All Talk
The debate in Parliament on the Liberhan commission report turned out to be a damp squib. Over two days, legislators nitpicked about the report
and hardly any thought was given to the impact of the Babri masjid demolition at Ayodhya on Indian democracy and secularism. BJP leader Rajnath Singh set the tone by calling the report a "bundle of errors" and taking exception to the indictment of senior BJP leaders, including former prime minister A B Vajpayee. Like Rajnath, BJP's Sushma Swaraj harped on the inaccuracies in the report and suggested that it was politically motivated. Both leaders were more intent on playing to the gallery than dealing with the complicity of the BJP in the destruction of the mosque.
The initial Congress response by Salman Khursheed was a tepid one where he sought to blame the Narasimha Rao government and exonerate Vajpayee. It was only in the final session that home minister P Chidambaram took up what was at the heart of the report - that the demolition of the Babri masjid was meticulously planned by the sangh parivar and that it wasn't a spontaneous combustion. He pointed out that the sangh parivar's politics represented a vision of India which clashed with Congress's, and that the people had rejected the Sangh's version. He further said that the Rao government had made a wrong political judgement for which Congress had to subsequently pay at the hustings.
The report itself - which indicted people like Deoraha Baba who had died two years before the Babri demolition - lends itself to some justified criticism. But what was conspicuously absent in the debates was any sort of soul-searching or a discussion of how best to prevent such events from happening in future. The BJP found fault with the report while the Congress preferred to pass the buck to a person who is no longer there to defend himself. Perhaps the only sensible suggestion was made by
CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta who said punitive action against the guilty might not be feasible but pleaded for the "isolation of fundamentalist forces".
In this context, of much greater importance than the debate on Liberhan is the Communal Violence Bill that is likely to be tabled in the ongoing session of Parliament. It empowers the Centre to intervene during acts of communal violence without the concurrence of state governments. That was the primary reason given by the Rao government, and corroborated by the Liberhan report, for not stepping in at Ayodhya. Though there are misgivings about giving the Centre enhanced powers to intervene in states and upsetting the federal structure, such legislation is needed, with adequate checks, to prevent Ayodhya-like events from occurring again.
