In case you have forgotten, let me remind you of a significant underground activity that has been going on all this while. Even as the Iraq war raged; even as the peace initiatives with Pakistan took some shape before relapsing into a familiar shapelessness; even as Jaswant Singh presented his Budget and did his rollbacks; even as PMji spouted poetry at Srinagar and Manali; even as Sushmaji advocated the Gandhian way of sexual abstinence to combat AIDS (which is an extremely smart move, come to think of it, because she can now claim to have singlehandedly brought down the country’s net rate of reproduction); even as minister’s PAs did their deals in the dark, crooked corners of the government, elsewhere in the Republic there was serious digging going on after the courts had ordered excavations to arrive at the truth as to whether a temple existed under the demolished Babri mosque at Ayodhya. Let me therefore give you a short update of this historic earth-shattering project. The first phase of the digging yielded discoveries that could be termed as only mildly significant although there was some excitement over the discovery of shards of pottery which turned out to be only a broken tea cup that was traced back to the Uma Bharati Period, when the lady in question was believed to have enjoyed a cuppa on a terrace as she watched the ancient masjid bite the dust. But that, of course, didn’t prove that there was a temple under the mosque and so the digging carried on apace until the shovels hit some hard, elongated objects that caused quite a flutter in the dovecotes. Could they be pillars of some ancient place of worship or its very foundation in fact? Well, subsequent investigation revealed that they were leftover PWD girders from a bridge that was built over the River Sarayu in circa 1972. And that, of course, didn’t prove that there was a temple under the mosque and so the digging carried on apace until the excavators came across a stone tablet bearing ancient inspirations. Much exultation and speculation met this particular discovery and the tablet was taken immediately to the lab for further testing. The carbon analysis done on it revealed it to be Union HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi’s learned doctoral dissertation on the ‘Physical and historical properties of politics’. Exciting though the discovery was, that still did not prove that there was a temple under the mosque and so the digging carried on apace. For days and days, pickaxes and shovels tore their way through the earth’s crust, through masses of sediment and slush and ash, through rock and sand and clay as the digging went on and on and on. Then, suddenly, one fine morning, after days and days of bone-weary labour, sunlight streamed into the enormous excavation site. And, lo and behold, there stood a magnificent temple dating back to circa 1112 AD. What did it matter that the temple in question was none other than the magnificent complex of Angkor Wat built by Suryavarman on Kampuchean territory so many centuries ago? The excavators in their zeal had like industrious beavers actually bored their way through the earth, all the way from Ayodhya to the other side of Asia. The discovery, of course, finally and conclusively proved that there was indeed a temple under the mosque and nobody in his/her right senses could dispute this fact anymore. MORAL OF THE STORY: If you dig deep enough you will always find what you are looking for.
