Liberhan commission spends 17 years and 9 crore to come up with a useless report on Babri Masjid demolition!
cartoonistsatish.blogspot.com
|
Showing posts with label Liberhan Commission. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberhan Commission. Show all posts
May 24, 2016
Cartoon by Satish Acharya on The Liberhan Commission that spent 17 years to produce a report on the Babari Mosque demolition of 1992
Liberhan commission spends 17 years and 9 crore to come up with a useless report on Babri Masjid demolition!
cartoonistsatish.blogspot.com
December 16, 2012
Babri Demolition: Two Decades Later
Babri Demolition: Two Decades Later
Ram Puniyani
Twenty years ago (December 6, 1992) on this fateful day, Babri Mosque was demolished. This demolition remains a major blot in the history of India. It was the act of demolition by communal forces which reflected the changing polity of India and it in turn further changed the polity in a very adverse direction. Liberhan Commission showed that it was a pre-planned act orchestrated by Sangh Parivar, which gloated over it and celebrated it as Hindu Shaurya Diwas (Hindu Bravery Day). RSS combine and many an ideologues sympathizing with its ideology projected and are projecting this demolition as a major act of Nation building! While those committed to democracy and secularism see this day as a day which shamed Indian democracy; secularism and opened the floodgates of further communal polarization in a very intense way. What emerged from this tragic day was the strengthening of communal forces due to which BJP emerged as the major party at electoral level, which further communalized our culture into a narrow sectarian one. The values of divisiveness and intolerance towards weaker sections grew further.
While the communal forces led the onslaught, the so called secular party, the Congress did everything to let the things go on, as a passive onlooker or an active colluder. Congress failed to protect the mosque and showed its week knees to the extent that many started equating Congress with BJP. It started being said that what BJP does openly during the day Congress does it covertly, by the night. These two major parties have ruled the Indian political space. In this BJP is programmatically communal and Congress is opportunistically communal. Not to be left behind during this demolition and in the aftermath of demolition, the violence which followed; the acts of violence which took place later and the role of police which was revealed during all these episodes has come as a shocker in a very blatant way. During demolition police failed to do its allotted duty and during violence it either looks the other way round or assists the rioters. In the aftermath of the violence, its role is again suspect. While the major victims of violence are the minorities, uniformly police arrests more from the minority community in large numbers. Despite some noble exceptions, many police personnel are most willing to violate the process of law to support the majoritarian communalism.
The violence has a pattern. While the Muslims are 13.4% according to 2001 census, the number of victims from Muslim minorities is close to 90%. The strong persistence of biases against them acts as the fertile ground on which the violence takes place. Most sections of society, including political leadership of many parties, large sections of those in bureaucracy and police have strong biases against these hapless minorities, due to which the starting point of their action is in presuming that they are criminals. What follows next in the form of their action, quite conforms to this pattern.
The violence has been leading to polarization of communities along religious lines. This polarization is so strong by now that starting from schools, colleges and some work places, where per chance some Muslims find employment, the segregation along religious lines is becoming discernible. This polarization has led to the rise of communal forces to bigger electoral power is very visible. In Mumbai, as Shiv Sena took the lead in violence, it did come to grab electoral power in the aftermath of violence. Simultaneously the inquiry commission reports, which have come out so far, Srikrishna or Liberahan, get their place in the cold storage. While the communal parties in power treat these reports with disdain, the Congress shows no interest in getting them implemented, the calculations of vote bank comes to the fore and we painfully see the work of judiciary, the inquiry commission reports, adorning the library shelves, and that’s about all. Had there been the rule of law, the perpetrators of hate speech, those who lead the communal violence would have been behind the bars rather than roaring in the streets and being upgraded to be called as Hindu Hriday Samrats (Emperor of Hindu Hearts). It is no coincidence that after the 92-93 Mumbai carnage Bal Thackeray, who led the violence, and Narendra Modi who was at the centre of 2002 Gujarat pogrom, both came to be anointed with this pre fix of Hindu Hriday Samrat.
The impact of communalization process is also visible in section of judiciary. In states like Gujarat, the cases had to be shifted out of the state to see that the justice is done. In case of Ayodhya judgment of Allahabad High Court, we saw the situation where two of the three judges resorted to the ‘faith’ of the people to divide the ‘disputed’ land amongst three contending parties. This was something neither asked for by the litigants nor can stand on the legal grounds. The divisive violence has been leading to the formation of physical ghettoes where the sunlight of progress and liberal value can hardly reach despite the best efforts of the social workers committed to the cause of education and reform. In Mumbai in particular Mohalla Committees did play some positive role and do continue to play the same in some form, thanks to the affirmative action by some police officers of impeccable reputation and the social workers committed to the cause of peace in society.
Unfortunately the response of state and the social groups to mitigate such a downward shift of the polity has not been adequate. While Government has set up National Foundation for Communal Harmony, its agenda and resources are too limited to address the mammoth task of spreading the awareness about the values of secular democratic values to most of the sections of society. The school text books, NCERT, have been improvised but these do not reach all the students, the state boards have yet to follow it. The sensitization efforts of the state, sensitization of bureaucracy and police are far from adequate. The need to look at their syllabi is most urgent. Surely they have a lot of time to spend for their basic job of policing or becoming the part of steel frame of the country but the aspects of education related to national integration have also to be taken more seriously and need to be integrated in to their curricula. The communal violence bill which can go a long way to prevent the occurrence of violence is again lying in the freezer of the government.
Social groups have their own limitations. While some social groups have focused on getting justice and have praiseworthy results, still the journey is too long due to the structural problems created due to spread of communal ideology and mindsets, which are dominating the social space. The emphasis on awareness program, though are there, these remains patchy, ad hoc and are not reaching the people where it should reach. The programs for secular values, in the arena of culture, street theatre, songs, films, though have taken off well, remain nascent. We have a long way to go for national unity, which is very much needed at the present time. The act of nation building is to follow the path of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. This whole exercise of Babri demolition has been the one of attempts to break the national unity, in a serious way. To put salt to the wound the communal forces are getting more legitimacy, one hopes that the lessons of Babri demolition are taken seriously by the society and state to reverse the trends initiated by this ghastly tragedy.
October 16, 2010
From political Ayodhya to legal Ayodhya
(Published in The Hindu, 16 October 2010)
by Vidya Subrahmaniam
Within the pages of the Ayodhya title suit verdict is a riveting political story that has not been taken note of.
The Liberhan Commission inquiring into the December 6, 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid was amateurish on many counts. However, it established one thing conclusively. That the Ram Mandir movement was pure political theatre. Its protagonists dragged out an issue that had been dead for decades, which had no resonance whatever with the local people, pouring so much destructive energy into it that for all outward appearances it became a throbbing, pulsating mass movement with a huge national following.
By contrast, the September 30, 2010 Allahabad High Court verdict on the Ayodhya title suits is innocently apolitical. To be sure, a commission of enquiry is far more free-wheeling than a court of law with its strict mandate to go by evidence, points of law and precedence. Yet we have had courts, the Supreme Court in particular, comment exhaustively and adversely on political developments, including the December 6, 1992 demolition and the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom.
The Allahabad High Court's disregard of the political nature of the Ram movement is surprising, considering the ease with which it moved beyond the boundaries of law and reason to explore issues of faith. There is another compelling factor here: The dramatic unfolding of the political story within the pages of the court's own judgment. Indeed, the legal twists and turns outlined in the judgment are not merely episodic highlights in a marathon court battle fought between warring parties; an unmistakably strong political narrative binds them together, never mind that the court itself remains oblivious to it.
Of the Ayodhya dispute's many high-definition political moments, two stand out — the December 22-23, 1949 installation of idols under the central dome of the Babri mosque, and the 1992 demolition of the mosque. The judges take both these in their stride, treating them as legal milestones rather than as Machiavellian political acts. The 1949 violation was a result of premeditated collusion between bigoted sections of the Congress party and the local Faizabad bureaucracy led by a deputy commissioner whose blatant partisanship was proved by his subsequent admission to the Bharatiya Jan Sangh.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru expressed his distress at the 1949 incident in a series of letters, among them, to Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, to Governor-General C. Rajagopalachari, to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Govind Ballabh Pant and to close friend K.G. Mashruwala ( The Babri Masjid, edited by A.G. Noorani). In a December 26, 1949, telegram to Pant, he presciently described the installation as a “dangerous example” that will have “bad consequences.” To Mashruwala (letter dated March 5, 1950), Nehru confessed that the district officer in Faizabad “misbehaved,” further that while Pant “condemned the act on several occasions” he refrained from “taking definite action.” In a letter dated April 17, 1950, to the U.P. Chief Minister, the Prime Minister poured out his anguish: “… U.P is becoming an almost foreign land to me … I find that communalism has invaded the minds and hearts of those who were the pillars of the Congress in the past. It is a creeping paralysis and the patient does not even realize it ... It seems to me that for some reason or other, or perhaps [for] mere political expediency, we have been far too lenient with this disease …”
These exchanges conclusively nail the lie that the 1949 installation of idols was an act of faith on the part of the Hindu masses. Sections of the U.P. Congress, with the parivar only too happily in attendance, drummed up the issue for “political expediency,” as Nehru lamented. Fast forward 61 years. For the Allahabad High Court, 1949 is merely a legal issue. The majority judgment accepts that the idols were installed by human hands — a fact admitted to by Deoki Nandan Agrawala, former Vice-President of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, in a suit he filed in 1989 as “next friend” of “Bhagwan Sri Ram Virajman” and “Asthan Sri Rama Janam Bhumi, Ayodhya.” Nonetheless, Justice Sudhir Agarwal rules that the installation of idols is not of material relevance because Lord Ram's “birthplace” is itself a deity with all juridical rights by virtue of it having become part of Hindu faith as a result of continuous, uninterrupted worship.
The politically engineered 1949 Hindu-Muslim conflict — vandals dug out Muslim graves in Ayodhya and forced the ouster of a Muslim owner of a hotel in Faizabad, watched on by the district administration — was saved from escalating into a conflagration, thanks to the fact that though permeated by sectarian elements, the Congress at its core was liberal. Nehru was unashamed of his secular convictions and made no excuses for deviations from the party's stated ideology.
The parivar and the Jan Sangh were by themselves too weak to carry the movement forward. As has been proved repeatedly, movements and conflicts die down without political support. So too it was in Ayodhya where a deafening quiet prevailed until the mid-late 1980s, when the VHP and then a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party seized the issue, realising its enormous political and electoral potential.
The progress of Ayodhya from a relative non-issue to a potent, divisive movement is reflected in the changing character of the Ayodhya law suits, filed first in the lower court and subsequently consolidated and transferred to the High Court. The initial plaints filed with regard to the 1949 installation of idols and the subsequent attachment of the site are remarkably without extraneous motives. In the first suit, filed in 1950 in the Faizabad civil court, the plaintiff, Gopal Singh Visharad, describes himself as a religious person who had been offering puja to the idols in the janmabhoomi. The only relief he seeks is an injunction against the removal of idols from under the central dome followed by the right to unobstructed worship. The second suit, later withdrawn, is similar. The third suit, filed in 1959 by the Nirmohi Akhara, is a comic distortion of the sangh parivar's case formulated to perfection in the 1980s. Unaware of how the story would change in later years, the Nirmohi Akhara insists that there was no Babri Masjid, no mosque, no attempted mosque and no demolition of an earlier temple by Babar or anyone else. The Akhara's case is that the temple has existed from time immemorial, the idols were not planted in 1949 but have always been present, and the Akhara, which came into being in the “days of yore … long before living memory,” is the sole owner of the janmabhoomi as well as the temple and the idols.
