India
Dec
03
2009
READ BABRI REPORT RIGHT
by Rajeev Dhavan
Those indicted culpably by the Liberhan panel must not hide behind procedure or the leak of the report
AT LAST after 17 years, 399 settings, 48 extensions, a cost of Rs 17 crores, embarrassing differences between the Commission’s counsel and Chairperson, litigation in court to delay it, the Liberhan Report on the destruction of Babri Masjid has arrived. Submitted on 30th June 2009, Home Minister P Chidambaram held on to it until, it was leaked on 23rd November 2009 amidst accusations of conspiracy and finally tabled on 24th November.
First, the leak. It was a coup for a newspaper. If anyone knows about the leak, surely it is that newspaper which stole a march to make a coup. In fact, what was wrong was the archaic law of non- disclosure. It is an absurd relic from English practice. There is no reason why reports should be disclosed to parliament first.
Dec
03
2009
by Badri Raina
On December 6,1992, hordes of right-wing Hindutva extremists
(called karsevaks) took the town of Ayodhya hostage with the full
and willing connivance of the then state government of Uttar Pradesh
and in physical presence of most of the top leaders of the Sangh
Parivar (the RSS and its affiliates/fronts like the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena, and the Bhartiya Janata
Party).
By evening of that fateful day, the 460 year old mosque built there
by one of Babar’s lieutenants, Mir Baqi, was razed to a heap of
rumble on the grounds that the mosque was built over a temple which
enclosed the birthplace of the god, Ram.
To this day, there is no evidence of any kind that a temple of any
sort pre-existed at the site of the demolished mosque.
Interestingly, the Prime Minister of the day, late Narasimha Rao,
failed/refused to respond to insistent pleas both from some members
of his cabinet and many others from civil society across religious
communities to intervene to forestall that unprecedently brazen
assault on the Constitution and the rule of law.
The local government of Kalyan Singh was to cock a final snook at the
central government and resign office after the deed was done, and
in daylong glare of television coverage, preempting the possibility
of being dismissed from office.
Almost instantly, riots broke out, and Muslims were killed with
impunity by Hindutva draftees who saw no obstacle to their
exertions. In the city of Mumbai, about a thousand innocent Indians
lost their lives. (The Justice Srikrishna Commission inquiring into
those Mumbai killings was to squarely hold the Shiv Sena and other
Hindutva bodies responsibe for those massacres, and recommend legal
action including against the Shiv Sena chief, Bal Thackeray. To this
day, however, no action has followed, although the state of
Maharashtra has been since ruled by the Congress/Natiionalist
Congress Party combine with only an interregnum of Shiv Sena rule.)
Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan was appointed in January of 1993 to
enquire into the sequence of events that led to the demolition of the
Babri mosque, and to fix responsibility.
After seventeen long years, the Liberhan report is in. Over a
thousand pages long, the Liberhan report concludes that “the RSS was
the author” of the carnage, and all “logistical arrangements” were
“coordinated between RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal, and the BJP,” calling the
latter “a front of the RSS”-the worst-kept secret of India’s modern
political history.
Characterising the event as the result of “tailor made” and
“meticulous” conspiracy rather than a spontaneous outrage, the
Liberhan report draws up a list of 68 names whom it holds culpable of
the same, names that include almost every scion of the Sangh
Parivar. Significantly, it lists the erstwhile Prime Minister, Atal
Bihari Vajpayee, at number 7, holding him responsible of taking the
“country towards communal discord.” A day before the demolition,
Vajpayee had been recorded on video making a public speech in
Lucknow, the Capital of Uttar Pradesh, expressing the need for the
ground at Ayodhya to be “leveled” inorder to facilitate the karseva
(collective religious activity) the next day.
Justice Liberhan exonerates the then Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao of
responsibility on the ground that he was duped by sworn affidavits
submitted by the chief minister, Kalyan Singh, to the Supreme Court
of India, undertaking to see that no harm would come to the mosque.
