The JNU fatwa

Yet, in 1989, all this evidence was brushed aside by a group of 25 academics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), mostly declared Marxists, who issued a statement denying the existence of any evidence for the temple: The Political Abuse of History.  Not that they offered any newfound data to support this dramatic reversal of the consensus, all they had to show was some totally contrived reinterpretations of a few of the existing data plus the worn-out slogans against "Hindu communalism".  But the sympathy of the Indian and international media for their purported motive of "upholding secularism" assured the immediate worldwide adoption of the new party-line as Gospel truth: 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 sensibly 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 judge in 1886 when ordering a status quo at the site.  No, instead they went as far as to base their rejection of a new temple construction on the claim that no demolition had ever taken place because no temple had existed there.  This was reckless, for if the political choice for the preservation of the mosque were based on the historical non-existence of the medieval temple at the site, then the eventual discovery of such a temple would justify a contrario the replacement of the mosque with a restored temple.  At least in theory, but the Marxists were confident that their opponents would never get the chance to press this point.  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.

Secular debate-dodgers

In December 1990, the short-lived Socialist-dominated government of Chandra Shekhar invited the two lobby groups involved, the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Babri Masjid Action Committee, to mandate a team of scholars for discussing 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, expecting a cakewalk over the discredited case of the VHP fanatics.  They were speechless when the VHP team presented dozens of documents supporting their case.  The BMAC then invited a team of proper historians chaired by Marxist professor R.S. Sharma, who arrived at the next meeting with the demand that they be recognized as "independent scholars" entitled to sit in judgment on the controversy, i.e. to pass a verdict between their BMAC employers and their VHP opponents.  The government representative did not grant this hilarious demand.  At the next meeting, they declared that they hadn't studied the evidence yet and needed six more weeks, a strange statement from people who had just led 42 academics in signing a petition confirming once and for all that there was absolutely no evidence at all for a temple.  At the meeting scheduled for 24 January 1991, they simply didn't show up anymore.  

In July 1992, the state government of Uttar Pradesh, dominated by the Hindu nationalist BJP (Indian People's Party), ordered the levelling and cleaning of the terrain around the mosque.  Before and during the work, archaeologists were permitted to search the site.  They discovered dozens of pieces of temple architecture and Hindu religious sculptures.  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.  The minister in charge, Arjun Singh, was a militant secularist and eager to embarrass the BJP, yet the academics never asked him to have the sculptures investigated by an international team of experts who could have certified their allegation.  Indeed, their behaviour was one of strictly ignoring this new body of evidence, as if they didn't believe their own claim of a forgery.  

In October 1992, the central government of Narasimha Rao (Congress) tried to revive the scholars' discussion.  This time, the BMAC team quite reasonably protested that there was no point in talking unless the VHP called off its announced demonstration in Ayodhya scheduled for December 6.  The VHP was adamant that Hindu society's right to the site could not be made dependent on mundane factors such as judicial verdicts and academic disputes.  This was an instance of the Hindu nationalist movement's long tradition of smashing its own windows and of spurning the intellectual struggle which in this case had been going in its favour.  On the plea that "you don't need arguments to love your mother", meaning Mother India, the Hindu nationalists had always neglected intellectual and media work and favoured a mindless activism.  Except for one (S.P. Gupta), all the scholars who had argued their case at the government-sponsored discussion had been outsiders to the movement; the VHP leadership itself, like its BMAC counterpart, never took the evidence debate very seriously.