The fourth suit, filed in 1961 seeking title and ownership, is by the Sunni Central Wakf Board. The SCWB's contention is that Muslims have been praying at the Babri Masjid since 1528, and prayers were forcibly and illegally halted by the installation of idols, the attachment of property and injunction against Muslims. By the time of the fifth and final suit, filed in July 1989, the political climate changed beyond recognition. A month earlier, the BJP had formally adopted the Ram mandir issue by a resolution passed at Palampur in Himachal Pradesh. The BJP and the VHP insist that the courts have no jurisdiction over matters related to faith but simultaneously arrive at a strategy to give a sharper thrust to the legal case. It is obvious that the case cannot be left to the likes of the Nirmohi Akahara which up to this point has shown no political understanding of the issue.
To circumvent the suit being barred by limitation, the plaintiff, a prominent member of the VHP, sues for title and property as the “next friend” of Ram Lalla and Asthan Ramjanmabhoomi. The story of Ram is spectacularly reconstructed, complete with a temple by Vikramaditya. In 1528, Babur came to Ayodhya, halted there for a week, destroyed the ancient temple and erected a mosque in its place using material from the old structure. The suit makes two principal points. A mosque built this way cannot be a mosque. Secondly, because the janmabhoomi has always been deified, it has a juridical personality of its own going into the past before the construction of any temple or mosque and regardless of whether the idols have been installed or not. Presented thus, the suit forecloses the legal pitfalls arising from the illegal installation of the idols.
Stung to the quick, the Nirmohi Akhara files a counter statement alleging that suit 5 is malicious and has been filed to harass and usurp the Akhara's property. Mr. Agrawala is not a worshipper but a member both of the VHP and the Ramajanmabhoomi Nyas. Significantly, the “next friend” himself admits to the political nature of the suit by arguing that it has been prompted by the rapidly growing temple movement: The deities are impatient for a temple, the architect of the Somnath temple has already taken charge of the Ayodhya temple design, and a date has been set for its construction.
Justice Agarwal does take note of the “abominable manner” of the 1992 demolition. But he hastens to add that the Muslim defendants have never held the plaintiffs in suit 5 responsible for it. In an unbeatable irony, he also allots the space under the central dome to the plaintiffs in suit 5, presumably unaware that the VHP would see it as a vindication of a movement born and nurtured in violence.
by Vidya Subrahmaniam
Within the pages of the Ayodhya title suit verdict is a riveting political story that has not been taken note of.
The Liberhan Commission inquiring into the December 6, 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid was amateurish on many counts. However, it established one thing conclusively. That the Ram Mandir movement was pure political theatre. Its protagonists dragged out an issue that had been dead for decades, which had no resonance whatever with the local people, pouring so much destructive energy into it that for all outward appearances it became a throbbing, pulsating mass movement with a huge national following.
By contrast, the September 30, 2010 Allahabad High Court verdict on the Ayodhya title suits is innocently apolitical. To be sure, a commission of enquiry is far more free-wheeling than a court of law with its strict mandate to go by evidence, points of law and precedence. Yet we have had courts, the Supreme Court in particular, comment exhaustively and adversely on political developments, including the December 6, 1992 demolition and the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom.
The Allahabad High Court's disregard of the political nature of the Ram movement is surprising, considering the ease with which it moved beyond the boundaries of law and reason to explore issues of faith. There is another compelling factor here: The dramatic unfolding of the political story within the pages of the court's own judgment. Indeed, the legal twists and turns outlined in the judgment are not merely episodic highlights in a marathon court battle fought between warring parties; an unmistakably strong political narrative binds them together, never mind that the court itself remains oblivious to it.
Of the Ayodhya dispute's many high-definition political moments, two stand out — the December 22-23, 1949 installation of idols under the central dome of the Babri mosque, and the 1992 demolition of the mosque. The judges take both these in their stride, treating them as legal milestones rather than as Machiavellian political acts. The 1949 violation was a result of premeditated collusion between bigoted sections of the Congress party and the local Faizabad bureaucracy led by a deputy commissioner whose blatant partisanship was proved by his subsequent admission to the Bharatiya Jan Sangh.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru expressed his distress at the 1949 incident in a series of letters, among them, to Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, to Governor-General C. Rajagopalachari, to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Govind Ballabh Pant and to close friend K.G. Mashruwala ( The Babri Masjid, edited by A.G. Noorani). In a December 26, 1949, telegram to Pant, he presciently described the installation as a “dangerous example” that will have “bad consequences.” To Mashruwala (letter dated March 5, 1950), Nehru confessed that the district officer in Faizabad “misbehaved,” further that while Pant “condemned the act on several occasions” he refrained from “taking definite action.” In a letter dated April 17, 1950, to the U.P. Chief Minister, the Prime Minister poured out his anguish: “… U.P is becoming an almost foreign land to me … I find that communalism has invaded the minds and hearts of those who were the pillars of the Congress in the past. It is a creeping paralysis and the patient does not even realize it ... It seems to me that for some reason or other, or perhaps [for] mere political expediency, we have been far too lenient with this disease …”
These exchanges conclusively nail the lie that the 1949 installation of idols was an act of faith on the part of the Hindu masses. Sections of the U.P. Congress, with the parivar only too happily in attendance, drummed up the issue for “political expediency,” as Nehru lamented. Fast forward 61 years. For the Allahabad High Court, 1949 is merely a legal issue. The majority judgment accepts that the idols were installed by human hands — a fact admitted to by Deoki Nandan Agrawala, former Vice-President of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, in a suit he filed in 1989 as “next friend” of “Bhagwan Sri Ram Virajman” and “Asthan Sri Rama Janam Bhumi, Ayodhya.” Nonetheless, Justice Sudhir Agarwal rules that the installation of idols is not of material relevance because Lord Ram's “birthplace” is itself a deity with all juridical rights by virtue of it having become part of Hindu faith as a result of continuous, uninterrupted worship.
The politically engineered 1949 Hindu-Muslim conflict — vandals dug out Muslim graves in Ayodhya and forced the ouster of a Muslim owner of a hotel in Faizabad, watched on by the district administration — was saved from escalating into a conflagration, thanks to the fact that though permeated by sectarian elements, the Congress at its core was liberal. Nehru was unashamed of his secular convictions and made no excuses for deviations from the party's stated ideology.
The parivar and the Jan Sangh were by themselves too weak to carry the movement forward. As has been proved repeatedly, movements and conflicts die down without political support. So too it was in Ayodhya where a deafening quiet prevailed until the mid-late 1980s, when the VHP and then a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party seized the issue, realising its enormous political and electoral potential.
The progress of Ayodhya from a relative non-issue to a potent, divisive movement is reflected in the changing character of the Ayodhya law suits, filed first in the lower court and subsequently consolidated and transferred to the High Court. The initial plaints filed with regard to the 1949 installation of idols and the subsequent attachment of the site are remarkably without extraneous motives. In the first suit, filed in 1950 in the Faizabad civil court, the plaintiff, Gopal Singh Visharad, describes himself as a religious person who had been offering puja to the idols in the janmabhoomi. The only relief he seeks is an injunction against the removal of idols from under the central dome followed by the right to unobstructed worship. The second suit, later withdrawn, is similar. The third suit, filed in 1959 by the Nirmohi Akhara, is a comic distortion of the sangh parivar's case formulated to perfection in the 1980s. Unaware of how the story would change in later years, the Nirmohi Akhara insists that there was no Babri Masjid, no mosque, no attempted mosque and no demolition of an earlier temple by Babar or anyone else. The Akhara's case is that the temple has existed from time immemorial, the idols were not planted in 1949 but have always been present, and the Akhara, which came into being in the “days of yore … long before living memory,” is the sole owner of the janmabhoomi as well as the temple and the idols.
The fourth suit, filed in 1961 seeking title and ownership, is by the Sunni Central Wakf Board. The SCWB's contention is that Muslims have been praying at the Babri Masjid since 1528, and prayers were forcibly and illegally halted by the installation of idols, the attachment of property and injunction against Muslims. By the time of the fifth and final suit, filed in July 1989, the political climate changed beyond recognition. A month earlier, the BJP had formally adopted the Ram mandir issue by a resolution passed at Palampur in Himachal Pradesh. The BJP and the VHP insist that the courts have no jurisdiction over matters related to faith but simultaneously arrive at a strategy to give a sharper thrust to the legal case. It is obvious that the case cannot be left to the likes of the Nirmohi Akahara which up to this point has shown no political understanding of the issue.
To circumvent the suit being barred by limitation, the plaintiff, a prominent member of the VHP, sues for title and property as the “next friend” of Ram Lalla and Asthan Ramjanmabhoomi. The story of Ram is spectacularly reconstructed, complete with a temple by Vikramaditya. In 1528, Babur came to Ayodhya, halted there for a week, destroyed the ancient temple and erected a mosque in its place using material from the old structure. The suit makes two principal points. A mosque built this way cannot be a mosque. Secondly, because the janmabhoomi has always been deified, it has a juridical personality of its own going into the past before the construction of any temple or mosque and regardless of whether the idols have been installed or not. Presented thus, the suit forecloses the legal pitfalls arising from the illegal installation of the idols.
Stung to the quick, the Nirmohi Akhara files a counter statement alleging that suit 5 is malicious and has been filed to harass and usurp the Akhara's property. Mr. Agrawala is not a worshipper but a member both of the VHP and the Ramajanmabhoomi Nyas. Significantly, the “next friend” himself admits to the political nature of the suit by arguing that it has been prompted by the rapidly growing temple movement: The deities are impatient for a temple, the architect of the Somnath temple has already taken charge of the Ayodhya temple design, and a date has been set for its construction.
Justice Agarwal does take note of the “abominable manner” of the 1992 demolition. But he hastens to add that the Muslim defendants have never held the plaintiffs in suit 5 responsible for it. In an unbeatable irony, he also allots the space under the central dome to the plaintiffs in suit 5, presumably unaware that the VHP would see it as a vindication of a movement born and nurtured in violence.
December 25, 2009
Religion does not unify a country
Deccan Herald
25 December 2009
Is it a new chapter?
by Kuldip Nayar
The BJP’s mentor, the RSS, should learn a lesson from our neighbouring country. Religion does not unify a country, pluralism does.
This was like searching for a needle in the haystack. I was looking for a word of remorse or regret in the reams of statements by the BJP on the Liberhan Commission’s report on demolition of the Babri masjid and on the stepping down of L K Advani from the office of opposition leader in the Lok Sabha. But I was disappointed.
Not that I was expecting a change of heart in the party. Yet I imagined that some leaders, at least from among the young who are supposed to have taken over the reins of the party, would feel sorry for the masjid’s destruction and the killing of hundreds in the wake. It would have sent a message that the BJP was trying to shake off its past and paving a new path of conciliation and consensus.
Instead, there was defiance and justification of demolition in the observations that the BJP leaders made. Remorse was needed, not to humiliate the BJP but to let it realise that a society, founded on the spirit of accommodation, expected the wrong-doers to make amends.
Advani has gone to the extent of saying that the high mark in his political career was the ‘rath yatra’ from the Somnath temple to Ayodhya where the Babri masjid stood till Dec 6, 1992. Still the din raised by the BJP and other leaders of the Sangh Parivar cannot drown the charge that they are responsible for the destruction and the death right up to Mumbai where scores were killed in early 1993.
The Liberhan Commission has named Advani as one of the 64 accomplices in the destruction of the masjid. There is nothing to ensure that action will be taken against any one of them. What should the nation infer if they get away with all that they did?
Sushma Swaraj has replaced Advani as leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha. The change of personalities does not usher a new chapter, the change of policies does. The BJP has given no evidence to suggest that it has jettisoned its communal agenda or that it has distanced from the fanatic RSS which has imposed its trusted man, Nitin Gadkari, as the party’s head in place of Rajnath Singh. It is the same old wine of the RSS prowess in a new bottle.