Liberhan also accuses the Sangh leaders of duplicity in having
“lulled” him and the central government into complacence through
their misleading pronouncements. While this is true enough, not many
are convinced that this fact alone forestalled any action on behalf
of the Prime Minister.
There is substantial evidence that one or two of his own cabinet
ministers had warned him of the RSS plans for December 6 well in
advance. One of those ministers, Makhan Lal Fotedar-a distinguished
Kashmiri Pandit secularist-has revealed how the then governor of
Uttar Pradesh was instructed by Rao not to recommend President’s rule
till asked by Rao to do so. Fotedar claims he was told about this by
the then President of India, Shankar Dayal Sharma-another
distinguished secularist Brahmin– whom he found in tears on the day.
Whereas Justice Liberhan has not recommended any specific action
against anyone, it has noted some correctives, chief among these the
need to have laws in place punishing the use of religion in political
activity.
II
Mysteriously, the Liberhan report was leaked to the media before it
was tabled in Parliament. Both the Home Minister and Justice
Liberhan deny responsibility for the leak.
The BJP which has been in tatters recently as a result first of its
electoral reverses, then of the most unedifying internecine discord,
and finally of the open and overt take-over of its decision-making
prerogatives by the RSS, its puppet master since inception, has
sought to unite around two issues: a fake outrage at the naming of
Vajpayee (whom both the RSS and Advani have wanted out for long), and
at the leaking of the report.
It has also sought to make much of the report having been submitted
17 years after the event-a detail that in the BJP’s view renders it
only of academic interest, warranting no follow up.
That, even as it continues to demand action against the perpetrators
of the Sikh killings of 1984-eight years prior to the Babri
demolition-and even as it admires the Zionists no end for pursuing
Nazi war criminals some half century after the second world war.
Having led the assault on the mosque on the grounds of a four-century
old “dishonouring” of a ”Hindu nation,” it advises that there is
little point in revisiting the Babri demolition some 17 years after
the demolition! It utters not a word of remorse at the dishonouring
of Muslim sentiments.
Privately the BJP hopes that the submission of the Liberhan report
and the recorded culpability of the Sangh Parivar may help to portray
the Sangh, and with it the BJP, as martyrs and warriors in the cause
of “cultural nationalism,” and revive its political fortunes which
stand now at nadir.
III
There are, however, fatal reasons why the demolition of the Babri
mosque by a fascist, Hindutva putsch must never be relegated as just
one communal episode among many in post-independence India.
The controversy whether the Babri mosque site was indeed the
birthplace of the Hindu god, Ram, has for a hundred years or so
remained a matter of localized and legal contention, as ”title”
suites are still being argued in courts to determine whether the
Muslim Wakf Board or some Hindu organization had rightful claim to
possession of the site.
Till as late as 1983, nobody outside Faizabad District in Uttar
Pradesh bothered a great deal about what was going on in those
suites. And not many did so even in Faizabad and Ayodhya which,
paradoxically, had remained bastions of age-old inter-community
harmony. Indeed, many of the plethora of temples in Ayodhya were
managed and run by Muslim devotees of Ram.
It was between 1983 and 1992 that the Sangh decided to convert the
Ayodhya issue into a cause celebre of “cultural nationalism,” leading
to the assault on December 6, 1992. That as a ploy to enter
Parliament with some seats more than the humiliating two it had got
in the elections of 1984.
In projecting the issue as they did, the Sangh had a macro-historical
enterprise in mind, something that had little or nothing to do with
the Hindu god, or with the purity of faith.
One, the project was to assert the majoritarian premise that India,
notwithstanding its secular constitution, was first and foremost, a
Hindu nation-state.
So that as the pick-axes rained on the domes of the mosque to the
accompaniment of the grossest communal abuse, the fury of the doing
suggested that it was not a mosque that was being demolished but,
verily, the very body-incarnate of Islam. The subliminal rage of the
erasers might have suggested that it was not a dome they were bashing
but the head of the Moghul, Babar. Very much as in demolishing the
Berlin wall, the body of the wall was seen to represent not an entity
that separated two parts of a city but as an entity that embodied
Communism.
