The Allahabad high court bench on Ayodhya matters,
Lucknow, finally gave its judgement on the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid
dispute on September 30, 2010. The three judges, Justices SU Khan,
Sudhir Agarwal and DV Sharma, gave separate judgements. The first two
judges did not agree on the historical issues involved but concurred
over the operational part which meant allotting two-thirds of the land
in well-defined portions to the VHP-sponsored body and the Nirmohi
Akhara and the residual one-third to the Sunni Wakf Board. Justice
Sharma delivered the minority judgement, holding that the Muslims needed
to be excluded altogether from the disputed land.
The operational part of the majority judgement
derived not from Justice SU Khan’s but from Justice Sudhir Agarwal’s
reading of the historical background. Moreover, Justice Agarwal, by
setting forth a very extensive reproduction of the court’s orders and
applications before the court during the case, and extracts from the
statements of witnesses and the arguments of advocates, has laid out
massive material of the case in over 5,000 pages. This constitutes a
large part of the basic material brought before the high court although
one may legitimately differ from Justice Agarwal’s mode of selection and
attribution of importance to certain statements or books.
In this volume we hope to deal with all the major
points at issue relating to history and archaeology that have been
raised in the judgement of Justice Sudhir Agarwal. It consists of four
papers. Paper I deals with the date of construction of the Babri Masjid
and the historicity of its inscriptions. Paper II shows that the
evolution of the belief in the site Ramjanmabhoomi is a recent one, not
earlier than the 18th century, and brings out the misuse of the
so-called Vishnu-Hari temple inscription. Paper III is the longest: it
refutes the conclusions of the final report of the Archaeological Survey
of India (ASI) and takes issue with the justice’s own findings about
“the structure(s) beneath the mosque” and the demolition thereof.
Finally, Paper IV traces the course of the ASI’s biased and partisan
conduct of the excavations at Ayodhya.
While we have had to disagree with Justice Agarwal’s
reasoning and conclusions on various occasions, no personal aspersions
are at all intended.
The judgement of Justice Agarwal has serially
numbered paragraphs and these are cited in all our references to it. All
paragraph numbers put in bold figures in our text refer to paragraph
numbers of the judgement.
For easy reference to our own text, we have numbered
our paragraphs in separate series under each paper: thus the third
paragraph in Paper II is numbered 2.3. The paragraph numbers in Notes
annexed to Papers I and II are prefaced with numbers of the respective
papers and notes. Thus the second paragraph of Note 3 annexed to Paper I
is numbered 1.3.2.
The papers in the volume have been compiled on the
basis of information from various sources, with the advice of many
friends and colleagues. But the ultimate responsibility is that of the
undersigned.
Irfan Habib
President,
Aligarh Historians Society