In the face of the Congress party’s arrogance, the BJP can attract support provided it does not follow the Hindutva line. At present, the BJP is part of the mob which is out to destroy the country’s ethos of pluralism. It has no faith even in India’s constitution, which consecrates secularism in the preamble itself.
No punitive action
The Manmohan Singh government has placed before parliament the Action Taken Report (ART) on the Liberhan Commission’s findings. But, shockingly, the government does not contemplate any punitive action against those who planned and pulled down the masjid.
True, Justice Liberhan did something unpardonable when he took 17 years to submit the report which also has some howlers. The BJP only concentrated on those to defend itself. But the verbal mistakes do not falsify the fact of demolition.
No doubt, the Muslim community would feel betrayed if the 64 people named by the commission go scot-free after what they have done. But the nation on the whole would equally be horrified if the guilty are not punished. The majesty of law would come down tumbling. And communalists would have a shot in their arm.
It is already a bad scenario which the country faces. The killing of 3,000 Sikhs at Delhi in 1984, nearly 100 Christians in Orissa two years ago and some 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 has disfigured Indians image as a pluralistic society. In fact, the message going around is that the minorities are not safe. On top of it, if there is no action on the Liberhan Commission’s recommendations, India may damage its secular credentials beyond repair.
That the BJP is a rightist party is understandable. The Congress is more or less the same. What is not acceptable is the BJP’s communal approach because it poses a threat to the very idea of India, the concept of unity and secularism. The RSS, the BJP’s mentor, should learn a lesson from the neighbouring country. Religion does not unify the country, pluralism does.
The pull of religion could not check the Bangladeshis separating from Pakistan because the Urdu speaking west Pakistanis did not accommodate the language, Bengali. The LTTE was a product of the Sinhalese inability to cope with the Tamil identity in Sri Lanka than that of the Tigers assertion. When the BJP ruled the country for six years, it kept aside its agenda of mandir.
The party can begin a new chapter only if it stops using religion for achieving its political ends. When the BJP stands in the way of punishment to the culprits in Gujarat or those who demolished the Babri masjid, the party only proves that it prefers wallowing in the waters of bigotry and communalism to seeking the secure shores of secularism. The day the people see that the BJP has stopped mixing religion with politics, they will consider that the party has begun a new chapter.
25 December 2009
Is it a new chapter?
by Kuldip Nayar
The BJP’s mentor, the RSS, should learn a lesson from our neighbouring country. Religion does not unify a country, pluralism does.
This was like searching for a needle in the haystack. I was looking for a word of remorse or regret in the reams of statements by the BJP on the Liberhan Commission’s report on demolition of the Babri masjid and on the stepping down of L K Advani from the office of opposition leader in the Lok Sabha. But I was disappointed.
Not that I was expecting a change of heart in the party. Yet I imagined that some leaders, at least from among the young who are supposed to have taken over the reins of the party, would feel sorry for the masjid’s destruction and the killing of hundreds in the wake. It would have sent a message that the BJP was trying to shake off its past and paving a new path of conciliation and consensus.
Instead, there was defiance and justification of demolition in the observations that the BJP leaders made. Remorse was needed, not to humiliate the BJP but to let it realise that a society, founded on the spirit of accommodation, expected the wrong-doers to make amends.
Advani has gone to the extent of saying that the high mark in his political career was the ‘rath yatra’ from the Somnath temple to Ayodhya where the Babri masjid stood till Dec 6, 1992. Still the din raised by the BJP and other leaders of the Sangh Parivar cannot drown the charge that they are responsible for the destruction and the death right up to Mumbai where scores were killed in early 1993.
The Liberhan Commission has named Advani as one of the 64 accomplices in the destruction of the masjid. There is nothing to ensure that action will be taken against any one of them. What should the nation infer if they get away with all that they did?
Sushma Swaraj has replaced Advani as leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha. The change of personalities does not usher a new chapter, the change of policies does. The BJP has given no evidence to suggest that it has jettisoned its communal agenda or that it has distanced from the fanatic RSS which has imposed its trusted man, Nitin Gadkari, as the party’s head in place of Rajnath Singh. It is the same old wine of the RSS prowess in a new bottle.
In the face of the Congress party’s arrogance, the BJP can attract support provided it does not follow the Hindutva line. At present, the BJP is part of the mob which is out to destroy the country’s ethos of pluralism. It has no faith even in India’s constitution, which consecrates secularism in the preamble itself.
No punitive action
The Manmohan Singh government has placed before parliament the Action Taken Report (ART) on the Liberhan Commission’s findings. But, shockingly, the government does not contemplate any punitive action against those who planned and pulled down the masjid.
True, Justice Liberhan did something unpardonable when he took 17 years to submit the report which also has some howlers. The BJP only concentrated on those to defend itself. But the verbal mistakes do not falsify the fact of demolition.
No doubt, the Muslim community would feel betrayed if the 64 people named by the commission go scot-free after what they have done. But the nation on the whole would equally be horrified if the guilty are not punished. The majesty of law would come down tumbling. And communalists would have a shot in their arm.
It is already a bad scenario which the country faces. The killing of 3,000 Sikhs at Delhi in 1984, nearly 100 Christians in Orissa two years ago and some 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 has disfigured Indians image as a pluralistic society. In fact, the message going around is that the minorities are not safe. On top of it, if there is no action on the Liberhan Commission’s recommendations, India may damage its secular credentials beyond repair.
That the BJP is a rightist party is understandable. The Congress is more or less the same. What is not acceptable is the BJP’s communal approach because it poses a threat to the very idea of India, the concept of unity and secularism. The RSS, the BJP’s mentor, should learn a lesson from the neighbouring country. Religion does not unify the country, pluralism does.
The pull of religion could not check the Bangladeshis separating from Pakistan because the Urdu speaking west Pakistanis did not accommodate the language, Bengali. The LTTE was a product of the Sinhalese inability to cope with the Tamil identity in Sri Lanka than that of the Tigers assertion. When the BJP ruled the country for six years, it kept aside its agenda of mandir.
The party can begin a new chapter only if it stops using religion for achieving its political ends. When the BJP stands in the way of punishment to the culprits in Gujarat or those who demolished the Babri masjid, the party only proves that it prefers wallowing in the waters of bigotry and communalism to seeking the secure shores of secularism. The day the people see that the BJP has stopped mixing religion with politics, they will consider that the party has begun a new chapter.
December 21, 2009
60 min video recording of the hindu right demolition squad in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992
Hindustan Times, December 20, 2009
Saw this, Liberhan?
by Madhu Trehan
It should have taken 60 minutes — 30 minutes to watch the footage from Newstrack, the old video magazine, and 30 minutes to write the report. Newstrack’s December 1992 edition gave a minute-by-minute account of what happened in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. And yet, M.S. Liberhan took 17 years to come up with what he came up with.
Mritinjoy Jha along with his team were in Ayodhya from November 23, 1992. Thousands of pumped-up, slogan-shouting people were pouring in, carrying pick-axes and other equipment. Manoj Raghuvanshi, with another Newstrack team, had pulled the story together. In his voice-over, Raghuvanshi spoke about “a chief minister who spoke from both sides of his mouth — promising the Supreme Court that no construction would take place on the disputed site — and a prime minister who trusted everybody, including his central forces sent ostensibly to defend the masjid”.
The recordings captured Hindu leaders, including Tyagi Maharaj and Acharya Dharmendra, exhorting the crowd that the masjid must be destroyed and a temple built. Uma Bharti in her speech made three crucial points by demanding answers from the crowd: “Will you restrain yourselves when the leaders ask you to? Will you maintain peace and observe rules? Will you obey your leaders?’” The crowd bellowed a yes. But did the BJP really believe that it could control the kar sevaks, the RSS volunteers, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad after its own passion-rousing rath yatra?
Rehearsals of demolition teams practising with ropes, pick-axes and boulders were recorded by Newstrack. The images included Bajrang Dal leader Ramesh Pratap in khaki shorts ‘directing’ with a whistle.
Each time they pulled down a ‘practice boulder’, there were cheers. Bajrang Dal president Vinay Katiyar stated on camera, “I have never formulated any strategy keeping the Supreme Court in mind.” At the Marg Darshak Mandal meeting on December 5, 1992, VHP president Ashok Singhal responded to Newstrack’s query on whether he would obey the Supreme Court order to maintain the status quo: “Nonsense! We have nothing to do with courts. We are unaffected by the court order.”
The disputed area was cordoned off and only sadhus and journalists were allowed in. Around 11.00 am on December 6, BJP leaders Murli Manohar Joshi, L.K. Advani and the VHP’s Ashok Singhal were seen walking into the area. Ayodhya District Magistrate R.N. Srivastava smugly told the Newstrack team: “We have made full arrangements,” adding excitedly, “There is a lot of enthusiasm in the public.” Any fear of anything happening? “No fear,” Srivastava replied. Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) D.B. Rai maintained that “peace and calm will prevail”. Srivastava, along with other senior bureaucrats, then settled down on a terrace to observe the demolition. Tea was served as they watched the proceedings.
As the mob started to demolish the cordoned-off area of the Babri Masjid, there was a clear divide between the general crowd and the hardcore kar sevaks. After being given a cue, the kar sevaks started assaulting journalists, breaking cameras and most journalists made a run for it. Newstrack’s sound recordist Ashok Bhanot hid tapes under a charpai in a nearby house. Another team carried on shooting.
The hardcore kar sevaks wearing yellow head-bands then started weeding out the general crowd (wearing orange head-bands) and only those trained and part of the demolition plan entered the area of the masjid. Singhal was seen shoving people himself. There was confusion among the faithful about why they were being thrown out. Those who resisted were beaten up. There was a specific plan with assigned roles for the demolition. Any ‘freelance’ help was not welcome.
“Watch this. The single-most crucial development that led to the destruction of the disputed structure — at this point there was no direct threat to the shrine and certainly no threat to the police — for some unknown reason: these troops suddenly lined up and filed out of the shrine area,” says Raghuvanshi in the voice-over of the footage. “Was this direct collusion? Were they ordered to leave and if so, by whom? There was no tear gas. No rubber bullets. No lathi charge. No firing. There was no attempt whatsoever to even try to defend the shrine.”
As sadhus blew conch-shells and kar sevaks scaled the barricades to the masjid with pick-axes, ropes and shovels, a small contingent of police stood just below the bureaucrats’ terrace. A police rebellion was caught on camera. As the demolition began, a frantic-looking SSP D.B. Rai ordered his troops to stop the demolition. The police force shuffled nervously, refusing to move even as Rai shouted at them. The bureaucrats kept sipping on their tea. Cameraman Bharat Raj realised then that the action to capture was not confined to the destruction of the masjid, but also the inaction around it.
The Censor Board banned the Newstrack tape. We appealed to the Appellate Tribunal in Bombay. Justice B. Lentin passed an order that stated, “Not only should this tape be allowed, it should be compulsory viewing for every citizen of India.” Doordarshan showed nothing.
We had 36 tapes of 20 minutes each, which totalled 12 hours. I was furious with Raghuvanshi for wasting so much tape on a 30-minute story. M.S. Liberhan asked Newstrack to hand over the tapes. I refused to hand over 12 hours of original tape and we gave him the edited story.
In the 17 years that Liberhan took to write his report, the BJP was in power for six years and the Congress for ten. One can presume that all the 48 extensions were given to Liberhan by both these parties, since the Congress and the BJP were in power for 16 out of the 17 years. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the tabling of the report did not suit either party.
Here’s the simple conclusion: both parties were responsible for the destruction of the Babri Masjid.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has ordered an inquiry into the leaking of the Liberhan report. This is the wrong inquiry to order. Journalists were simply doing their job to get the contents of the Liberhan report to the public. There should be an inquiry into who gave Liberhan 48 extensions and took Indian citizens for a Rs 8 crore ride.