Far from being just one vandalising episode at the hands of sectarian
hordes, the assault on the mosque was constructed and propagated as a
campaign to vanquish the secular Constitution of India and to shame
it once and for all as being at bottom tilted against Hindus, and
violative of racial principles of nationhood-an idea for which the
erstwhile RSS ideologue and President, Golwalker, was to be full of
praise for Hitler and the Nazis.
Never reconciled to the secular Republic, the RSS thought to make of
the campaign an occasion to reverse the principles of secular and
pluralist citizenship that India had chosen to give to herself after
Independence in 1947.
Two, the campaign was calculated to register the view that the will
of the majority community superceded all the institutions of state,
an initial gambit towards turning India into a theocracy, or a Hindu
Rashtra in consonance with the well-laid out ideology of the Hindu
Mahasabha and the RSS (see Golwalker’s We, Our Nationhood Defined,
and Savarkar’s Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?). A mirror image of the
hardline Islamic idea of nationhood and state!
It should surprise nobody that the Sangh has a standing list of
thousands of mosques which are slated to be demolished and replaced
by temples, some 36,000 at last count. The question is never asked
as to how many temples stand at sites that used to be Buddhist or
Jain stupas.
And, not the least, to catapult the BJP as being the primary
“nationalist” political formation of India, and relegate the Congress
and the Leftists as essentially “appeasers” of Babar’s progeny, the
Muslims, whose right to Indianness was to be formally damaged by the
construction that they continue to be non-indigenous and disloyal
progeny of invaders.
IV
India may have come a long way since 1992; yet so long as the BJP
remains a mannequin to the RSS, so long as it fails or is unwilling
to transform itself into an autonomous “political” formation, so long
as, willy nilly, it harks back to “cultural nationalism” as its chief
raison d’ etre of political existence, remaining thereby unreconciled
to secular citizenship, minority rights, and equality of opportunity
and equality before the law, so long as, in one word, its chief point
of political reference remains its visceral hatred of Muslims, it
would be fatal to forget the lessons of the Babri demolition.
In that context, the indifferently evolved secular convictions of the
Congress party after Nehru pose no small obstacle to any forthright
firming up of the Constitutional regime. It cannot be said that many
more than half a dozen top leaders of the Congress hold Nehruvian
secularism to be sancrosanct, especially when votes are in question.
And the Congress has only one way of disproving those reservations,
namely, to grab Liberhan’s injunction about the separation of
religion and politics, and to put in place legislation that may
heretofore brook no heinous mixing of the two.
Legislation, it must be noted, that is then backed up with the legal
resolve never to pussyfoot any instance of communal appeal to the
polity, and to come down with the full majesty of the law and the
state on instances of communal violence instigated by political
agents, whoever they be, or however high or mighty.
Taking a cue from the Liberhan recommendations, the Election
Commission of India, a Constitutional Body beholden to no political
or governmental regime, may consider the time ripe for laying down
that any political use of religion would be ground for derecognition
of the party found culpable.
This must include due and prompt punishment to all those who, in
school, pathshala, madrasa, or wherever else seek to frame curriculi
around communal perceptions of history and polity, calculated to
undermine the rights and prerogatives of secular citizenship or to
instill antagonism towards other religions, and a ruthless denial of
all attempts to grab public spaces for unauthorized communal/
religious use/propagation (something that the Supreme Court has
recently enjoined) as well.
Even if the current UPA dispensation forgave all the designated
culprits of the Babri crime (very few believe that the state has the
will to do otherwise) but made the long-lasting redressals
suggested by Liberhan and listed above, the generation of Indians to
come might inherit a worthwhile democracy in regard at least to the
matter of a non-negotiable secular citizenship and a country free of
“internal dangers” far worse and debilitating than pockets of
insurgency floated around issues of livelihood.
