A violent mob mobilised by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Sangh parivar demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.

New Delhi: The Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI’s) 2003 claim that there is evidence of a temple under the Babri Masjid doesn’t enjoy consensus, even among members of the group that conducted the dig.

The ASI submitted its 574-page report on the matter to the Allahabad high court in August 2003, saying proof had been found of a massive structure just below the demolished Babri Masjid. The Sunni Waqf Board, a party to the Ayodhya title dispute case, had said then that the ASI’s report was “vague and self-contradictory”.

Two archaeologists, Supriya Varma and Jaya Menon, had observed the ASI’s excavations on behalf of the Sunni Waqf Board. In 2010, the wrote a paper in the Economic and Political Weekly detailing why they had objected to the ASI’s results, and the subsequent Allahabad high court judgment in September 2010. According to the article, the duo had objected to various practices the ASI was following during its dig, which made “it clear that there was already a preconceived idea in the minds of ASI archaeologists”.

The authors argued that the ASI’s report had gone largely unchallenged because of the power it holds over researchers in the country. “Any archaeologist in India or from outside who wants to explore or excavate sites has to obtain a licence from the ASI. So no field archaeologist is willing to speak out against it or its outdated methods.”

This story was originally published in thewire.in . Read the full story here