible demolition of a Hindu temple and its replacement with the Babri Masjid; and even more irrelevant for the fundamental issue of the restoration to Hindu society of one of the places it holds specially sacred.  Even if a mosque forcibly imposed on one of our sacred sites is effectively used as a mosque, it remains just as much a forcibly imposed token of desecration and humiliation.