And if none of that were to be done, the Liberhan exercise would
indeed have been a criminal waste at tax-payer’s expense. And,
worse, an incentive to further depredations along the lines of the
Babri crime.
by Badri Raina
On December 6,1992, hordes of right-wing Hindutva extremists (called karsevaks) took the town of Ayodhya hostage with the full and willing connivance of the then state government of Uttar Pradesh and in physical presence of most of the top leaders of the Sangh Parivar (the RSS and its affiliates/fronts like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena, and the Bhartiya JanataParty).
By evening of that fateful day, the 460 year old mosque built there by one of Babar’s lieutenants, Mir Baqi, was razed to a heap of rumble on the grounds that the mosque was built over a temple which enclosed the birthplace of the god, Ram.
To this day, there is no evidence of any kind that a temple of any sort pre-existed at the site of the demolished mosque.
Interestingly, the Prime Minister of the day, late Narasimha Rao, failed/refused to respond to insistent pleas both from some members of his cabinet and many others from civil society across religious communities to intervene to forestall that unprecedently brazen assault on the Constitution and the rule of law.
The local government of Kalyan Singh was to cock a final snook at the central government and resign office after the deed was done, and in daylong glare of television coverage, preempting the possibility of being dismissed from office.
Almost instantly, riots broke out, and Muslims were killed with impunity by Hindutva draftees who saw no obstacle to their exertions. In the city of Mumbai, about a thousand innocent Indians lost their lives. (The Justice Srikrishna Commission inquiring into those Mumbai killings was to squarely hold the Shiv Sena and other Hindutva bodies responsibe for those massacres, and recommend legal action including against the Shiv Sena chief, Bal Thackeray.
To this day, however, no action has followed, although the state of Maharashtra has been since ruled by the Congress/Natiionalist Congress Party combine with only an interregnum of Shiv Sena rule.)
Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan was appointed in January of 1993 to enquire into the sequence of events that led to the demolition of the Babri mosque, and to fix responsibility. After seventeen long years, the Liberhan report is in. Over a thousand pages long, the Liberhan report concludes that “the RSS was the author” of the carnage, and all “logistical arrangements” were ”coordinated between RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal, and the BJP,” calling the latter “a front of the RSS”-the worst-kept secret of India’s modern political history.
Characterising the event as the result of “tailor made” and ”meticulous” conspiracy rather than a spontaneous outrage, the Liberhan report draws up a list of 68 names whom it holds culpable of the same, names that include almost every scion of the Sangh Parivar. Significantly, it lists the erstwhile Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, at number 7, holding him responsible of taking the ”country towards communal discord.” A day before the demolition, Vajpayee had been recorded on video making a public speech in Lucknow, the Capital of Uttar Pradesh, expressing the need for the ground at Ayodhya to be “leveled” inorder to facilitate the karseva (collective religious activity) the next day.
Justice Liberhan exonerates the then Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao of responsibility on the ground that he was duped by sworn affidavits submitted by the chief minister, Kalyan Singh, to the Supreme Court of India, undertaking to see that no harm would come to the mosque.
Liberhan also accuses the Sangh leaders of duplicity in having ”lulled” him and the central government into complacence through their misleading pronouncements. While this is true enough, not many are convinced that this fact alone forestalled any action on behalf of the Prime Minister.
There is substantial evidence that one or two of his own cabinet ministers had warned him of the RSS plans for December 6 well in advance. One of those ministers, Makhan Lal Fotedar-a distinguished Kashmiri Pandit secularist-has revealed how the then governor of Uttar Pradesh was instructed by Rao not to recommend President’s rule till asked by Rao to do so. Fotedar claims he was told about this by the then President of India, Shankar Dayal Sharma-another distinguished secularist Brahmin– whom he found in tears on the day. Whereas Justice Liberhan has not recommended any specific action against anyone, it has noted some correctives, chief among these the need to have laws in place punishing the use of religion in political activity.
