7. The Anti-Temple Debating Tactics

Meanwhile, the actual course of the debate both in the official forum and in the media could have suggested some conclusions even to non-historians (like the Supreme Court judges who refused to pronounce an opinion on it in 1994). The debate has not genuinely altered the old consensus, but it has been an interesting case-study in manipulation by unscrupled academics. That, at least seems to be a fair description of learned publications advertising themselves as "objective" studies of the controversy, but systematically concealing the arguments put forth by one of the parties.

The VHP has published it argumentation including a detailed refutation of the Babri Masjid Action Committee's arguments, and like-minded scholars have published detailed presentations of specific types of evidence (e.g., Prof. Harsh Narain and Prof. R. Nath; note how the VHP, lacking a think-tank of its own, was dependent on the help of people with no prior connection to it). By contrast, the BMAC, which had the support of the Indian Council of Historical Research led by Aligarh historian Prof. Irfan Habib and of a team of scholars led by Prof. R. S. Sharma, has not felt sufficiently satisfied with its own performance in the official debate to publish its argumentation. Its numerous supporters have chosen not to refer to the debate at all and to keep the argumentation of their serious opponents out of view.

Instead, these top academics have chosen the poorest Hindutva pamphletists as their opponents and made some fun of cranky but irrelevant claims which go around in the semi-literate fringe of the Hindu movement. One point they like to highlight is the spurious claim that on 22 December 1949, the idols "miraculously appeared" in the disputed building. I do not know of anyone who would affirm that except tongue in cheek, but given that placing the idols could be construed as a criminal offence, it has nonetheless been affirmed - as an obvious ad hoc fable for purposes of self-exculpation. But note that this miracle story has long gone out fashion: in an interview in the New York Times, "Abbot Ram Chander Das Parahamahams of an Ayodhya akhara declared openly that he was one who had put the image inside the mosque."[37]

Another fairly common tactic was to lump the temple argumentation with the fringe school led by P. N. Oak, which holds that every Indo-Muslim building (e.g., the Taj Mahal)[38] was in fact a Hindu temple, not demolished but only transformed. However, this school happened to have aligned itself with the eminent historians against the VHP. Oak himself explained that the Babri Masjid itself was built by Hindus as a temple, that "Babar had nothing to do with the Babri Masjid", and that neither the Moghul nor any Muslim ruler had demolished a Hindu temple at the site.[39] Oak's version of history is of a kind with the contrived scenarios thought up by the eminent historians.

Another spokesman if this school, Heevan Kulkarni from Bombay, claimed that the Babri Masjid was a Hindu temple built by Hindus before the Muslim conquest. He even approached the Supreme Court to obtain permission to prove his point by means of thermo-luminescence and other advanced archaeological techniques, as well as an injunction to solve the dispute by preserving the building (as Muslims demand, in the "mistaken" belief that the building was built as a mosque) but allotting it to the Hindus to serve as the "restored" Rama temple which it was meant to be when it was built. Again, this school was wrongly identified with the HP position.

A similar tactic was to associate the Ayodhya evidence with the eccentric theory of the non-historian Bal Gangadhar Tilak, later adapted by the non-historian Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar in his young days, that the Aryans came from the Arctic (Tilak's attempt to harmonize the Aryan invasion theory with traditional Vedic chronology) or that Indian itself had been in the Arctic zone then (Golwalkar's attempt to harmonize Tilak with Aryan indigenousness).[40] These ideas are simply unrelated to the more recent history of Hindu-Muslim conflict, and are only brought into the discussion in order to strengthen the contrast between Hindu amateurishness and secularist professionalism: "After R. C. Majumdar, the communal interpretation has been relegated to the world of school-level textbooks, made-easies, popular magazines, newspapers and comic strips", - meaning that the positions of prestige by India's secularists who imposed denial of Hindu-Muslim conflict as the orthodox explanation.[41] This is an argument not of authority but of status.[42]

This way, India's topmost academics and journalists have avoided confronting the real evidence and have concentrated on attacking straw men instead. It is clearly an application of Mao Zedong's dictum: "Attach where the enemy is weak, retreat where the enemy is strong." That may be a legitimate principle in warfare, but in scholarship the goal is not to score points but to establish the truth.