Madhu Trehan produced and anchored Newstrack, a video magazine, from 1988 to 1995.
Saw this, Liberhan?
by Madhu Trehan
It should have taken 60 minutes — 30 minutes to watch the footage from Newstrack, the old video magazine, and 30 minutes to write the report. Newstrack’s December 1992 edition gave a minute-by-minute account of what happened in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. And yet, M.S. Liberhan took 17 years to come up with what he came up with.
Mritinjoy Jha along with his team were in Ayodhya from November 23, 1992. Thousands of pumped-up, slogan-shouting people were pouring in, carrying pick-axes and other equipment. Manoj Raghuvanshi, with another Newstrack team, had pulled the story together. In his voice-over, Raghuvanshi spoke about “a chief minister who spoke from both sides of his mouth — promising the Supreme Court that no construction would take place on the disputed site — and a prime minister who trusted everybody, including his central forces sent ostensibly to defend the masjid”.
The recordings captured Hindu leaders, including Tyagi Maharaj and Acharya Dharmendra, exhorting the crowd that the masjid must be destroyed and a temple built. Uma Bharti in her speech made three crucial points by demanding answers from the crowd: “Will you restrain yourselves when the leaders ask you to? Will you maintain peace and observe rules? Will you obey your leaders?’” The crowd bellowed a yes. But did the BJP really believe that it could control the kar sevaks, the RSS volunteers, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad after its own passion-rousing rath yatra?
Rehearsals of demolition teams practising with ropes, pick-axes and boulders were recorded by Newstrack. The images included Bajrang Dal leader Ramesh Pratap in khaki shorts ‘directing’ with a whistle.
Each time they pulled down a ‘practice boulder’, there were cheers. Bajrang Dal president Vinay Katiyar stated on camera, “I have never formulated any strategy keeping the Supreme Court in mind.” At the Marg Darshak Mandal meeting on December 5, 1992, VHP president Ashok Singhal responded to Newstrack’s query on whether he would obey the Supreme Court order to maintain the status quo: “Nonsense! We have nothing to do with courts. We are unaffected by the court order.”
The disputed area was cordoned off and only sadhus and journalists were allowed in. Around 11.00 am on December 6, BJP leaders Murli Manohar Joshi, L.K. Advani and the VHP’s Ashok Singhal were seen walking into the area. Ayodhya District Magistrate R.N. Srivastava smugly told the Newstrack team: “We have made full arrangements,” adding excitedly, “There is a lot of enthusiasm in the public.” Any fear of anything happening? “No fear,” Srivastava replied. Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) D.B. Rai maintained that “peace and calm will prevail”. Srivastava, along with other senior bureaucrats, then settled down on a terrace to observe the demolition. Tea was served as they watched the proceedings.
As the mob started to demolish the cordoned-off area of the Babri Masjid, there was a clear divide between the general crowd and the hardcore kar sevaks. After being given a cue, the kar sevaks started assaulting journalists, breaking cameras and most journalists made a run for it. Newstrack’s sound recordist Ashok Bhanot hid tapes under a charpai in a nearby house. Another team carried on shooting.
The hardcore kar sevaks wearing yellow head-bands then started weeding out the general crowd (wearing orange head-bands) and only those trained and part of the demolition plan entered the area of the masjid. Singhal was seen shoving people himself. There was confusion among the faithful about why they were being thrown out. Those who resisted were beaten up. There was a specific plan with assigned roles for the demolition. Any ‘freelance’ help was not welcome.
“Watch this. The single-most crucial development that led to the destruction of the disputed structure — at this point there was no direct threat to the shrine and certainly no threat to the police — for some unknown reason: these troops suddenly lined up and filed out of the shrine area,” says Raghuvanshi in the voice-over of the footage. “Was this direct collusion? Were they ordered to leave and if so, by whom? There was no tear gas. No rubber bullets. No lathi charge. No firing. There was no attempt whatsoever to even try to defend the shrine.”
As sadhus blew conch-shells and kar sevaks scaled the barricades to the masjid with pick-axes, ropes and shovels, a small contingent of police stood just below the bureaucrats’ terrace. A police rebellion was caught on camera. As the demolition began, a frantic-looking SSP D.B. Rai ordered his troops to stop the demolition. The police force shuffled nervously, refusing to move even as Rai shouted at them. The bureaucrats kept sipping on their tea. Cameraman Bharat Raj realised then that the action to capture was not confined to the destruction of the masjid, but also the inaction around it.
The Censor Board banned the Newstrack tape. We appealed to the Appellate Tribunal in Bombay. Justice B. Lentin passed an order that stated, “Not only should this tape be allowed, it should be compulsory viewing for every citizen of India.” Doordarshan showed nothing.
We had 36 tapes of 20 minutes each, which totalled 12 hours. I was furious with Raghuvanshi for wasting so much tape on a 30-minute story. M.S. Liberhan asked Newstrack to hand over the tapes. I refused to hand over 12 hours of original tape and we gave him the edited story.
In the 17 years that Liberhan took to write his report, the BJP was in power for six years and the Congress for ten. One can presume that all the 48 extensions were given to Liberhan by both these parties, since the Congress and the BJP were in power for 16 out of the 17 years. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the tabling of the report did not suit either party.
Here’s the simple conclusion: both parties were responsible for the destruction of the Babri Masjid.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has ordered an inquiry into the leaking of the Liberhan report. This is the wrong inquiry to order. Journalists were simply doing their job to get the contents of the Liberhan report to the public. There should be an inquiry into who gave Liberhan 48 extensions and took Indian citizens for a Rs 8 crore ride.
Madhu Trehan produced and anchored Newstrack, a video magazine, from 1988 to 1995.
December 15, 2009
Editorial from Communalism Combat Special issue on Liberhan Report
Communalism Combat
December 2009
Editorial
Who are the guilty?
What can one say about the wisdom of a judge who damages his own case before his verdict concerning others! After 17 long years and eight crore rupees of public money Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan has delivered to the country an over 1,000 page report on the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition that is full of howlers. According to the Liberhan Commission report, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on January 31, 1948. Names of the same persons are spelt differently in different places; designations too are mixed up on occasions. Looks like the learned judge could not be bothered with reading his own report before placing it before the nation.
Not surprisingly, those indicted, and rightly so, have latched on to the howlers to dismiss the entire report as lacking credibility. But though Justice Liberhan’s callousness is indefensible, his report remains an evidence-backed damnation of those who took the Indian Republic to the brink in December 1992. Not only was the Babri Mosque demolished in full public view on December 6, it also created the communal climate that made possible the pogrom against Mumbai’s Muslims in December 1992-January 1993 and the Muslims of Gujarat 10 years later.
Reading the report is like watching a horror film with an unfolding evil plot, step-by-step. Until 1983 when the VHP decided to jump on to the bandwagon, the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi dispute remained a local issue that agitated some residents of Ayodhya… and Faizabad district at most. By 1989, however, a multitude of ordinary Hindus from across the country had been transformed into a frenzied mob that converged on Ayodhya again and again with a single object: construction of a Ram Mandir on the very spot where the Babri Masjid had stood for a few hundred years. Mission demolition on December 6, 1992 was the logical culmination and climax of a hate-driven agenda.
If the criminal intent of the various constituents of the sangh parivar and its ally the Shiv Sena was public knowledge the contribution of the report lies in establishing in great detail how a malevolent intent was translated into malicious action in such a short period as the institutions of State sworn to protect constitutional values and provisions – Union government, Parliament, the Supreme Court of India, the governor of Uttar Pradesh – stood as "helpless" spectators while corresponding institutions and individuals with similar obligations at the state level – chief minister Kalyan Singh, his cabinet, senior to top level civil servants and police officers – acted instead as the private army of a campaign brimming with contempt for the rule of law. If the Liberhan report provides us overwhelming evidence of the acts of commission of those guilty of the criminal act, far more damning is the evidence it marshals against those whose acts of omission made it possible.
It has been the plea of the BJP and the RSS ever since December 1992 that mosque demolition was never on their agenda. To puncture this claim, Justice Liberhan asks a simple question: why then were tens of thousands of kar sevaks mobilised to descend in Ayodhya repeatedly, indoctrinated with incendiary slogans till a very large number of individuals had turned into a hate-filled frenzied mob, straining at the leash? Justice Liberhan does not buy the innocence plea.
From the evidence gathered before the commission it was more than apparent well before December 6 that the plan for that day was anything but a "symbolic kar seva". What’s more, the report points out that much of this information was already in the public domain. By December 2, if not earlier, it was so easy to anticipate the climax of this dance of the macabre on December 6. Why then did the Union government, the Allahabad High Court, the Congress-appointed governor of UP, the Supreme Court of India not intervene?
Justice Liberhan seems over-eager to give the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao (and the Congress party?) a clean cheat. "In 1992, the central government had been blinded and handicapped by the inaction of its own agent (governor) in the state and by the unfathomable trust the Supreme Court placed in the paper declarations of the sangh parivar". But he is not so sparing with other agents of State. Here are his parting words: "the intransigent stance of the High Court of Uttar Pradesh, the obdurate attitude of the governor (of UP), the inexplicable irresponsibility of the Supreme Court’s observer (sent to Ayodhya) and the short-sightedness of the Supreme Court itself are fascinating and complex stories, the depths of which I must not plumb... (But) historians, journalists and jurists may – and should – explore these dimensions and tell these untold stories for the benefit of the current and unborn generations".
In short, the Liberhan Commission tells us that our constitutional edifice today stands on shaky pillars – legislature, executive, judiciary – of State. Unless the System addresses the rot within and secures its porous borders from pretentious infiltrators, there’s little hope of meeting the challenge from without.
We reproduce in this issue excerpts from the Liberhan Commission’s Report with a few obvious corrections and clarifications.
– EDITORS
The complete December 2009 issue of Communalism Combat is available at:
http://www.sabrang.com/cc/archive/2009/dec09/index.html
December 10, 2009
Hidden facets to the Babri Masjid episode also implicate others
Mail Today, 10 December 2009
SINNERS IN DISGUISE
by Jyotirmaya Sharma
There are hidden facets to the sorry episode of the Babri Masjid that also implicate others
THE LIBERHAN Report can be excused for its longwinded vacuity as also the time it took to see the light of day. But the more hilarious aspect of the aftermath of the tabling of the report is the manner in which politicians of various persuasions have reacted to it. All of them have come up with their own version of the truth. In Indian politics, truth never prevails, but all that prevails is true.
In a mature democracy, it would have been the norm for the BJP to accept that they participated in a criminal act that vitiated public life and divided people.
Equally so, the Congress ought to have apologised to the country for P. V. Narasimha Rao’s inept handling of the entire situation.
Mulayam Singh ought to have kept silent in Parliament, if only because he was, until recently, extolling the virtues of a certain Kalyan Singh. The Left too ought to have toned down its self- righteous bluster, especially after their cosy understanding with the BJP recently in trying to bring down the UPA government over the issue of the nuclear deal. “ In the congregation of the righteous”, said a poet, “ the sinners are well- disguised: do not seek to count them”.
Opportunity
For the BJP and certain of its leaders, the Liberhan report seems like a godgiven opportunity to revive its ever- dwindling fortunes. Just as their conception of Hindutva is stuck in an imaginary past, so are their political calculations. They hope to revive the irrational mobilisation of the rath yatra and karseva movements, if only to rectify their rockbottom status in the arena of Uttar Pradesh politics.
Even if their hope of a revival on the lines of the Ayodhya movement clashes with pictures of Narendra Modi in denims, they would love to live under the fatal illusion that they have the moral and intellectual wherewithal to merge and resolve all such contradictions.
