The officer, Kishore Kunal, quit the police service in 2001 to focus on religion and now heads the Bihar State Religious Trust Board in Patna. A Masters degree holder in History and Sanskrit, Kunal was an Officer on Special Duty (OSD) in the ‘Ayodhya Cell’ of the Union Home Ministry which dealt with the Babri Masjid controversy in the early 1990s before kar sevaks razed the mosque.
His book, ‘Ayodhya Rediscovered’, seeks to prove that Babar had no connection with the Babri Masjid in Faizabad district of Uttar Pradesh, Kunal told The Indian Express during a recent visit to Ahmedabad.
“For two decades, I have been mutely witnessing the excruciating death of real history on Ayodhya on account of false and misleading interpretation of historical facts,” Kunal says in the book’s preface. “Earlier, I kept mum primarily because in the early nineties I was officially associated with the negotiations on this issue between the Hindu and Muslim communities. But in the last leg of legal proceedings before the Lucknow Bench of Allahabad High court hearing the case, I prepared this thesis, a part of which was submitted before the court by advocate P N Mishra.”
In the book, Kunal says “Babar’s name being dragged into the demolition of Ram temple and construction of the mosque, was a handiwork of Shia clergies who wanted the possession of the mosque after Aurangzeb, an avowed Sunni, demolished the temple and erected a mosque. The Shia clerics forged inscriptions and associated with Babar, that’s how it became ‘Babri Masjid’.”
Kunal argues Shia clerics who couldn’t get possession of the mosque for a century after it was built by Aurangzeb were now able to do so under the new leadership of Awadh. “It was in 1810 when some clergies invented an inscription and predated construction of the mosque to the period of Babar and Mir Baqi as the real builder, who has been claimed as Shia,” writes Kunal.