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Reading into 1984 and Liberhan
Report
What’s inside
the Congress? The BJP, of course!
Priyaleen K
Renuka
 There will never
be a closure to the pogrom of the Sikhs in 1984. There will never be
a closure to the black event that was the Babri Masjid demolition.
It has taken 25 years for the government of
India
to do nothing. It has taken 25 years for the civil society in India
to learn to live famously well with the idea of not doing justice
and still not protest.
It has taken the
CBI 25 years to hand out clean chits to the worst characters of the
1984. It has taken 25 years for the Indian state to be hit by a
shoe.
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.
In case of the
genocide of the Sikhs, the role of the Indian state has been much
worse, the shamelessness of the Indian justice dispensing system
much more blatant. As advocate H S Phoolka has brought out in his
fact filled tome and now Jarnail Singh has brought about in his
passionately written "I Accuse", the idea that justice can still be
somehow done is almost a naive one.
No one can do
justice after 25 years of a pogrom. Yes, you can bring some people
to justice. You can and must track down and bring to the law those
who killed, maimed, raped, burnt Sikhs but no, you cannot do
justice. How can you do justice to the five year old child who saw
his father being burnt? He is now 30 year old himself, and the five
year old has never left him.
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What it did not
establish or even state was the fact that there has always been a
core of Hindutva, a core of BJP inside the Congress. That the
Congress is as much an avatar of the BJP as a reformed BJP is an
avatar of the Congress. |
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Just as you
cannot do justice to the old man who saw TV beaming images of Babri
mosque being demolished, dome by dome, as he read his Namaz and
prayed with his hands held heavenwards.
The best thing
you can do is to understand the forces and the ideology that kills
Sikhs in 1984, that demolishes mosques, that kills Muslims in
Gujarat, that attacks Christians in Orissa.
The Liberhan
Commission’s report focuses on the ideology, world view and
organizing 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 Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang 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 protested 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 colluding 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 demolition – 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 finalize his report.
The commission certainly faced many obstacles in its work. The
culprits did everything possible to delay and stretch out the
proceedings.
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.
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No one can do
justice after 25 years of a pogrom. Yes, you can bring some
people to justice. You can and must track down and bring to the
law those who killed, maimed, raped, burnt Sikhs but no, you
cannot do justice. How can you do justice to the five year old
child who saw his father being burnt? He is now 30 year old
himself, and the five year old has never left him. |
|
What it did not
establish or even state was the fact that there has always been a
core of Hindutva, a core of BJP inside the Congress. That the
Congress is as much an avatar of the BJP as a reformed BJP is an
avataar of the Congress.
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 administration in January 1986 to remove
the “judicial” locks that had been placed on the mosque for nearly
four decades.
That is what we
mean by Congress being a softer avataar of the BJP.
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
mobilization 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
legitimized 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 organizations 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.
Also, it ensured
that there is forever a BJP in the Congress.
9
December 2009
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