II
Mysteriously, the Liberhan report was leaked to the media before it was tabled in Parliament. Both the Home Minister and Justice Liberhan deny responsibility for the leak. The BJP which has been in tatters recently as a result first of its electoral reverses, then of the most unedifying internecine discord, and finally of the open and overt take-over of its decision-making prerogatives by the RSS, its puppet master since inception, has sought to unite around two issues: a fake outrage at the naming of Vajpayee (whom both the RSS and Advani have wanted out for long), and at the leaking of the report.
It has also sought to make much of the report having been submitted 17 years after the event-a detail that in the BJP’s view renders it only of academic interest, warranting no follow up. That, even as it continues to demand action against the perpetrators of the Sikh killings of 1984-eight years prior to the Babri demolition-and even as it admires the Zionists no end for pursuing Nazi war criminals some half century after the second world war.
Having led the assault on the mosque on the grounds of a four-century old “dishonouring” of a ”Hindu nation,” it advises that there is little point in revisiting the Babri demolition some 17 years after the demolition! It utters not a word of remorse at the dishonouring of Muslim sentiments. Privately the BJP hopes that the submission of the Liberhan report and the recorded culpability of the Sangh Parivar may help to portray the Sangh, and with it the BJP, as martyrs and warriors in the cause of “cultural nationalism,” and revive its political fortunes which stand now at nadir.
III
There are, however, fatal reasons why the demolition of the Babri mosque by a fascist, Hindutva putsch must never be relegated as just one communal episode among many in post-independence India.
The controversy whether the Babri mosque site was indeed the birthplace of the Hindu god, Ram, has for a hundred years or so remained a matter of localized and legal contention, as ”title” suites are still being argued in courts to determine whether the Muslim Wakf Board or some Hindu organization had rightful claim to possession of the site.
Till as late as 1983, nobody outside Faizabad District in Uttar Pradesh bothered a great deal about what was going on in those suites. And not many did so even in Faizabad and Ayodhya which, paradoxically, had remained bastions of age-old inter-community harmony. Indeed, many of the plethora of temples in Ayodhya were managed and run by Muslim devotees of Ram.
It was between 1983 and 1992 that the Sangh decided to convert the Ayodhya issue into a cause celebre of “cultural nationalism,” leading to the assault on December 6, 1992. That as a ploy to enter Parliament with some seats more than the humiliating two it had got in the elections of 1984.
In projecting the issue as they did, the Sangh had a macro-historical enterprise in mind, something that had little or nothing to do with the Hindu god, or with the purity of faith. One, the project was to assert the majoritarian premise that India, notwithstanding its secular constitution, was first and foremost, a Hindu nation-state.
So that as the pick-axes rained on the domes of the mosque to the accompaniment of the grossest communal abuse, the fury of the doing suggested that it was not a mosque that was being demolished but, verily, the very body-incarnate of Islam. The subliminal rage of the erasers might have suggested that it was not a dome they were bashing but the head of the Moghul, Babar. Very much as in demolishing the Berlin wall, the body of the wall was seen to represent not an entitythat separated two parts of a city but as an entity that embodied Communism.
Far from being just one vandalising episode at the hands of sectarian hordes, the assault on the mosque was constructed and propagated as a campaign to vanquish the secular Constitution of India and to shame it once and for all as being at bottom tilted against Hindus, and violative of racial principles of nationhood-an idea for which the erstwhile RSS ideologue and President, Golwalker, was to be full of praise for Hitler and the Nazis.
Never reconciled to the secular Republic, the RSS thought to make of the campaign an occasion to reverse the principles of secular and pluralist citizenship that India had chosen to give to herself after Independence in 1947.
Two, the campaign was calculated to register the view that the will of the majority community superceded all the institutions of state, an initial gambit towards turning India into a theocracy, or a Hindu Rashtra in consonance with the well-laid out ideology of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS (see Golwalker’s We, Our Nationhood Defined, and Savarkar’s Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?). A mirror image of the hardline Islamic idea of nationhood and state! It should surprise nobody that the Sangh has a standing list of thousands of mosques which are slated to be demolished and replaced by temples, some 36,000 at last count. The question is never asked as to how many temples stand at sites that used to be Buddhist or Jain stupas.
