The Demolition

So, activism replaced argument on December 6, 1992.  The official leadership represented at the demonstration in Ayodhya by L.K. Advani (who today is Deputy Prime Minister) had wanted to keep the affair purely ceremonial, singing some hymns to Rama as a sufficient act of confirming the Hindu claim to the site.  But an elusive leadership within the crowd had other plans.  A small group had come well-prepared for a demolition job, and once they broke ranks from the official ceremony to methodically pull down the mosque, much of the crowd joined in.  Hindu movement officials tried to stop them, even when the police withdrew from the scene, but to no avail.  The BJP state government resigned at once, but the central government did not physically intervene until the next morning, when the activists had cleared the debris and consecrated a little tent with the three statues as the provisional new Rama temple.  In a typical instance of the Congress culture, Narasimha Rao on the one hand declared that the mosque should be rebuilt and on the other hand created an accomplished fact on the ground which practically precluded the prospect of rebuilding the mosque.

It is an odd but highly significant fact that the Indian media subsequently refused to open a search for who exactly organised the demolition.  None of them seemed to care for the scoop of the year: "This man (photograph) organized the demolition."  Clearly, they thought it politically most profitable to pin the blame on the so-called "hardliner" Advani, the one Hindu leader who was most definitely not behind it.  He had burst into tears upon seeing the fabled discipline of his activists break down and had been narrowly dissuaded from resigning as party leader in his post-demolition confusion.

During the demolition, another load of temple sculptures came to light from among the debris, including an inscription detailing how it was part of a temple to "Vishnu, slayer of Bali and of the ten-headed one", built in ca. 1140 under king Udai Chand.  Rama is considered an incarnation of Vishnu, and the two enemies he defeated were king Bali and king Ravana, usually depicted as ten-headed in recognition of his brilliant mind.  As the reader will expect by now, 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 and satisfying in every detail the description of the piece discovered during the demolition,-- but which had gone missing since the late 1980s.  So it was alleged that someone had stolen this inscription from the museum and planted it at the site shortly before the demolition.  During the initial scholars' debate in 1990-91, the VHP-mandated team had discovered that no less than 4 documents kept in Muslim libraries had demonstrably been tampered with in order to remove references to the "birthplace temple".  Here the secularists had their great occasion to get back at them and expose them in turn as cheaters who had planted a stolen inscription.  However, museum director Jitendra Kumar declared that the piece had never left the museum, even though 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.

Meanwhile, in 1993 the central government had approached the Supreme Court with a request to evaluate the historical evidence.  It is clear that Narasimha Rao, the most pro-Hindu Prime Minister of independent India so far (more so than the wobbly BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee), hoped to use a positive verdict as the basis for a settlement favouring the Hindu claim.  But in October 1994, the Supreme Court turned down the request.