Conclusion

Summary

Twenty-eight years after the illegal demolition of the Babri Masjid, two events marked a discouraging and an uncomfortable denouement of the narrative. In August 2020, the prime minister of India laid a 40-kilogram silver brick as the foundation stone for the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, and a few weeks later, in September of the same year, the Supreme Court of India acquitted all 32 conspirators accused in the destruction of the masjid on December 2, 2020. After the Supreme Court adjudication of 2019 that upheld the findings of the ASI's specious archaeological excavation, and paved the pathway for the temple's construction, both these events were a forgone conclusion for me. The unempirical assertion of a monumental structure having characteristics of a Hindu temple in an un-authored chapter, of an unpublished report, of an epistemologically compromised archaeological excavation, conducted in constrained circumstances by the ASI was usurped by judges of the High Court and the Supreme Court to adjudicate that a temple did exist under the Babri Masjid. And it should not come as a surprise that like this un-authored chapter of the Ayodhya excavation report, the 1,045-page Supreme Court judgment does not have an author.

The covert epistemological sleight of hand in the case of the ASI report and the juridical appropriation of spurious archaeological evidence has once again given strength to the old slogans, for this is not the end. Hindu fundamentalists, who in 1992 shrieked hoarsely: “Give another push/Break the Babri Masjid” (Ek dhakka aur do/Babri Masjid tod do), are again screaming in the congested and clogged streets of India (now also on Facebook and Twitter): “This was the beginning/Kashi and Mathura are still left” (Yeh to ek jhanki hai/Kashi Mathura abhi baki hai), referring to two prominent archaeological sites of contestation and dispute among many others spread throughout India (including the Taj Mahal). In Kashi (another name for Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh) and in Mathura, the Hindu fundamentalists intend to demolish the mosques allegedly built by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb after destroying Hindu temples—a meta-narrative not unfamiliar.