And, not the least, to catapult the BJP as being the primary ”nationalist” political formation of India, and relegate the Congress and the Leftists as essentially “appeasers” of Babar’s progeny, the Muslims, whose right to Indianness was to be formally damaged by the construction that they continue to be non-indigenous and disloyal progeny of invaders.
IV
India may have come a long way since 1992; yet so long as the BJP remains a mannequin to the RSS, so long as it fails or is unwilling to transform itself into an autonomous “political” formation, so long as, willy nilly, it harks back to “cultural nationalism” as its chief raison d’ etre of political existence, remaining thereby unreconciled to secular citizenship, minority rights, and equality of opportunity and equality before the law, so long as, in one word, its chief point of political reference remains its visceral hatred of Muslims, it would be fatal to forget the lessons of the Babri demolition.
In that context, the indifferently evolved secular convictions of the Congress party after Nehru pose no small obstacle to any forthright firming up of the Constitutional regime. It cannot be said that many more than half a dozen top leaders of the Congress hold Nehruvian secularism to be sancrosanct, especially when votes are in question.
And the Congress has only one way of disproving those reservations, namely, to grab Liberhan’s injunction about the separation of religion and politics, and to put in place legislation that may heretofore brook no heinous mixing of the two.
Legislation, it must be noted, that is then backed up with the legal resolve never to pussyfoot any instance of communal appeal to the polity, and to come down with the full majesty of the law and the state on instances of communal violence instigated by political agents, whoever they be, or however high or mighty.
Taking a cue from the Liberhan recommendations, the Election Commission of India, a Constitutional Body beholden to no political or governmental regime, may consider the time ripe for laying down that any political use of religion would be ground for derecognition of the party found culpable.
This must include due and prompt punishment to all those who, in school, pathshala, madrasa, or wherever else seek to frame curriculi around communal perceptions of history and polity, calculated to undermine the rights and prerogatives of secular citizenship or to instill antagonism towards other religions, and a ruthless denial of all attempts to grab public spaces for unauthorized communal/ religious use/propagation (something that the Supreme Court has recently enjoined) as well.
Even if the current UPA dispensation forgave all the designated culprits of the Babri crime (very few believe that the state has the will to do otherwise) but made the long-lasting redressals suggested by Liberhan and listed above, the generation of Indians to come might inherit a worthwhile democracy in regard at least to the matter of a non-negotiable secular citizenship and a country free of ”internal dangers” far worse and debilitating than pockets of insurgency floated around issues of livelihood.
And if none of that were to be done, the Liberhan exercise would indeed have been a criminal waste at tax-payer’s expense. And, worse, an incentive to further depredations along the lines of the Babri crime.
Source: ZNet, November 30, 2009
Dec
03
2009
There will never be a closure to the black event that was the Babri
Masjid demolition.
It has taken 17 years for the Justice M S Liberhan Commission set up
to investigate the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6
December 1992, to arrive at what has been known from the time the
mosque was brought down. The Liberhan Commission has delivered a
searing indictment of the Sangh parivar as the primary culprit for
the demolition. It also names (in the commission’s words) the “pseudo-
moderate” leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the
secondary culprit and officials of the state machinery and
administration as tertiary participants in the horrendous act that
stripped the Indian state’s claim to be secular.
The Liberhan Commission’s report focuses on the ideology, world view
and organising power of the Sangh parivar, and the manner in which it
single-mindedly attempted to create a frenzy among the masses for the
demolition. It details how “the inner core of the Parivar” – the
leadership of the Rashtriya Swaya- msevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, the B ajrang Dal, the BJP and the Shiv Sena – bears
“primary responsibility” for the crime. It also points out how the
BJP leadership, comprising Atal Behari Vajpayee, L K Advani and
Murli Manohar Joshi, was privy to the decisions of the Sangh parivar
on the demolition, but pro- tested innocence in order to project a
“moderate” image because it had been tasked to shed the “best
possible light” on the plan of the RSS. And last but not least the
commission indicts officials of the Kalyan Singh government in Uttar
Pradesh for deliberately collud- ing with the parivar in razing the
Babri Masjid.