The spectacle of Rajnath Singh thundering about the existence of a Ram Temple in the past and the assurance of a temple in the future weeks before he is to be given the marching orders by the RSS in favour of a man whose sole claim to fame is building flyovers is all too delicious for the ordinary spectator. After all, flyovers for the BJP are the new temples of their conception of modern India.
In all this, the RSS presents a picture that is a strange mixture of bravado, innocence and lack of contrition. They have been consistent in stating that they have no regrets about the demolition of the Babri Mosque.
But they are equally consistent in saying that a spontaneous surge of karsevaks resulted in the felling of what has been known as the disputed structure. This theory of spontaneity and popular sentiment has served the RSS and the Sangh Parivar well over the years in their systematic attempts at subverting democracy, the rule of law and the Indian Constitution.
One just has to remember the rhetoric at all levels within the Sangh Parivar in justifying the post- Godhra riots and the systematic killing of Muslims to know that this is a familiar tool in their kit of medieval barbarity. The only consolation that the Sangh Parivar has is that even the Congress borrowed the same set of rhetorical devices in order to justify the massacre of innocent Sikhs in 1984 and continues to condone similar acts by not acting on the findings of the Srikrishna Report concerning the 1992- 93 riots in Bombay.
Is there, then, a difference between the Sangh Parivar and the Congress? The difference is a small, but significant one. The Congress condones similar acts of violence for political expediency and does so with cynical impunity. The Sangh Parivar indulges in acts of organised violence in the name of God, Hinduism, cultural pride and with the express purpose of destroying a plurality of the ideas of India.
In keeping the mandirmasjid issue alive, the RSS also has a different agenda. It hopes to alienate Muslims to an extent by which it becomes untenable for them to exist as first- class citizens in India, and, thereby, foist its limited, shortsighted and dangerous idea of a Hindu nation.
Logic
A few examples would suffice. The former RSS sarsanghchalak , K. P Sudarshan, wrote a pamphlet published in 2000 called ‘ Sangh ki saphalta ka rahasya’ ( The Secret of the Sangh’s Success). He writes that when Indira Gandhi visited Afghanistan and wanted to lay a wreath at the tombstone of Babur, the Afghans had to clean the place overnight. The tombstone was in a state of acute disrepair. Sudarshan cites an official in the Prime Minister’s party asking the caretaker of the cemetery about Babur’s tomb and its sorry state.
The caretaker is supposed to have replied that they did not care because Babur was no Afghan.
Sudarshan goes on to say that it is unfortunate that many Indian Muslims still connect themselves to Babur. He goes on to explain how the structure that was demolished was on purpose designated as Babri Mosque, and they created futile anger in the country upon its demolition.
Sudarshan’s amnesia makes him forget that if his story of the Afghan caretaker of the cemetery is a desirable one, then the Sangh ought not to have screamed and shouted as much as it did when the Bamiyan Buddhas were blown away by dynamite sticks. After all, the Buddha was no Afghan either! But Sudarshan’s perverse creativity in rewriting history reaches hitherto unscaled heights when he dismisses the historical veracity of a structure that is a few hundred years old, but argues that the existence of a Ram Temple at the very spot was historically true and incontrovertible.
Irony
But there is one other gem in Sudarshan’s pamphlet.
He quotes a fax sent to Narasimha Rao on 10 December 1992 by a senior leader from Maharashtra.
Sudarshan says that this leader advised Rao not to ban the RSS in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque because Balasaheb Deoras was a friend of the Congress government.
Deoras wanted the government to survive for five years and was not in favour of frequently bringing governments down.
This unnamed Maharashtra leader warns Rao that if the Sangh was banned, a section of the Sangh sympathetic to Rao’s government would turn hostile.
Despite this advice, the Sangh was banned. It would do us all a lot of good if Sudarshan could release the copy of that fax to the Indian people now and expose this senior Maharashtra leader.
But nothing of this sort is likely to happen. The irony is that all those associated with this act of mob violence and vandalism will go scot- free. In the case of L. K. Advani, like the proverbial cat with nine lives, he will probably see a revival in his political fortunes and his political ambitions. In the meantime, the RSS will go on with its business of sullying Indian public life in a manner only it can and has perfected over the years. History, perhaps, will forgive those karsevaks , but it will scarcely condone the likes of Advani for being complicit in the RSS’s agenda of the diminution of what India is all about.
The writer teaches politics in University of Hyderabad
SINNERS IN DISGUISE
by Jyotirmaya Sharma
There are hidden facets to the sorry episode of the Babri Masjid that also implicate others
THE LIBERHAN Report can be excused for its longwinded vacuity as also the time it took to see the light of day. But the more hilarious aspect of the aftermath of the tabling of the report is the manner in which politicians of various persuasions have reacted to it. All of them have come up with their own version of the truth. In Indian politics, truth never prevails, but all that prevails is true.
In a mature democracy, it would have been the norm for the BJP to accept that they participated in a criminal act that vitiated public life and divided people.
Equally so, the Congress ought to have apologised to the country for P. V. Narasimha Rao’s inept handling of the entire situation.
Mulayam Singh ought to have kept silent in Parliament, if only because he was, until recently, extolling the virtues of a certain Kalyan Singh. The Left too ought to have toned down its self- righteous bluster, especially after their cosy understanding with the BJP recently in trying to bring down the UPA government over the issue of the nuclear deal. “ In the congregation of the righteous”, said a poet, “ the sinners are well- disguised: do not seek to count them”.
Opportunity
For the BJP and certain of its leaders, the Liberhan report seems like a godgiven opportunity to revive its ever- dwindling fortunes. Just as their conception of Hindutva is stuck in an imaginary past, so are their political calculations. They hope to revive the irrational mobilisation of the rath yatra and karseva movements, if only to rectify their rockbottom status in the arena of Uttar Pradesh politics.
Even if their hope of a revival on the lines of the Ayodhya movement clashes with pictures of Narendra Modi in denims, they would love to live under the fatal illusion that they have the moral and intellectual wherewithal to merge and resolve all such contradictions.
The spectacle of Rajnath Singh thundering about the existence of a Ram Temple in the past and the assurance of a temple in the future weeks before he is to be given the marching orders by the RSS in favour of a man whose sole claim to fame is building flyovers is all too delicious for the ordinary spectator. After all, flyovers for the BJP are the new temples of their conception of modern India.
In all this, the RSS presents a picture that is a strange mixture of bravado, innocence and lack of contrition. They have been consistent in stating that they have no regrets about the demolition of the Babri Mosque.
But they are equally consistent in saying that a spontaneous surge of karsevaks resulted in the felling of what has been known as the disputed structure. This theory of spontaneity and popular sentiment has served the RSS and the Sangh Parivar well over the years in their systematic attempts at subverting democracy, the rule of law and the Indian Constitution.
One just has to remember the rhetoric at all levels within the Sangh Parivar in justifying the post- Godhra riots and the systematic killing of Muslims to know that this is a familiar tool in their kit of medieval barbarity. The only consolation that the Sangh Parivar has is that even the Congress borrowed the same set of rhetorical devices in order to justify the massacre of innocent Sikhs in 1984 and continues to condone similar acts by not acting on the findings of the Srikrishna Report concerning the 1992- 93 riots in Bombay.
Is there, then, a difference between the Sangh Parivar and the Congress? The difference is a small, but significant one. The Congress condones similar acts of violence for political expediency and does so with cynical impunity. The Sangh Parivar indulges in acts of organised violence in the name of God, Hinduism, cultural pride and with the express purpose of destroying a plurality of the ideas of India.
In keeping the mandirmasjid issue alive, the RSS also has a different agenda. It hopes to alienate Muslims to an extent by which it becomes untenable for them to exist as first- class citizens in India, and, thereby, foist its limited, shortsighted and dangerous idea of a Hindu nation.
Logic
A few examples would suffice. The former RSS sarsanghchalak , K. P Sudarshan, wrote a pamphlet published in 2000 called ‘ Sangh ki saphalta ka rahasya’ ( The Secret of the Sangh’s Success). He writes that when Indira Gandhi visited Afghanistan and wanted to lay a wreath at the tombstone of Babur, the Afghans had to clean the place overnight. The tombstone was in a state of acute disrepair. Sudarshan cites an official in the Prime Minister’s party asking the caretaker of the cemetery about Babur’s tomb and its sorry state.
The caretaker is supposed to have replied that they did not care because Babur was no Afghan.
Sudarshan goes on to say that it is unfortunate that many Indian Muslims still connect themselves to Babur. He goes on to explain how the structure that was demolished was on purpose designated as Babri Mosque, and they created futile anger in the country upon its demolition.
Sudarshan’s amnesia makes him forget that if his story of the Afghan caretaker of the cemetery is a desirable one, then the Sangh ought not to have screamed and shouted as much as it did when the Bamiyan Buddhas were blown away by dynamite sticks. After all, the Buddha was no Afghan either! But Sudarshan’s perverse creativity in rewriting history reaches hitherto unscaled heights when he dismisses the historical veracity of a structure that is a few hundred years old, but argues that the existence of a Ram Temple at the very spot was historically true and incontrovertible.
Irony
But there is one other gem in Sudarshan’s pamphlet.
He quotes a fax sent to Narasimha Rao on 10 December 1992 by a senior leader from Maharashtra.
Sudarshan says that this leader advised Rao not to ban the RSS in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque because Balasaheb Deoras was a friend of the Congress government.
Deoras wanted the government to survive for five years and was not in favour of frequently bringing governments down.
This unnamed Maharashtra leader warns Rao that if the Sangh was banned, a section of the Sangh sympathetic to Rao’s government would turn hostile.
Despite this advice, the Sangh was banned. It would do us all a lot of good if Sudarshan could release the copy of that fax to the Indian people now and expose this senior Maharashtra leader.
But nothing of this sort is likely to happen. The irony is that all those associated with this act of mob violence and vandalism will go scot- free. In the case of L. K. Advani, like the proverbial cat with nine lives, he will probably see a revival in his political fortunes and his political ambitions. In the meantime, the RSS will go on with its business of sullying Indian public life in a manner only it can and has perfected over the years. History, perhaps, will forgive those karsevaks , but it will scarcely condone the likes of Advani for being complicit in the RSS’s agenda of the diminution of what India is all about.
The writer teaches politics in University of Hyderabad
They Debated Liberhan Report, But No Punitive Action Against The Guilty
Editorial in The Times of India, 10 December 2009
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
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.
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.
December 09, 2009
Chidambaram’s reply to the debate on the Liberhan Commission in Lok Sabha
The Hindu
Dec 10, 2009
Editorial
Clear and commendable
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s raucous slogan-shouting in the Lok Sabha could not drown out the clear message from Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s reply to the debate on the Liberhan Commission’s report on the December 6, 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid. His oration was in the best traditions of truth-telling — a cool lawyerly marshalling of facts punctuated by sharp punches but also by honest self-criticism that is rare in Indian political discourse. True to form, the BJP leaders defended the indefensible — defiant in their insistence that the “disputed structure” met its brutal end because kar sevaks were at the end of their patience. Mr. Chidambaram, on the other hand, must be commended for showing the mirror to the BJP and also turning it inward, admitting on the floor of the House that the P.V. Narasimha Rao government — which made a “wrong political judgment” — was partly to blame for the demolition. Assembling his facts with care and targeting the protagonists with precision, the Home Minister made out an unassailable case against the sangh parivar and the BJP, accusing the latter of breaking “every single promise” made to the Supreme Court, the Central government, and the National Integration Council. The assault on the disputed structure was “pre-planned, calculated, and cold-blooded.” The evidence lay in the variety of tools and ropes ready at hand for destroying the structure, the inflammatory slogans that encouraged the rampaging kar sevaks, and the passivity of the BJP leaders as well as the police and district administration, which “remained a mute spectator to the demolition.”
