Babri Masjid demolition: Intelligence official recalls the original Babri sting

http://scroll.in/article/intelligence-official-recalls-the-original-babri-sting-operation-he-pulled-off-22-years-ago?id=660624

Babri Masjid demolition

Intelligence official recalls the original Babri sting operation he pulled off 22 years ago

Dinesh Narayanan

In February 1992, a top Intelligence Bureau man had bugged a room in which senior Sangh Parivar leaders met to discuss plans to demolish Ayodhya shrine.

Investigative website Cobrapost’s sting operation on leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders has added a layer of unwitting testimonials to heaps of circumstantial evidence that the demolition of Babri Masjid was meticulously planned and clinically executed. In a series of 24 videos, the main actors in the demolition reveal how they planned the destruction of the shrine on India on December 6, 1992.

The sting operation has revived speculation that the central government of the time, headed by prime minister PV Narasimha Rao, was privy to the plans but let it happen anyway. In fact, a top-ranking intelligence officer has written that Rao probably even knew about the plan down to its last detail. In his autobiography, Open Secrets, published in 2005, former joint director of the Intelligence Bureau, Maloy Krishna Dhar, revealed how he was ordered to snoop in on a top-level meeting of the Sangh Parivar outfits.

Dhar writes that in February 1992, soon after BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi’s unsuccessful Ekta Yatra, he was asked to arrange "technical coverage’’ of a key meeting of the Sangh Parivar. Simply put, he was told to bug the meeting that would be attended by BJP leaders LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Vijaya Raje Scindia; Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leaders Rajendra Singh, KS Sudarshan and HV Sheshadri; and VHP leaders Vinay Katiyar, Uma Bharti and Champat Roy, among others. These last three were caught on hidden camera by Cobrapost as well.

Dhar himself was an unabashed RSS sympathiser. "I literally faced a crisis of faith,” he writes. "I was a self-proclaimed friend of the Sangh Parivar and I genuinely expected them to do better in the forthcoming national elections.’’ Despite this, Dhar planted audio and video bugs to record the meeting.

"Thank God, I did,’’ he writes. "The audio of video tapes rattled my emotional attachment to the Hindutva protagonist organisations. The February meeting tapes disillusioned me.’’

According to the spy chief, the contents showed that the Sangh Parivar had adopted a stringent Hindutva programme soon after Indira Gandhi’s murder. The meeting proved beyond doubt that they had "choreographed the pralaya nritya at Ayodhya in December 1992’’.

The leaders at the meeting had agreed that all Sangh Parivar organisations should coordinate their work. Uma Bharti was particularly advised to "hold back her emotional leanings to [her colleague] Govindacharya till the mission was complete’’.

Dhar writes that he retrieved the audio and video tapes after a couple of days by breaking into the building and handed it over to his boss. "I have no doubt that he had shared the chilling contents with the Prime Minister and the Home Minister.’’

If Narasimha Rao knew about the plan, he never gave an inkling of it – except perhaps a week before the demolition. On November 26, 1992, Rao told a Congress Parliamentary Party meeting that the temple dispute had reached a crucial state with the VHP already having given orders to karsevaks (volunteers) to gather in large numbers in Ayodhya on November 27 and 28 and the Supreme Court about to intervene in the matter.

"I pointed out that not much time was left before the kar seva,” Rao recollects in his book Ayodhya 6 December 1992. “The deliberate intention of the state government appeared to be to delay the court intervention and thus sabotage the move for a peaceful resolution of the dispute’’.

There is no doubt that Rao was in favour of building the Ram temple. At a meeting of the National Integration Council on November 23, which the BJP boycotted, the prime minister said, "As regards the construction of the temple, we all agree that a grand temple should be constructed in Ayodhya. I had said as much from the Red Fort on Independence Day. I do not think that there is anyone here who would disagree with this basic proposition.’’


http://scroll.in/article/not-just-1992-babri-masjid-was-focus-of-conspiracy-in-1949-too?id=660621

Not just 1992, Babri Masjid was focus of conspiracy in 1949 too

Dhirendra K Jha · 3h ago

The mysterious appearance of an idol of Ram inside the Babri Masjid one night in 1949 was also the result of a well-planned conspiracy.
Investigative website Cobrapost’s latest sting operation claimed on Friday that the demolition of Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 was not the result of a spontaneous mob frenzy, as the accused in the case have maintained, but rather the outcome of a well-orchestrated conspiracy by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, with the knowledge of senior leaders of Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena.

These organisations had led a long movement to build a Ram temple on the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, claiming that it was the birthplace of Lord Ram. They alleged that the Muslim shrine had come up in place of a temple that had been demolished there in 1527. The Cobrapost investigation demonstrates that the demolition was planned with great precision.

December 1992 wasn't the first time the Babri Masjid had been the subject of a conspiracy. It had been the subject of attention for Hindutva elements ever since India attained independence.

In 1947, Babri Masjid was a mosque. Two years later, on the night of December 22, 1949, an idol of Ram Lalla appeared mysteriously inside the mosque, transforming it, for all practical purposes, into a temple. The appearance of the idol was presented as a matter of divine intervention to conceal a plan executed by the Hindu Mahasabha, the BJP’s predecessor, in collaboration with a few sadhus from Ayodhya.

As a result, the Babri Masjid served as a temple from 1949 until it was demolished by a mob one afternoon in 1992. This time the conspiracy was even more obvious than the one in 1949.

The mosque was demolished in broad daylight as lakhs of karsevaks (volunteers) gathered at the site. Senior BJP leaders such as LK Advani and Uma Bharati were present at the site. Despite this, Hindutva parties have repeatedly argued that it was a spontaneous act of a frenzied mob.

The Central Bureau of Investigation, even after many years of work, has not been able to find clinching evidence against the 40 people it has named in its charge sheet.

“If we could collect so much evidence to prove that the demolition of Babri Masjid was an act of planned sabotage, imagine how much more evidence could have been gathered had a proper attempt been made in the immediate aftermath of the demolition,” said Aniruddha Bahal, editor of Cobrapost. He said the sting operation was carried out over a period of two years.

At a press conference on Friday, he screened video-taped interviews in which the leaders of the BJP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and the Shiv Sena claimed that the demolition was carried out with precision by their volunteers after going through intense training and mock drills. Among those interviewed were BJP leaders Uma Bharti, Kalyan Singh and Vinay Katiyar, who talk about the conspiracy and events that preceded the demolition. Cobrapost interviewed 23 leaders who were allegedly in the forefront of the demolition.

According to Cobrapost, the people interviewed by its journalists named BJP leaders LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti and others for “secretly planning” the demolition. It also claimed that Kalyan Singh, who as then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, and PV Narsimha Rao, who was prime minister at the time, were aware of the imminent demolition.