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Monday November 30, 2009

Bitter memories return

INDIA DIARY
By COOMI KAPOOR


A judge’s report which indicted 68 people, including key leaders, for events leading up to the destruction of a 16th-century mosque, does little to heal old wounds.

OUR past is always with us. Seventeen years after the demolition of a disputed mosque by Hindu zealots in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, bitter memories of that wintry December day in 1992 have come back to haunt the entire country.

Thanks to the leaked report of the judicial commission set up immediately after the demolition, politicians on either side of the secular-communal divide were yet again engaged in bitter recriminations, blaming one another for what has been called an “assault on the secular soul of India”.

After seventeen years and 48 extensions, Justice Manmohan Singh’s Liberhan Inquiry Commission, tasked to probe the “sequence of events leading, and all facts and circumstances relating, to the occurrences at Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid complex” on Dec 6, 1992, submitted his nearly-1,000 page report in June this year.

This was one of the longest running commissions of inquiry in the history of the country. The Government was still sitting on the report when a newspaper scooped the findings. Unfortunately, these were so mundane, failing to throw any fresh light into one of the darkest chapters in the history of free India, that the report came to be dubbed as a “non-report” or a dud.

Aside from holding the usual suspects in the pro-Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and its mother organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, guilty for the demolition of the disputed mosque, the voluminous report was full of platitudes.

It neither unravelled the philosophy and ideology that had underpinned the mass Ram temple movement headed by the BJP leader Lal Kishan Advani, nor did it zero in on the actual culprits who had physically pulled down the fragile 16th century structure.

However, the report was notable on two counts.

One, for controversially indicting the former BJP prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for the demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya. Vajpayee was not summoned by the commission; nor asked to answer any charges, as is obligatory under the rules of inquiry.

Two, it did not indict former prime minister Narasimha Rao who was in the saddle in New Delhi when the demolition took place.

Vajpayee had all along kept himself aloof from the temple movement. Indeed, his indictment further eroded the credibility of the Liberhan report. As for Rao, his failure to anticipate the events in Ayodhya on the D-Day, and his faith in assurances of good conduct given by the BJP leadership, including the party government in UP, had come in for wide criticism.

Aside from calling the late Prime Minister “daydreamer”, the report was silent on his failure to protect the mosque.

Advani, top-most among the 68 indicted leaders, had undertaken a motorised journey throughout the country to drum up support for the construction of a temple to the Hindu God, Ram, at the very place where Mir Baqi, commander-in-chief of the first Mugal king of India, Babur, had built the mosque in the latter’s honour.

Advani articulated the belief of a vast majority of Hindus that the Babri mosque was built by converting a temple commemorating the birthplace of Lord Ram.

Archaeologists and other experts were divided on the question, though ordinary Hindus easily lent support to the belief that the mosque had replaced the temple at the point of a Mugal sword in the 16th century.

The temple movement shook the placidity of Indian politics. The then prime minister V.P. Singh lost power when, following Advani’s arrest on his way to Ayodhya, the BJP withdrew support. The Congress Party lost its pre-eminent position, ceding electoral ground to the BJP in large swathes of the country.

The mass mobilisation under the rubric of the temple movement came at a time when India was at the cusp of its failed tryst with socialism and the ushering in of an open, liberalised economy.

The Hindu upsurge for “righting the wrongs of history” drew millions from the middle and lower middle classes from small town India. The attempt to make Hinduism central to Indian nationhood was all too clear in the temple campaign.

The late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi pandered to the obscurantist elements in the minority and majority communities by turns, denying the benefit of the civil law to divorced Muslim widows in one case, and allowing the foundation stone of the proposed Ram temple to be laid at the disputed spot in Ayodhya in the other.

Earlier, he had caused the locks of the make-shift temple at the disputed site to be opened for the devotees to offer prayers.

However, the demolition by tens of thousands of frenzied Ram followers gathered in Ayodhya on Dec 6, 1992, virtually ended the temple campaign. (A make-shift temple now functions at the site where once had stood the Babri mosque.)

Advani and a host of other leaders were jailed; BJP governments in UP and other states dismissed and a ban clamped on the RSS, which was withdrawn later on the recommendations of an inquiry report.

Several criminal cases were filed against Advani and others leading the campaign, which are still at a preliminary stage of hearing in various courts. The resulting tension had caused religious riots in large parts of the country leaving several hundred people in both communities dead in wanton acts of violence and arson.

After a lapse of seventeen years, the polarisation caused by the temple movement had evaporated. The Congress Party was on course to regain some of its past glory, while the BJP was in total disarray.

The Liberhan report has had the effect of temporarily uniting its various factions. Yet, the ruling party was hesitant to penalise the perpetrators of the carnage for fear of a backlash from the Hindus.

In other words, there was no closure in sight to the temple issue. Nobody indicted by the inquiry commission is likely to face justice. In the end, it all boils down to the struggle for power.

Some parties pander to the fears and insecurities of the minorities to win elections, while others unabashedly seek to create a sense of victimhood among the Hindus to win support.

No democracy is perfect, the Indian version the least so. The long-running temple-mosque saga proves that conclusively.

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