The one-man commission has no doubt done a painstaking and thorough
examination of the events that led up to the demo- lition – the
intrigue, the subterfuge, the sabotage of law and order and even the
inter-mixing of religion and politics. But did it have to take close
to two decades to present its findings? Justice Liberhan’s original
brief was to conclude its investigations in three months, but he took
40 extensions to finalise his report. The commission certainly faced
many obstacles in its work. The culprits did everything possible to
delay and stretch out the pro- ceedings. But the commission has taken
an inexcusably long time since 16 December 1992, when Justice
Liberhan was appointed head of the judicial commission, to
investigate the events that led up to the destruction of the mosque
at Ayodhya.
Justice Liberhan points to the failure of many an institution of the
Indian state – including the media and bureaucracy along with the
polity – but he reserves his indictment for the Sangh parivar and is
silent on the Congress Party. Indeed, even as the commission has
revealed the conspiracy underlying the demolition, what is intriguing
is the clean chit it has given to the then Narasimha Rao government
in New Delhi and the silence it has maintained about the role of
previous Congress governments in fuelling the ”Ram Janmabhoomi”
claim. If there is a contemporary marker in the events leading to the
demolition it is surely the decision taken by the local adminis-
tration in January 1986 to remove the “judicial” locks that had been
placed on the mosque for nearly four decades. This too is common
knowledge, that it was done at the instance of the then Rajiv Gandhi
government, which was anxious to “win” Hindu support to compensate
for its decision to placate the Muslim clergy after the Shah Bano
judgment. The report is also silent about the poor mobilisation of
central paramilitary forces at the Ayodhya site even after the
demolition, where kar sevaks continued to run riot following the
dismissal of the Kalyan Singh government.
The aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition is well known. As much
as this incident legitimised communal rhetoric in Indian politics,
leading of course to the BJP heading a government at the centre for
six years, it also hugely damaged public administration, the results
of which were immediately evident in the handling of the Bombay riots
of January 1993.
Despite indicting 68 individuals as being directly responsible for
the demolition and pointing fingers at the Sangh parivar and the BJP
leadership, the commission is quiet about pressing charges against
those individuals and organisations who have hitherto escaped
arraignment. Instead the report waxes eloquently on the reforms
needed in the functioning of the bureaucracy, on regulations for the
media and on upholding secularism. The Action Taken Report also does
not suggest that the central government is thinking of initiating
proceedings against those identified as responsible for the
demolition. Therefore, all the effort taken to lay out the details of
the conspiracy and the failure of the state government of Uttar
Pradesh, and the recommendations and the responses listed in the
Action Taken Report end up as a futile exercise.
Justice Liberhan has described how the Sangh parivar corroded and
shamed the secular image of the Indian state and how officials sworn
to the Indian Constitution were brazenly complicit in this crime that
changed Indian politics and public administration for the worse. But
given how every single institution of the Indian state and polity has
pussy-footed around the Babri Masjid demolition and continues to do
so, there will never be any closure to this shameful event. The BJP
may have been electorally vanquished in two Lok Sabha elections but
the virus it nurtured in the course of its campaign to destroy the
mosque at Ayodhya remains implanted in India’s social and political
fabric.
There will never be a closure to the black event that was the Babri
Masjid demolition.
It has taken 17 years for the Justice M S Liberhan Commission set up
to investigate the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6
December 1992, to arrive at what has been known from the time the
mosque was brought down. The Liberhan Commission has delivered a
searing indictment of the Sangh parivar as the primary culprit for
the demolition. It also names (in the commission’s words) the “pseudo-
moderate” leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the
secondary culprit and officials of the state machinery and
administration as tertiary participants in the horrendous act that
stripped the Indian state’s claim to be secular.
