The Allahabad high court in its majority judgment in the Ayodhya case relied upon a plethora of historical and religious texts, including British Gazetteers, to establish the right of Hindus on the core portion of the disputed land on which the demolished structure stood, but found the Archaeological Survey of India report of little help.

In the opinion of the majority judges — Justices S.U. Khan and Sudhir Agarwal — the relied upon texts though did not form any hard evidence but were the basis for drawing a conclusion about the “belief” of Hindus that the birthplace of Lord Ram was at the place beneath the “central dome” of the demolished structure.
The court said lawyers for the Hindu parties produced history books and public records to establish that the ancient temple built by Maharaja Vikramaditya at the birthplace of Lord Ram was destroyed partly by Mir Baqi, a commander of Babur, and a mosque was built at its place.
“An extract from the 1928 Faizabad Gazetteer has been quoted wherein it was mentioned that in 1528 Babur came to Ayodhya and destroyed the ancient temple and on its site built a mosque,” Justice Khan said in his verdict recorded. Justice Agrawal concurred.
The court also took into account A.S. Beveridge’s English translation of the Baburnama published in 1889 in order to trace the history of the Babri Majid, but dismissed it on the ground that there were doubts about the “authenticity” of its copies. The book though said Babur reached the other side of the Saryu river in March/April of 1528 when the mosque was believed to have been built.
“However, Babur himself (had) mentioned that some pages of his diary were lost in a storm. The lost pages include the pages from 2-4-1528 to 18-9-1528. In the pages it is mentioned that Babur had reached towards other side of rivers Saryu/Ghaghra and had gone hunting on April 2, 1528,” Justice Khan recorded in his verdict.
The first British Gazetteer by Walter Hamilton in 1828 has been extensively quoted. “Pilgrims resort to this vicinity, where the remains of the ancient city of Oude (Ayodhya) and capital of great Rama, are still to be seen; but whatever may have been its former magnificence, it now exhibits nothing but a shapeless mass of ruins,” it said.
The other crucial document considered was Carnegy’s historical sketch Janamsthan and Other Temples, which said, “It is locally affirmed that at the Mohammedan conquest there were three important Hindu shrines, with but few devotees attached, at Ajudhia (Ayodhya), which was then little other than a wilderness, These were the Janamsthan, Saraadwar Mandir also known as Ram Darbar and Tareta-ke-Thakur.”
But on the other hand, the court said, “Ayodhya Mahatim (importance)”, compiled during the period of Mughal emperor Akbar, stated that there was “no clear indication that the premises in dispute was the birthplace of Lord Ram”.
“Hans Bakker, a German scholar who has made great efforts in locating important sites of the Ramayana, also could not pinpoint the premises in dispute as the birthplace of Lord Ram in his book Ayodhya published in 1986,” Justice Khan wrote.
It is not that the references in these documents about the temple and mosque were accepted by the court, but they were analysed to draw conclusions in favour or against based on the reliability and “authenticity” of the documents.
The high court, which had ordered excavation of the area by the ASI to collect evidence about the existence of a temple beneath the demolished structure, if any, proved of little help in arriving at clear conclusion though they said that several signs of the ruins of a Hindu religious place were found.