Even as Mr. Chidambaram laid bare the details of the Babri conspiracy, which could not have possibly succeeded had the Congress central government done its job, the party’s rising star, Rahul Gandhi, was away in Lucknow, refusing even to acknowledge that he had read the Liberhan report. Had he gone through the 1,000-plus pages, he might have learnt that there were other omissions in the report, besides Prime Minister Rao’s tragic culpability. History will record that the Congress in power made two earlier key contributions to the process that led to demolition. It was Rajiv Gandhi’s government that, under pressure from a VHP-led mobilisation, facilitated the opening of the locks of the makeshift temple in February 1986, and enabled the performance of shilanyas in November 1989. One provided fresh impetus to the Ayodhya movement, the other legitimised the Ram mandir project. It was not part of Mr. Chidambaram’s remit to go into this pre-history of the demolition. But the Congress would do well to follow his lead and complete the much-delayed exercise in truth-telling on Ayodhya — so that full closure can be applied to a benighted chapter in independent India’s socio-political history.
Dec 10, 2009
Editorial
Clear and commendable
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s raucous slogan-shouting in the Lok Sabha could not drown out the clear message from Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s reply to the debate on the Liberhan Commission’s report on the December 6, 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid. His oration was in the best traditions of truth-telling — a cool lawyerly marshalling of facts punctuated by sharp punches but also by honest self-criticism that is rare in Indian political discourse. True to form, the BJP leaders defended the indefensible — defiant in their insistence that the “disputed structure” met its brutal end because kar sevaks were at the end of their patience. Mr. Chidambaram, on the other hand, must be commended for showing the mirror to the BJP and also turning it inward, admitting on the floor of the House that the P.V. Narasimha Rao government — which made a “wrong political judgment” — was partly to blame for the demolition. Assembling his facts with care and targeting the protagonists with precision, the Home Minister made out an unassailable case against the sangh parivar and the BJP, accusing the latter of breaking “every single promise” made to the Supreme Court, the Central government, and the National Integration Council. The assault on the disputed structure was “pre-planned, calculated, and cold-blooded.” The evidence lay in the variety of tools and ropes ready at hand for destroying the structure, the inflammatory slogans that encouraged the rampaging kar sevaks, and the passivity of the BJP leaders as well as the police and district administration, which “remained a mute spectator to the demolition.”
Even as Mr. Chidambaram laid bare the details of the Babri conspiracy, which could not have possibly succeeded had the Congress central government done its job, the party’s rising star, Rahul Gandhi, was away in Lucknow, refusing even to acknowledge that he had read the Liberhan report. Had he gone through the 1,000-plus pages, he might have learnt that there were other omissions in the report, besides Prime Minister Rao’s tragic culpability. History will record that the Congress in power made two earlier key contributions to the process that led to demolition. It was Rajiv Gandhi’s government that, under pressure from a VHP-led mobilisation, facilitated the opening of the locks of the makeshift temple in February 1986, and enabled the performance of shilanyas in November 1989. One provided fresh impetus to the Ayodhya movement, the other legitimised the Ram mandir project. It was not part of Mr. Chidambaram’s remit to go into this pre-history of the demolition. But the Congress would do well to follow his lead and complete the much-delayed exercise in truth-telling on Ayodhya — so that full closure can be applied to a benighted chapter in independent India’s socio-political history.
Little men re-enact Ayodhya chaos inside Parliament
The Hindu, 9 December 2009
Siddharth Varadarajan
Challenge for Chidambaram will be to go from jaw-jaw to law-law
New Delhi: After having its say on the Liberhan Commission report in Parliament on Monday and Tuesday, the Bharatiya Janata Party showed its fear of a proper debate on the demolition of the Babri Masjid by trying to prevent Home Minister P. Chidambaram from replying to the points it had made.
Throughout the Minister’s hour-long speech, BJP MPs screamed and shouted at the top of their voices and later even resorted to throwing paper. The Speaker, for some reason, chose not to intervene and have them evicted from the House, thus depriving all those citizens who had tuned in to the live telecast on Lok Sabha TV from hearing what the government had to say.
In a curious way, the orchestrated chaos inside the House was like a farcical reprise of the tragic drama that played out in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.
Seventeen years ago, according to Justice Liberhan, activists of the BJP, RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Shiv Sena demolished an ancient mosque while the party’s top leaders either celebrated, smiled quietly or expressed “feeble protests.” On Tuesday, Sushma Swaraj and Ananth Kumar, the senior most BJP leaders present at the conclusion of the debate, did nothing to rein in backbench MPs who went about demolishing parliamentary tradition and the public’s right to information with lusty abandon.
On Monday BJP president Rajnath Singh sounded angry and hurt at Mr. Liberhan’s reference to party leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi as “little men.” But on Tuesday, his party handed itself over to little men with oversized, bullying voices. Mr. Chidamabaram refused to yield but he could barely be heard above the din.
Unfortunately for Indian democracy, this was not the first time the BJP has behaved like this in Parliament. Last August, the party refused to allow Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to reply to the confidence motion moved against him. His speech was entered into the records without actually being delivered. Indeed, during the term of the last Lok Sabha, the BJP continuously sought to disrupt proceedings under one pretext or another.
On Tuesday, the pretext was a reference Congress MP Beni Prasad Verma made to Messrs. Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi that the BJP said was offensive. Even though Mr. Chidambaram apologised and the reference was expunged from the record, BJP MPs refused to take their seats. And when the Home Minister began speaking after a brief adjournment, the shouting resumed.
Mr. Chidamabaram was combative, insisting that the only issue the House was debating was who demolished the “Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid structure” and not the historicity of the mosque or temple. He placed on record the government’s concurrence with Justice Liberhan’s principal finding — that the demolition was the result of a “joint common enterprise” by the BJP, RSS, VHP and Shiv Sena and their leadership. And their crime did not end there. More than 2,000 innocent people died as a result of the violence that the sangh parivar’s calculated act of vandalism unleashed across the country.
Having thus described the crime and identified the criminals, the Home Minister must now find a way of turning debate into action, jaw-jaw into law-law. The UPA government won the war of words in the Lok Sabha by default because the other side kept shouting. But winning the battle for justice will require a stronger display of political will than anything we have seen the Congress put up so far.
Siddharth Varadarajan
Challenge for Chidambaram will be to go from jaw-jaw to law-law
New Delhi: After having its say on the Liberhan Commission report in Parliament on Monday and Tuesday, the Bharatiya Janata Party showed its fear of a proper debate on the demolition of the Babri Masjid by trying to prevent Home Minister P. Chidambaram from replying to the points it had made.
Throughout the Minister’s hour-long speech, BJP MPs screamed and shouted at the top of their voices and later even resorted to throwing paper. The Speaker, for some reason, chose not to intervene and have them evicted from the House, thus depriving all those citizens who had tuned in to the live telecast on Lok Sabha TV from hearing what the government had to say.
In a curious way, the orchestrated chaos inside the House was like a farcical reprise of the tragic drama that played out in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.
Seventeen years ago, according to Justice Liberhan, activists of the BJP, RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Shiv Sena demolished an ancient mosque while the party’s top leaders either celebrated, smiled quietly or expressed “feeble protests.” On Tuesday, Sushma Swaraj and Ananth Kumar, the senior most BJP leaders present at the conclusion of the debate, did nothing to rein in backbench MPs who went about demolishing parliamentary tradition and the public’s right to information with lusty abandon.
On Monday BJP president Rajnath Singh sounded angry and hurt at Mr. Liberhan’s reference to party leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi as “little men.” But on Tuesday, his party handed itself over to little men with oversized, bullying voices. Mr. Chidamabaram refused to yield but he could barely be heard above the din.
Unfortunately for Indian democracy, this was not the first time the BJP has behaved like this in Parliament. Last August, the party refused to allow Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to reply to the confidence motion moved against him. His speech was entered into the records without actually being delivered. Indeed, during the term of the last Lok Sabha, the BJP continuously sought to disrupt proceedings under one pretext or another.
On Tuesday, the pretext was a reference Congress MP Beni Prasad Verma made to Messrs. Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi that the BJP said was offensive. Even though Mr. Chidambaram apologised and the reference was expunged from the record, BJP MPs refused to take their seats. And when the Home Minister began speaking after a brief adjournment, the shouting resumed.
Mr. Chidamabaram was combative, insisting that the only issue the House was debating was who demolished the “Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid structure” and not the historicity of the mosque or temple. He placed on record the government’s concurrence with Justice Liberhan’s principal finding — that the demolition was the result of a “joint common enterprise” by the BJP, RSS, VHP and Shiv Sena and their leadership. And their crime did not end there. More than 2,000 innocent people died as a result of the violence that the sangh parivar’s calculated act of vandalism unleashed across the country.
Having thus described the crime and identified the criminals, the Home Minister must now find a way of turning debate into action, jaw-jaw into law-law. The UPA government won the war of words in the Lok Sabha by default because the other side kept shouting. But winning the battle for justice will require a stronger display of political will than anything we have seen the Congress put up so far.
December 08, 2009
The dialects of Ayodhya and Manmohan Singh
by Jawed Naqvi
Dawn, 07 Dec, 2009
It was Bertrand Russell who muttered in mock exasperation: ‘O God, if there be a God, bless my soul, if there be a soul.’ Suppose there was no God, only soul. Or suppose there was neither God, nor soul. Would any of that have made a difference to Russell’s anti-Victorian precepts, which he prescribed impishly in Marriage and Morals?
Counterfactual imagination is not a waste of time. Walter de la Mare had used the method to create a memorable poem for school children. ‘If I were lord of Tartary, myself and me alone…’ If! Remember? In my experience, a counterfactual peep into the past often helps (among other things) clinch useful brownie points against widespread cretinism that passes for Hindutva historiography.
When I visited the Babri mosque a few months before its demolition on Dec 6, 1992, it was already functioning as a Hindu temple. Rajiv Gandhi who got the locked up precincts opened made this possible. He thus tried to appease Hindu obscurantism while balancing it with his pandering of Muslim mediaevalists via the notorious Shahbano divorce case.
Under the middle dome of the obscure 16th century structure stood a pujari with an idol of Lord Ram in his avatar as a toddler, ensconced prominently on a perch for devotees to circumambulate around.
My leather belt and wallet had to be surrendered before they let me into the sanctum sanctorum – leather being considered unholy and polluting by Brahmins. The self-styled organisers who worked in tandem with a posse of policemen took my camera away. No evidence was to be taken out of the goings on within. An obscure court order was cited to back up the procedure.
There was a pleasant surprise, however. On the southern wall inside the mosque someone had left huge charcoal sketches of Indian martyrs Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, signed off with their famous chant: Inquilab Zindabad. Hindutva activists evidently did not have the courage to erase the memory of one of India’s most celebrated atheists. I wondered if the sketches had anything to do with the fact that the district of Faizabad, close to where Ayodhya is located, was once a stronghold of communist partisans.
A tobacco-chewing policeman with a 303 rifle, stood idly under the southern dome. He claimed to know the entire history by heart of what many believe is the birthplace of Ram. I engaged him in his native Awadhi dialect. When was Ram born here? I probed. ‘Kahat hain ki nau laakh saal hoi gaye haye hain,’ he replied, mouth slanted upward to prevent the copious drool of masticated tobacco spilling over. (They say Ram was born nine hundred thousand years ago.) Where exactly was he born? I persisted. ‘Jahaan pujariji khadey huye hai’n, wahi ke jaano chaar paanch phoot yahar wahar.’ (He was born near the spot where the pujari is standing, give or take four or five feet.) Engineers working on cruise missiles can learn a lesson in precision here.
