NEW DELHI: On Wednesday, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) launched a truly extraordinary project when it started excavating the super-controversial site in Ayodhya where a 16th century mosque was destroyed 10 years ago by a Hindu mob.

This act, which has been compared to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, shocked and convulsed Indian society, setting off sectarian violence that led to the deaths of thousands of people in several northern Indian states.

India’s Hindu chauvinists, represented in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), a key ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party which leads the country’s ruling coalition, have since the demolition mounted a strident campaign to build a temple to the Hindu deity Ram at that precise site.

Their claim is that a temple to Rama, marking his birthplace, existed on the site before 1528, and was razed so that the Babri mosque, named after the just emperor, could be built.

They cite no historical evidence for this. But they have been agitating to correct history’s “wrong” by building a grand Ram temple.

The issue has lain in the deep freeze since January 1993, when the government, shaken by the mosque’s razing, took over about 68 acres of land on which it promised to rebuild the mosque and construct a Hindu temple.

The government promised to resolve the dispute through mutual negotiations between the Hindus and Muslims, or through litigation.

India’s courts have now revived that thorny issue by asking the ASI to determine if a temple existed at Ayodhya before the mosque was built. They want the ASI to complete the excavation within a month.

This has opened a Pandora’s box, pitting historians and social scientists against the government and the courts, but also bringing in other contenders who claim they too were “hurt” by history’s “wrongs”.

For instance, an organisation representing the Jains, devoted to a non-violent faith, like Buddhism, says a 6th century Jain temple existed at the site before any Hindu temple was built. It wants to become a party to the real estate dispute. The court’s order mandating the excavation poses a host of problems and creates bad precedents.

Assuming that the ASI does find that a structure existed at the site prior to 1528, would that merit or justify the razing of the mosque or “getting even with history”? Many monuments were built in ancient and mediaeval India on top of demolished structures. What if the Taj Mahal or some of the greatest Hindu temples are found to belong to that category?

Can archaeological excavation provide conclusive, clinching, “objective”, proof of the existence of old monuments? Is archaeology a rigorous natural science, on the basis of which courts can settle property disputes and correct historical anomalies?

Matters are not helped by the fact that the VHP blatantly employs double standards. If the prior existence of a Hindu temple is confirmed, it will press its demand for being allowed to build a Rama temple (without a mosque) on the entire taken- over land. But it refuses to say it will drop its demand if no such evidence is found!

However, reputed historians and archaeologists say the court’s order raises “serious concerns” and is fundamentally misguided.

For instance, Irfan Habib and K.M. Shrimali, two of India’s best-known mediaeval historians, and Suraj Bhan, an archaeologist, argue that the court grants legitimacy to the erroneous view that “a monument can be destroyed or removed if there are any grounds for assuming that a religious structure of another community had previously stood at its sit”.

This view was forcefully rejected by the principal organisation of Indian historians, the Indian History Congress, which voted against it “by an overwhelming majority” in 1993.

These scholars also hold that the preliminary survey — done by a non-destructive testing private company (using earth- penetration radar) —on the basis of which the Allahabad High Court ordered the ASI to excavate is fundamentally biased. The company (Tojo-Vikas) has no known previous experience of archaeological surveying.

According to Bhan, a site like Ayodhya, which lies in the heart of the Gangetic plains, was probably continuously inhabited for almost 2,000 years and would therefore have seen a lot of “disturbance” — movement of layers-marking one period into other layers, and from one place to another. These disturbances would have to be properly detected and explained. —Dawn/InterPress News Service.