Gyanvapi's litigation moved from argument over history to argument over physical evidence in 2022, when Hindu petitioners seeking rights to pray inside the mosque compound reported finding a stone object during a court ordered videography survey of the site. The petitioners' lawyers described it as a shivling, a representation of the deity Shiva and clear evidence of an underlying temple; the mosque's caretaker body, the Anjuman Intezamia Masajid committee, identified the same object as the defunct fountainhead of a wazu khana, the ablution basin used before Muslim prayer, a functional plumbing fixture rather than a religious icon.
A Varanasi court ordered the Archaeological Survey of India to conduct a fuller scientific survey in 2023, and its report, made public in January 2024 after months in sealed cover, went further than the original discovery. Investigators recorded carved fragments consistent with Hindu deities and other religious iconography inside the complex and concluded that the mosque's western wall was itself part of an earlier structure, stating that a Hindu temple had existed on the site before the mosque was built atop it, a finding consistent with what the mosque's own incorporated masonry had already suggested.
Neither finding has resolved the underlying legal question. Muslim petitioners have disputed the survey's interpretation and continue pressing the case through India's court system rather than accepting its conclusions, while Hindu litigants have pursued follow on petitions seeking access to the sealed wazu khana itself. The site remains under restricted access and continuing litigation, its physical evidence read by each side as confirmation of what it already believed.