The pseudo-accuracy with which details are recounted from pre-history is a feature of Hindutva historiography. Ben Kinglsey might love the role of Mughal emperor Shahjehan he is playing in a new movie on the builder of Taj Mahal. But Hindutva historiographer P.N. Oak has already claimed the fabled monument to be a Hindu shrine. Should Kingsley change the script?
In a book by Sadashiv Golwalkar, revered as a great guru by RSS activists, who include at least one former prime minister of India if not two, the North Pole was claimed to have been located on the border of today’s Bihar and Orissa before it shifted to its current position by a geological process! I imagine that was one way to cast the fairer-skinned Indians rather than the darker ones as the original inhabitants of the subcontinent.
Secular historians have punched holes in the mythology of Ayodhya as the actual, as opposed to imagined, birthplace of Ram. Far from there being scientific evidence of Lord Ram’s historically verifiable presence there, the present day Ayodhya, according to a several historical indications, stands on the ruins of a Buddhist centre called Saket. Dalit-Buddhist activists insist that the spot was chosen by upper caste Hindus to usurp a Buddhist legacy. The day of the demolition – December 6 – according to this theory, was chosen to belittle Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar’s birthday that Dalit-Buddhists celebrate on that day.
The Liberhan Commission investigated the circumstances that led to the razing of the mosque, and he has blamed Hindu extremists for the act. However, the actual dispute – whether there was a temple to Ram which was razed by a general of Mughal Emperor Babar in order to build a mosque on the site is dragging on in the courts. A former judge who dealt with it told me that the issue of belief was ‘non-justiciable’ any way. In other words a secular court could not be reasonably expected to judge on a dispute concerning a matter of faith. Whether there is God or soul – as Russell had wondered – is not the concern of a secular court. So what are we then quarrelling about?
This is where counterfactual history is helpful. Let us ask the question differently? Suppose there was no mosque in Ayodhya, would there be no Hindu-Muslim strife? Would Lal Kishan Advani not have sat on a make believe chariot to instigate bloody violence across much of the country to win votes anyway? In the cause-and-effect calculus of fascism there need not be a Godhra train carnage to trigger a wider pogrom of an accused community. A trigger could be conjured from a four hundred year old narrative to cynically wreak havoc. This was amply shown to be the case in Ayodhya.
What does it mean to ordinary Indians when an alleged injustice inflicted on a make believe community (Hindu) by another make believe community (Muslim) whips up bloody-mindedness even if the said injustice is claimed to have occurred hundreds of years ago? Discussants at a daylong symposium about India’s ‘war on its own people’ offered a few thought-provoking frameworks last week.
Prof Jagmohan Singh, a nephew of Bhagat Singh, told the symposium that much of the strife in India was carried out at the behest of the state to corner the peoples’ shrinking resources – water, minerals, land, forests, to list some of the loot. A writer-activist presented a radically new framework.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she argued, India had to take drastic new positions to cozy up to the surviving superpower.
Going by this argument two locks were opened in India in 1990 – one in Ayodhya that opened the floodgates of religious fascism and the other that ushered an aggressive form of economic fascism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms are thus perceived as euphemism for unpopular policies that can only be sustained by a police state. Moreover, his prescriptions would probably not have passed through parliament without the smokescreen of religious turmoil and an attempted false polarisation of Indian citizens into mutually hostile religious entities.
Several cabinet colleagues of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had protested against his sleepy response to Ayodhya, which happened under his watch. However, it has never been made clear what if any position did Dr Singh take on the bloody mayhem. There is circumstantial evidence, however, of a dialectical relationship between him and the Bharatiya Janata Party. After all did he not hero worship Atal Behari Vajpayee, described by Justice Liberhan as a key architect of the Ayodhya crime.
Bhishma Pitamah – isn’t that what Dr Singh called Mr Vajpayee? And yet, in the wider evolution of India’s religio-economic fascism, handy issues like Ayodhya and personalities like Dr Singh are mere accidental conduits. There are and will always be good, even better, alternatives.
This was the worrying message from the symposium on the war by the Indian state against its own people. Debating God and the soul is one thing. Using them as a decoy for a nefarious agenda is another.
Copyright © 2009 - Dawn Media Group
Dawn, 07 Dec, 2009
It was Bertrand Russell who muttered in mock exasperation: ‘O God, if there be a God, bless my soul, if there be a soul.’ Suppose there was no God, only soul. Or suppose there was neither God, nor soul. Would any of that have made a difference to Russell’s anti-Victorian precepts, which he prescribed impishly in Marriage and Morals?
Counterfactual imagination is not a waste of time. Walter de la Mare had used the method to create a memorable poem for school children. ‘If I were lord of Tartary, myself and me alone…’ If! Remember? In my experience, a counterfactual peep into the past often helps (among other things) clinch useful brownie points against widespread cretinism that passes for Hindutva historiography.
When I visited the Babri mosque a few months before its demolition on Dec 6, 1992, it was already functioning as a Hindu temple. Rajiv Gandhi who got the locked up precincts opened made this possible. He thus tried to appease Hindu obscurantism while balancing it with his pandering of Muslim mediaevalists via the notorious Shahbano divorce case.
Under the middle dome of the obscure 16th century structure stood a pujari with an idol of Lord Ram in his avatar as a toddler, ensconced prominently on a perch for devotees to circumambulate around.
My leather belt and wallet had to be surrendered before they let me into the sanctum sanctorum – leather being considered unholy and polluting by Brahmins. The self-styled organisers who worked in tandem with a posse of policemen took my camera away. No evidence was to be taken out of the goings on within. An obscure court order was cited to back up the procedure.
There was a pleasant surprise, however. On the southern wall inside the mosque someone had left huge charcoal sketches of Indian martyrs Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, signed off with their famous chant: Inquilab Zindabad. Hindutva activists evidently did not have the courage to erase the memory of one of India’s most celebrated atheists. I wondered if the sketches had anything to do with the fact that the district of Faizabad, close to where Ayodhya is located, was once a stronghold of communist partisans.
A tobacco-chewing policeman with a 303 rifle, stood idly under the southern dome. He claimed to know the entire history by heart of what many believe is the birthplace of Ram. I engaged him in his native Awadhi dialect. When was Ram born here? I probed. ‘Kahat hain ki nau laakh saal hoi gaye haye hain,’ he replied, mouth slanted upward to prevent the copious drool of masticated tobacco spilling over. (They say Ram was born nine hundred thousand years ago.) Where exactly was he born? I persisted. ‘Jahaan pujariji khadey huye hai’n, wahi ke jaano chaar paanch phoot yahar wahar.’ (He was born near the spot where the pujari is standing, give or take four or five feet.) Engineers working on cruise missiles can learn a lesson in precision here.
The pseudo-accuracy with which details are recounted from pre-history is a feature of Hindutva historiography. Ben Kinglsey might love the role of Mughal emperor Shahjehan he is playing in a new movie on the builder of Taj Mahal. But Hindutva historiographer P.N. Oak has already claimed the fabled monument to be a Hindu shrine. Should Kingsley change the script?
In a book by Sadashiv Golwalkar, revered as a great guru by RSS activists, who include at least one former prime minister of India if not two, the North Pole was claimed to have been located on the border of today’s Bihar and Orissa before it shifted to its current position by a geological process! I imagine that was one way to cast the fairer-skinned Indians rather than the darker ones as the original inhabitants of the subcontinent.
Secular historians have punched holes in the mythology of Ayodhya as the actual, as opposed to imagined, birthplace of Ram. Far from there being scientific evidence of Lord Ram’s historically verifiable presence there, the present day Ayodhya, according to a several historical indications, stands on the ruins of a Buddhist centre called Saket. Dalit-Buddhist activists insist that the spot was chosen by upper caste Hindus to usurp a Buddhist legacy. The day of the demolition – December 6 – according to this theory, was chosen to belittle Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar’s birthday that Dalit-Buddhists celebrate on that day.
The Liberhan Commission investigated the circumstances that led to the razing of the mosque, and he has blamed Hindu extremists for the act. However, the actual dispute – whether there was a temple to Ram which was razed by a general of Mughal Emperor Babar in order to build a mosque on the site is dragging on in the courts. A former judge who dealt with it told me that the issue of belief was ‘non-justiciable’ any way. In other words a secular court could not be reasonably expected to judge on a dispute concerning a matter of faith. Whether there is God or soul – as Russell had wondered – is not the concern of a secular court. So what are we then quarrelling about?
This is where counterfactual history is helpful. Let us ask the question differently? Suppose there was no mosque in Ayodhya, would there be no Hindu-Muslim strife? Would Lal Kishan Advani not have sat on a make believe chariot to instigate bloody violence across much of the country to win votes anyway? In the cause-and-effect calculus of fascism there need not be a Godhra train carnage to trigger a wider pogrom of an accused community. A trigger could be conjured from a four hundred year old narrative to cynically wreak havoc. This was amply shown to be the case in Ayodhya.
What does it mean to ordinary Indians when an alleged injustice inflicted on a make believe community (Hindu) by another make believe community (Muslim) whips up bloody-mindedness even if the said injustice is claimed to have occurred hundreds of years ago? Discussants at a daylong symposium about India’s ‘war on its own people’ offered a few thought-provoking frameworks last week.
Prof Jagmohan Singh, a nephew of Bhagat Singh, told the symposium that much of the strife in India was carried out at the behest of the state to corner the peoples’ shrinking resources – water, minerals, land, forests, to list some of the loot. A writer-activist presented a radically new framework.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she argued, India had to take drastic new positions to cozy up to the surviving superpower.
Going by this argument two locks were opened in India in 1990 – one in Ayodhya that opened the floodgates of religious fascism and the other that ushered an aggressive form of economic fascism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms are thus perceived as euphemism for unpopular policies that can only be sustained by a police state. Moreover, his prescriptions would probably not have passed through parliament without the smokescreen of religious turmoil and an attempted false polarisation of Indian citizens into mutually hostile religious entities.
Several cabinet colleagues of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had protested against his sleepy response to Ayodhya, which happened under his watch. However, it has never been made clear what if any position did Dr Singh take on the bloody mayhem. There is circumstantial evidence, however, of a dialectical relationship between him and the Bharatiya Janata Party. After all did he not hero worship Atal Behari Vajpayee, described by Justice Liberhan as a key architect of the Ayodhya crime.
Bhishma Pitamah – isn’t that what Dr Singh called Mr Vajpayee? And yet, in the wider evolution of India’s religio-economic fascism, handy issues like Ayodhya and personalities like Dr Singh are mere accidental conduits. There are and will always be good, even better, alternatives.
This was the worrying message from the symposium on the war by the Indian state against its own people. Debating God and the soul is one thing. Using them as a decoy for a nefarious agenda is another.
Copyright © 2009 - Dawn Media Group
December 07, 2009
Liberhan Commission; Painful wait for Justice
Ram Puniyani
Liberhan commission submitted its four volume report to the Government on 30 of June 2009. It might have been one of the longest times taken by any commission. Liberhan’s claim that the report got delayed due to non cooperation of leaders involved may have some truth as one knows Kalyan Singh avoided appearing before the commission for long time, and so was the attitude of many of those alleged for demolition. Still all the hearings were complete by 2004. Did it take 5 long years to write the report? Such a long delay in the report coming out, defeats half the purpose of the same. One of the minor reasons of delay has also been the differences in the approach of Justice Liberhan and its chief counsel Anupam Gupta. Gupta after he interrogated Advani, Justice Liberhan allrently told him to apologize to Advani for being harsh. While Gupta maintains that Justice Liberhan had been soft on Advani, despite his role of the chief mobilizer for demolition.
One awaits the report to be tabled and see what the commission has to say about things which have been reported in the media and seen on the TV by most. One also await to see the attitude of this Government towards this commission, is it going to be forthright objectivity or dictated by political exigencies. That apart, since the report was submitted some of the accused have been hiding for cover, and some others are saying that since already 17 years have lapsed how the report can be meaningful, if at all? Some of them have questioned the timing of the report.
