Ayodhya Ram Mandir: What ASI found when it excavated the site 20 years ago

Ayodhya Ram Mandir construction is being done in phases. (File)

In mid-May 2003, I became the first English mainstream media journalist to try to sneak into the excavation site around where the Babri Masjid had stood from 1528 till December 6, 1992.

A few days before, I had received a call from a distant relative by marriage whom I had never heard of, based in Faizabad (now Ayodhya). In March that year, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court had ordered the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to excavate the land to check claims that a huge Ram temple had existed there before the mosque was built. The caller knew that I was a journalist at Outlook magazine, and asked if I would be interested in visiting the site and reporting on what the ASI team was unearthing.

My editor Vinod Mehta readily agreed but advised that the assignment should be totally hush-hush—no one in the office must know. Vinod was a proudly self-confessed “pseudo-secular" but he recognised a potentially good story when he saw it. My Delhi-Lucknow flight and car from Lucknow to Faizabad were booked secretly by Vinod’s secretary.

I knew that photography was strictly prohibited at the site. I had decided to try my luck with a borrowed camera-cellphone—very expensive in those days, but one look at the thorough body searches being carried out at the entry to the site, and I left the phone with my driver.

The ASI had turned the area into a perfectly geometric grid of 4m by 4m trenches, each trench separated from the adjacent one by one metre. Aluminium ladders descended into the trenches. Every find in every trench was being photographed, and the recovery, packing and sealing process videographed.

But this was all concealed from the public. Entry into the excavation site was stringently restricted. Apart from the ASI team, only observers appointed by the court and representatives of the litigants in the various cases relating to Ram Janmabhoomi were allowed in. All the permitted visitors had to carry passes issued by the Allahabad High Court. They entered through a gate separate from the one used by the pilgrims.

The pilgrims had been through a long and serpentine steel-girded cage-like corridor that wound through the excavation site to reach the makeshift structure where an idol of Ram Lalla sat. They had no way to see what was going on outside, just a few feet away. The walls of the cage had been covered from roof to ground with crimson curtains. Policemen constantly patrolled to make sure that no one was peeping out.

Standing in that closed-in corridor, all I could hear were numbers shouted by the excavators: “245.” “175.” “160.” Keeping my eye out for the police patrols, I worked on the stitches that held the curtains together and managed to peek in quite well. I would have definitely been arrested if I had been caught doing this. My heart was thumping, but the adrenaline also lent me intense focus.

Dozens of people were working quietly with picks and shovels, whisks and dustpans, probing into the earth for the secrets it may have concealed for centuries, secrets that, when uncovered and understood, could impact the lives and minds of a billion Indians. But the workers were nonchalant, periodically calling out some measurements. They were just doing their job.

I had no idea when the next cop would appear, but I knew I had a maximum of a minute or two every such chance I got. Even then, what I managed to gather was very interesting. I possibly spent an hour in that tunnel, tearing the curtain stitches whenever there was no one in sight and looking out into the sunlit outdoors and memorizing what I saw. Since the tunnel wound across the site, it allowed me a good look all over it.

I saw ancient staircases that had been excavated, large circular spaces blackened by long-extinguished fires that could be explained only by yajnas being performed there. These were outside the perimeters of the erstwhile Babri Masjid and all around it.

I had absolutely no doubt that a structure had existed under the Babri Masjid that was much larger than the mosque. I had no idea whether it had been a temple or a hotel or a palace, but there had been something there.

When I came out into the sunlight again, there was an elderly woman screaming obscenities at the skies, cursing the Indian government for having betrayed her and not built the Ram temple yet. Eleven years had passed since the dhaancha (structure) had been demolished, and where was the temple that had been promised? The shopkeepers at the nearby market of Ram Janmabhoomi pooja items, souvenirs and audio cassettes smiled and told me that she came every day at exactly this time of the afternoon, shouted for half an hour and went home.

Next morning, I saw a scale model of the envisaged grand temple—very different from what is now about to be inaugurated, and visited a yard where the components of the temple were stacked—sculpted pillars, stone slabs. It was like a giant machine, all its parts ready to be assembled. Well-built young men with tilaks on their foreheads told me that they were only waiting for the call, and when it came, they could have the temple up in days.

I met several extremely interesting people, including one who claimed to have been part of a team that had placed an idol of Lord Rama under the central dome of the mosque in the dead of night in December 1949, leading to the locking of the compound’s gates by Sardar Patel. The gates were unlocked by Rajiv Gandhi in 1986 to assuage Hindu sentiments after the Shah Bano episode.

One of the seers I met told me: “People think of Ayodhya only as a holy place. But it has always been a city of warriors. Look around you and see what the localities are called—Laxman Qilla, Hanuman Garhi, Chhoti Chhawni. This is where Kshatriya dharma resides.”

I met activists, lawyers and observers. With their help, I could build a rough map of what that floor of the structure may have looked like. It was not possible to figure out the vertical proportions of the structure from this data.

When my story, with a graphic of the layout of the buried structure, was published by Outlook as a cover story, I was surprised by the furore it caused.

All the Lucknow papers, including editions of national newspapers, had been printing a daily list of ASI discoveries and the artefacts on every list were overwhelmingly of Hindu origin. What I had written must have been common knowledge among Uttar Pradesh journalists, but they had never followed up on it. All I had done was to bring something which was well-known locally into the national limelight—that it was quite evident that there had been an older—and much larger—structure under the Babri mosque. I had not even said that it had been a temple.

However, historians like Irfan Habib wrote angry letters to Vinod Mehta and I believe that some leftist historians even held a press conference to denounce me and Outlook. Several of my colleagues went around saying that I was L.K. Advani’s planted agent in our magazine, whereas, I have never in my life met Advani, and I am sure he is wholly unaware of my existence. Vinod stood firmly behind me.

Six months later, when the ASI published its report on its findings, every point that I had made was proved correct.

Years after this, long after I had quit Outlook and Narendra Modi had come to power, Vinod was asked by an interviewer whether he regretted carrying any story in the magazine he had edited for more than two decades. He said that he could think of only one—the cover story on the Ayodhya excavations. Ah well. People have every right to change their views.

Note: Some parts of this article have been reworked from two previous articles by the author on outlookindia.com (2003) and livemint.com (2019).