The Liberhan Commission’s report focuses on the ideology, world view
and organising power of the Sangh parivar, and the manner in which it
single-mindedly attempted to create a frenzy among the masses for the
demolition. It details how “the inner core of the Parivar” – the
leadership of the Rashtriya Swaya- msevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, the B ajrang Dal, the BJP and the Shiv Sena – bears
“primary responsibility” for the crime. It also points out how the
BJP leadership, comprising Atal Behari Vajpayee, L K Advani and
Murli Manohar Joshi, was privy to the decisions of the Sangh parivar
on the demolition, but pro- tested innocence in order to project a
“moderate” image because it had been tasked to shed the “best
possible light” on the plan of the RSS. And last but not least the
commission indicts officials of the Kalyan Singh government in Uttar
Pradesh for deliberately collud- ing with the parivar in razing the
Babri Masjid.
The one-man commission has no doubt done a painstaking and thorough
examination of the events that led up to the demo- lition – the
intrigue, the subterfuge, the sabotage of law and order and even the
inter-mixing of religion and politics. But did it have to take close
to two decades to present its findings? Justice Liberhan’s original
brief was to conclude its investigations in three months, but he took
40 extensions to finalise his report. The commission certainly faced
many obstacles in its work. The culprits did everything possible to
delay and stretch out the pro- ceedings. But the commission has taken
an inexcusably long time since 16 December 1992, when Justice
Liberhan was appointed head of the judicial commission, to
investigate the events that led up to the destruction of the mosque
at Ayodhya.
Justice Liberhan points to the failure of many an institution of the
Indian state – including the media and bureaucracy along with the
polity – but he reserves his indictment for the Sangh parivar and is
silent on the Congress Party. Indeed, even as the commission has
revealed the conspiracy underlying the demolition, what is intriguing
is the clean chit it has given to the then Narasimha Rao government
in New Delhi and the silence it has maintained about the role of
previous Congress governments in fuelling the ”Ram Janmabhoomi”
claim. If there is a contemporary marker in the events leading to the
demolition it is surely the decision taken by the local adminis-
tration in January 1986 to remove the “judicial” locks that had been
placed on the mosque for nearly four decades. This too is common
knowledge, that it was done at the instance of the then Rajiv Gandhi
government, which was anxious to “win” Hindu support to compensate
for its decision to placate the Muslim clergy after the Shah Bano
judgment. The report is also silent about the poor mobilisation of
central paramilitary forces at the Ayodhya site even after the
demolition, where kar sevaks continued to run riot following the
dismissal of the Kalyan Singh government.
The aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition is well known. As much
as this incident legitimised communal rhetoric in Indian politics,
leading of course to the BJP heading a government at the centre for
six years, it also hugely damaged public administration, the results
of which were immediately evident in the handling of the Bombay riots
of January 1993.
Despite indicting 68 individuals as being directly responsible for
the demolition and pointing fingers at the Sangh parivar and the BJP
leadership, the commission is quiet about pressing charges against
those individuals and organisations who have hitherto escaped
arraignment. Instead the report waxes eloquently on the reforms
needed in the functioning of the bureaucracy, on regulations for the
media and on upholding secularism. The Action Taken Report also does
not suggest that the central government is thinking of initiating
proceedings against those identified as responsible for the
demolition. Therefore, all the effort taken to lay out the details of
the conspiracy and the failure of the state government of Uttar
Pradesh, and the recommendations and the responses listed in the
Action Taken Report end up as a futile exercise.
Justice Liberhan has described how the Sangh parivar corroded and
shamed the secular image of the Indian state and how officials sworn
to the Indian Constitution were brazenly complicit in this crime that
changed Indian politics and public administration for the worse. But
given how every single institution of the Indian state and polity has
pussy-footed around the Babri Masjid demolition and continues to do
so, there will never be any closure to this shameful event. The BJP
may have been electorally vanquished in two Lok Sabha elections but
the virus it nurtured in the course of its campaign to destroy the
mosque at Ayodhya remains implanted in India’s social and political
fabric.
Source : The Economic and Political Weekly - Editorial
November 28, 2009
November 28, 2009
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