When on 6 December 1992 hoodlums of the Saffron Brigade pulled down the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, there was a suspiciously simultaneous declaration from the VHP "archaeologists" that an inscription had been discovered within the precincts of the destroyed mosque, which allegedly showed that there had earlier been a Rama temple at the site. The inscription after being in VHP’s custody for some time was put in Government custody, and its photographs and impressions became available for examination.

The fact that this sandstone inscription was really a plant became clear from the testimony given before the High Court, Lucknow bench. A V.H.P. witness, claiming to have seen it fall from a height off the Babri Masjid wall, deposed that it was pulled out of the rubble within the wall and had mortar covering large parts of it. But the inscription shows no trace today either of the mortar or of the scratches or any other traces of the mortar’s removal from its surface. There is no way in which medieval mortar can be removed from a stone without leaving such traces.

While obviously planted, the inscription appears to be a genuine one belonging to the twelfth century or so. Contrary to the VHP’s claims, it does not tell us that the inscription was set up at the site of the Janmabhumi of Lord Rama, Dr K.V. Ramesh, former Director (Epigraphy), Archaeological Survey of India, in his translation submitted to the court by the VHP itself, clearly shows that the janmabhumi of the inscription is not a place, but the family of the donor; Ramesh rendered the text as follows: "Noble was that very family [of the donor] which was the birth place (janmabhumi) of honour." It is thus clear that whatever place the inscription was originally installed at was not believed to be the site of Lord Rama’s birth.

What the original place of this inscription was thus remains a mystery; and one naturally begins to look for any known inscription, hitherto unpublished, that could possibly have been acquired for presentation as a "find" from the Babri Masjid. It does, indeed, happen that one such inscription recovered from Ayodhya in the 1880s has remained unpublished.

In Archaeological Survey Reports, N.S., Vol.I, actually published as the Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur, by A. Fuhrer, edited by Jas. Burgess, Director General, Archaeological Survey of India, Calcutta, 1889, page 68, the following statement occurs: "Inscription No.XLIV is written in twenty incomplete lines on a white sandstone broken off at either end, and split in two parts in the middle. It is dated Samvat 1211, or A.D. 1184, in the time of Jayachchhandra (sic!) of Kanauj, whose praises it records for erecting a Vaishnava temple, from whence stone was originally brought and appropriated by Aurangzib in building his masjid known as Treta-ki-Thakur [at Ayodhya]. The original slab was discovered in the ruins of this Masjid, and is now in the Faizabad Local Museum".

Perhaps, because the reference to this inscription lay buried in a volume entitled Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur, the inscription was not noticed in the detailed lists of inscriptions of the Gahadavala dynasty, to which Jayachandra belonged, provided by H.C. Ray in Dynastic History of Northern India, Vol.I, Calcutta, 1931, pages 536-41, and Roma Niyogi, The History of the Gahadavala Dynasty, Calcutta, 1959, pages 245-60. The only author besides Fuhrer to refer to the inscription has been Hans Bakker. In his Ayodhya, Part I, Groringen, 1986, page 52, he notes that the inscription "has never been published" and that "the inscription is now in the possession of the State Museum, Lucknow", giving its no. there as Arch. Dep. 53.4. Seeing that Bakker gives no further information about the appearance and contents of the inscription beyond that given by Fuhrer, it is obvious that he himself did not actually see or read it. Dr T.P. Verma, deposing before the High Court, admitted that he had tried to see it at the Lucknow Museum but was unable to do so. More recent attempts to trace it at the Lucknow Museum have proved unavailing; and unofficially it has been described as "missing."

Could it be that it is the same inscription which miraculously reappeared at the Babri Masjid site on 6 December 1992 as a great find of the VHP?

In appearance, the VHP’s inscription has many points in common with the Lucknow inscription described by Fuhrer. It too is of sandstone (though rather greyish, not fully white). It too is broken into two parts, the slit starting near the middle of the top, then running rather diagonally to the bottom right. Its text, again, is broken at either end, and the individual lines are incomplete in case of all but four owing to the broad slit. All these are features it shares with Lucknow Museum Inscription. And, above all, like the Lucknow Museum inscription it too has just twenty lines.

We now come to the contents. The Lucknow Museum inscription is said to relate to the construction of a Vaishnava temple; the VHP inscription mentions that of a Vishnu–Hari temple, which would have been naturally construed as "Vaishnava" by anyone summarising its contents. Fuhrer read "Jayachandra" in the Lucknow Museum inscription; the VHP inscription has "Anayachandra". Fuhrer was himself not a Sanskrit epigraphist and his assistant may have made a mistake in a hurried reading of the name. The final matter is the date. No date occurs in the VHP inscription. This is because the last line where it ought normally to have come has had its middle part removed by the stone being chipped off, the impression of the text revealing a further damage to the line extending to quite a distance to the right of the chipping. Has this been a deliberate act of mutilation to remove a date that could have given away the identity of the inscription?

The key to the solution of the question lies in the hands of the Lucknow State Museum. If it does not produce the "Jayachandra" inscription out of its store rooms, the suspicion that its vaults have furnished the inscription that was subsequently planted at the Babri Masjid, will only grow and become irrefutable. If it does succeed in tracing the inscription (obtained from some other source), this will not, of course, absolve the VHP of planting the mortar-free inscription in the rubble of the Babri Masjid, but it will have considerable evidential value of its own. How does it refer to the "Vaishnava" temple inscription? Does it have a word like "Janmabhumi"? How does its orthography compare with that of the VHP’s inscription? And so on.

There is no doubt that either way, the solution of the mystery will greatly aid both the ends of justice and the interests of History.