From the time when Uttar Prasad CM Gobind Ballabh Pant inserted the Ram Lalla idol in the Babri Masjid on December 22-23, 1949 the die was cast. Nehru strongly asked Pant to remove the idol. He even sent an emissary to Pant, but the later was adamant (Nehru, Selected Correspondence).

This weak kneed politics continued.

In 1986 in Faizabad, on Congress Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s orders the DM and DCP agreed to open the doors of the Babri Masjid. The hearings were heard on a Saturday when the court is not usually open. In this case, the Muslims were not even aware of the proceedings.

Even before the assault on the Babri Masjid, Congress PM Narasimha Rao systematically weakened the fortifications of the Babri Masjid. The concertina barbed wire was removed and the ground outside the masjid was raised by six feet on the guise of a Ram Katha Kunj Park. There was no substantial protection for the Babri Masjid.

The paramilitary forces placed in Faizabad by the PM were not allowed to fire at the rioters destroying the masjid. Incidentally, the Babri Masjid was built by the Mughal nobleman Mir Baqi on Babur’s instructions in the 1520s. Babur never went to Ayodhya. PM Rao ensured that the Hindu rioters destroying the masjid were not subject to warnings/shootings in violation of promises to protect the masjid. The rioters were given time and space to build a makeshift “Ram Mandir” in the absence of the paramilitary police restrained at the orders of PM P.V. Narasimha Rao.

The Supreme Court when approached to stop the kar sewaks from assaulting the Babri Masjid instructed the lawyers to treat the influx of the saffron brigade as state guests. Some BJP MPs and others promised to protect the endangered mosque. In the event, the preplanned attack took place. BJP leaders like Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati were prominent in celebrating the collapse of the masjid.

The Supreme Court is unlikely to resurrect this history. It probably knows little of it. Documentation doesn’t seem to be decisive in the present case. But surely the Supreme Court should have amassed the huge store of evidence! But is the honourable Court interested in this?

Where are the documents and Allahabad High Court and lower court records on this highly sensitive issue. Like the earlier Supreme Court did not acknowledge its mistakes, the current one doesn’t appear to have perused the proof including a huge trove of evidence.

This is a complex conspiracy. When visiting Ayodhya President Shankar Dayal Sharma had said the issue was no longer the masjid, but the Lord Rama issue. This is how evidence based history is replaced by myth sanctified by law.