Daily Times
4 December 2009
On the eve of Babri anniversary
by J Sri Raman
The primary reason was that the newspaper came out with a summary of the findings of the Justice Manmohan Singh Commission of Inquiry before the commission’s report had been tabled in Parliament
“...to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates”.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was voicing a loftier thought there than any ever articulated by Lal Krishna Advani. But the former Deputy Prime Minister had a more than fleeting hope on November 23 that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could rise from the wreck it had been reduced to. And as a matter of fact, the party seemed to believe that it could resurrect itself now also from the wreck of the Babri Masjid.
On that date, the Lok Sabha (the Lower House of India’s Parliament) rocked with protests led by Advani. Waving the day’s issue of a ‘national daily’ (as any newspaper published in New Delhi is named), the Leader of the Opposition waxed indignant over a report it carried about the conclusions of a judicial inquiry into the demolition of the historic mosque on December 6, 1992, marking the culmination of the Ayodhya movement. There were two reasons why the report sent him into a rage.
The primary reason was that the newspaper came out with a summary of the findings of the Justice Manmohan Singh Commission of Inquiry before the commission’s report had been tabled in Parliament. The offence caused even greater outrage for being committed when Parliament was in session. The point was politically well taken. Few could dismiss it as a far-right plea or deny the importance of parliamentary norms and conventions.
On the issue of the report’s “leak”, Advani received loud and clear support from even the Left and centrist parties, besides all sections of the BJP. This opened a window of opportunity for all those pseudo-liberal media sages, sad to watch the party in a shambles and wondering what ever the country would do without a strong opposition. Latching on to this brief break for the BJP, they rushed to draw ludicrous conclusions of a blatantly diversionary character.
The limited opposition unity on the “leak” was seen as a sign of the beginning of the end of the BJP’s isolation. Liberhan Report, it was suggested, had thrown a lifeline to a drowning party, though the 1,000-page denunciation of its role in the demolition was not going to add to the dwindling tribe of its allies.
The report was also said to have saved Advani’s parliamentary post. The octogenarian’s days as the Leader of the Opposition seemed numbered earlier, with the patriarch of the ‘parivar’ or the far-right ‘family’, the Rashtriya Swayanmevak Sangh (RSS), laying down a lower age limit for the occupant of the post from the party. After the Liberhan Report, denouncing Advani’s role in the Ayodhya affair, it is argued, the ‘parivar’ and the party cannot appear to be abandoning him.
Other ‘parivar’ and party leaders, however, have more than hinted that Advani’s date of birth is not his only disqualification. He cannot, in any case ride his way back to power within the BJP on the Ayodhya ‘rath’ (chariot). RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has, just days ago, voiced his disagreement with Advani’s description of the demolition, which he made possible more than anyone else, as ‘a national shame’. The BJP leader told the commission that December 6, 1992, was ‘the saddest day of my life’. Another luminary, Vinay Katiyar, has now rebutted him with the remark, “That was the happiest day of my life.”
The second reason why Advani flew into a rage, maybe of a more synthetic kind, was that former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has been among the indicted, the ‘culpable’ as the commission calls them. The main objection to the mention of his name, too, has been technical. The argument is that, since the commission did not summon him, no strictures can be passed against him. There can be no such requirement, however, for the commission’s comments on his larger political role in the crime against the nation and his moral responsibility for it as part of the party leadership.
Vajpayee’s image makeover as a ‘moderate’ has been so sustained and successful that even some in the Left demur over his denunciation. But, Justice Liberhan cannot be blamed if his labours lead him to the conclusion that the BJP’s poster boy and plaster saint was one of the ‘pseudo-moderates’ whose ‘secular credentials were preserved for use at a later time’.
It was under Vajpayee as the Prime Minister, after all, that India was to witness Pokharan II nuclear-weapon tests, the pogrom in Gujarat, and the murder of missionary Graham Staines that set the stage for massacres of the Christian minority in Orissa. His famous ‘secular credentials’ did serve the far-right purpose. Advani’s far more suspect credentials cannot achieve even a fraction of such success in providing a cloak for the ‘parivar’.
For a long time, BJP leaders have acknowledged that, contrary to their initial expectations, Ayodhya proved a one-election issue. It cannot give a second life to the party now.
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint
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