To expect that those involved in demolition will own up the crime and honestly confess to that is something not to be expected. Still Uma Bharati was honest enough to say that “I definitely wanted Ram temple to come up (in Ayodhya) and I definitely wanted that building (Babri Mosque) to come down but not in that manner. But I am not going to apologize. I am ready to be hanged for it.” It was the same Uma Bharti, who along with Sadhvi Ritambhra was exhorting the Kar Sevaks by saying, Ek Dhakka Aur Do: Babri Masjid Tod do”. (Give one more push, break the Babri mosque) She also expressed her joy after the demolition by hugging another accused, Murli Manohar Joshi who was sharing dais with her. Amongst others who shared the dais, when the demolition work was in progress, were Lal Krishna Advani, Ashok Singhal and ex- RSS chief K. Sudarshan himself.
How do people respond to the crime after executing it, is a matter of great variance. Same Murli Manohar Joshi, who before the demolition had said told his followers "…demolish the masjid, nature of Kar Seva will be determined by Sants and not by courts/demolition is prerequisite for temple building", in the hearing of the commission he said that “With all humility, I say that the incident was never remotely conceived by us”. This despite the fact that Vinay Katiyar, the then Bajrang Dal chief had asserted that "Masjid will be demolished and debris will be thrown in river Sarayu". During the deposition he distracted form the main issue and doubted the need of commission and said that Ram Lalla is the owner of the place. While Lal Krishna Advani had stated the Kar Seva will done with Bricks and shovels, kar sevaks are not going to Ayodhya to sing Bhajan and Kirtans, later he declared that the day of demolition was the saddest day of his life. Which is the real Advani is difficult to say.
K.Sudarshan, who later became RSS Sarsnghchalak, stated that he heard Nirmala Deshpande saying that Mosque fell due to the explosion inside. Nirmala Deshpande disowned the statement. Kalyan Singh takes the cake as for as turn arounds are concerned. Before the demolition he committed to National Integration Council and through a sworn affidavit to Supreme Court, that he will protect the mosque. When demolition began he did not deploy 20000 central forces stationed barely 10 minutes from the place. Later he was imprisoned for a day and he proudly justified his inaction in the path of Ram Temple. He filed a 300 page affidavit, taking a line, which was in accordance with his the then Party’s line, stating that it was a spontaneous act by uncontrollable Kar Sevaks. With his problems beginning with BJP, he hit out at A.B.Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi saying Babri was destroyed on the instructions of senior BJP leaders.
The then Prime Minister P.V. Narsimha Rao was famously having the afternoon siesta when the Babri was being demolished and he covered his inaction by putting the blame on Kalyan Singh. Immediately he promised that Babri will be restored at the same spot.
It all raises the question of political morality. How the actors in the tragic act have been taking stances according the political necessities. How they regard that public memory is short and they can wriggle out of their crimes by mere play of words.
And now with report on the table of the Congress Government can one expect justice? The experience so far is far from optimistic. Congress weighs the issues on the scale of political advantages or otherwise. On one hand it tries to put a show that it will do justice and when the crunch time comes one finds it wanting in resolve to stand firmly for secularism and justice. Political calculations have been its guiding load stones. So even now one is not sure about the real justice coming through after 17 long years of wait.
BJP on its part is a divided house. It has used the Ram Temple agitation and the consequent demolition and the violence for politically strengthening itself. It is around this agitation, demolition and violence that it came to occupy the major position on the political scene in India. Now having been in power and having seen that Lord Ram cannot eternally help it to keep coming to power, some of its major leaders have been rethinking the political line to be adopted. What one sees around is the total opportunism for the sake of power. They realize the necessities of such issues to be in power, they also see that beyond a point it can be counter productive. Now it’s up to them to keep adopting double standards or to come to adopt democratic issues as their political base. Can BJP shift away from such issues and take up the issues of the poor and downtrodden? This is a million-vote question. This is also a question related to the goals of its political father, the RSS. How does RSS evaluate its future role in Indian political chessboard? Indications are RSS will stick to Hindutva and Ram temple type of issues, come what may. One only hopes in despair that people concerned have honesty to own up their acts and face the legal consequences for their commitments!
--
Liberhan commission submitted its four volume report to the Government on 30 of June 2009. It might have been one of the longest times taken by any commission. Liberhan’s claim that the report got delayed due to non cooperation of leaders involved may have some truth as one knows Kalyan Singh avoided appearing before the commission for long time, and so was the attitude of many of those alleged for demolition. Still all the hearings were complete by 2004. Did it take 5 long years to write the report? Such a long delay in the report coming out, defeats half the purpose of the same. One of the minor reasons of delay has also been the differences in the approach of Justice Liberhan and its chief counsel Anupam Gupta. Gupta after he interrogated Advani, Justice Liberhan allrently told him to apologize to Advani for being harsh. While Gupta maintains that Justice Liberhan had been soft on Advani, despite his role of the chief mobilizer for demolition.
One awaits the report to be tabled and see what the commission has to say about things which have been reported in the media and seen on the TV by most. One also await to see the attitude of this Government towards this commission, is it going to be forthright objectivity or dictated by political exigencies. That apart, since the report was submitted some of the accused have been hiding for cover, and some others are saying that since already 17 years have lapsed how the report can be meaningful, if at all? Some of them have questioned the timing of the report.
To expect that those involved in demolition will own up the crime and honestly confess to that is something not to be expected. Still Uma Bharati was honest enough to say that “I definitely wanted Ram temple to come up (in Ayodhya) and I definitely wanted that building (Babri Mosque) to come down but not in that manner. But I am not going to apologize. I am ready to be hanged for it.” It was the same Uma Bharti, who along with Sadhvi Ritambhra was exhorting the Kar Sevaks by saying, Ek Dhakka Aur Do: Babri Masjid Tod do”. (Give one more push, break the Babri mosque) She also expressed her joy after the demolition by hugging another accused, Murli Manohar Joshi who was sharing dais with her. Amongst others who shared the dais, when the demolition work was in progress, were Lal Krishna Advani, Ashok Singhal and ex- RSS chief K. Sudarshan himself.
How do people respond to the crime after executing it, is a matter of great variance. Same Murli Manohar Joshi, who before the demolition had said told his followers "…demolish the masjid, nature of Kar Seva will be determined by Sants and not by courts/demolition is prerequisite for temple building", in the hearing of the commission he said that “With all humility, I say that the incident was never remotely conceived by us”. This despite the fact that Vinay Katiyar, the then Bajrang Dal chief had asserted that "Masjid will be demolished and debris will be thrown in river Sarayu". During the deposition he distracted form the main issue and doubted the need of commission and said that Ram Lalla is the owner of the place. While Lal Krishna Advani had stated the Kar Seva will done with Bricks and shovels, kar sevaks are not going to Ayodhya to sing Bhajan and Kirtans, later he declared that the day of demolition was the saddest day of his life. Which is the real Advani is difficult to say.
K.Sudarshan, who later became RSS Sarsnghchalak, stated that he heard Nirmala Deshpande saying that Mosque fell due to the explosion inside. Nirmala Deshpande disowned the statement. Kalyan Singh takes the cake as for as turn arounds are concerned. Before the demolition he committed to National Integration Council and through a sworn affidavit to Supreme Court, that he will protect the mosque. When demolition began he did not deploy 20000 central forces stationed barely 10 minutes from the place. Later he was imprisoned for a day and he proudly justified his inaction in the path of Ram Temple. He filed a 300 page affidavit, taking a line, which was in accordance with his the then Party’s line, stating that it was a spontaneous act by uncontrollable Kar Sevaks. With his problems beginning with BJP, he hit out at A.B.Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi saying Babri was destroyed on the instructions of senior BJP leaders.
The then Prime Minister P.V. Narsimha Rao was famously having the afternoon siesta when the Babri was being demolished and he covered his inaction by putting the blame on Kalyan Singh. Immediately he promised that Babri will be restored at the same spot.
It all raises the question of political morality. How the actors in the tragic act have been taking stances according the political necessities. How they regard that public memory is short and they can wriggle out of their crimes by mere play of words.
And now with report on the table of the Congress Government can one expect justice? The experience so far is far from optimistic. Congress weighs the issues on the scale of political advantages or otherwise. On one hand it tries to put a show that it will do justice and when the crunch time comes one finds it wanting in resolve to stand firmly for secularism and justice. Political calculations have been its guiding load stones. So even now one is not sure about the real justice coming through after 17 long years of wait.
BJP on its part is a divided house. It has used the Ram Temple agitation and the consequent demolition and the violence for politically strengthening itself. It is around this agitation, demolition and violence that it came to occupy the major position on the political scene in India. Now having been in power and having seen that Lord Ram cannot eternally help it to keep coming to power, some of its major leaders have been rethinking the political line to be adopted. What one sees around is the total opportunism for the sake of power. They realize the necessities of such issues to be in power, they also see that beyond a point it can be counter productive. Now it’s up to them to keep adopting double standards or to come to adopt democratic issues as their political base. Can BJP shift away from such issues and take up the issues of the poor and downtrodden? This is a million-vote question. This is also a question related to the goals of its political father, the RSS. How does RSS evaluate its future role in Indian political chessboard? Indications are RSS will stick to Hindutva and Ram temple type of issues, come what may. One only hopes in despair that people concerned have honesty to own up their acts and face the legal consequences for their commitments!
--
December 06, 2009
PRESS RELEASE: British Indian Muslims urge British Government to declare the 68 terrorists persona non grata
COUNCIL of INDIAN MUSLIMS (UK)
66c Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington, London N16 6AA
Tel: 020 8806 1147 Fax: 020 8806 6859, www.coimuk.org, coimuk@hotmail.com
Patron: Lord Adam Patel of Blackburn
PRESS RELEASE: For Immediate Release
6 December 2009
British Indian Muslims urge British Government to declare the 68 terrorists persona non grata
British Indian Muslims have urged British Government to declare the 68 people persona non grata found guilty by the Justice Liberhan Commission for the demolition of 16th centaury Babri Mosque on 6 December 1992.
In a statement issued to mark the 18th anniversary of the demolition of Babri Mosque, Chairman of Council of Indian Muslims—UK (CIM) Mr Mohammad Munaf Zeena said, “Although the role in the demolition of the historic mosque of these people, including former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and former Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani, was no secret, Justice Liberhan Commission has established their guilt beyond doubt. Not only are they responsible for the demolition of a religious historic monument, they are also guilty of inciting anti-Muslim riots over the country and the killings of thousands of innocent people. Therefore, in view of not only putting an end to any possible support from British soil to these fascists in India but also to prove that it is against fascism in any form, the British Government must declare these 68 people persona non grata and never allow them enter into the UK.”
Zeena also demanded that the Indian Government must also take without any delay all the necessary steps to prosecute and punish these guilty people and hand over the Babri Mosque site to Indian Muslims.
Babri Mosque was built in 1528 by Baqi Beg Tashqandi, the Governor General of Mughal Emperor Babar to mark the victory of Mughal army over a Pathan Muslim King, Sikandar Lodhi. There is no historic or archaeological evidence to prove either of Babar’s going to Ayodhya or any existence of a Hindu temple on Babri Mosque site. With the connivance of the administration the Mosque was closed to Muslims in 1949 and converted into a de facto temple after the statues of Rama and his consort Sita were smuggled and planted there. However, in order to gain political mileage and financial gains in the 80s BJP leaders suddenly turned their politics towards what they call the liberation of the birth place of Hindu deity Rama and on 6 December 1992 destroyed the mosque in full un-ashamed media glare.
Ends
66c Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington, London N16 6AA
Tel: 020 8806 1147 Fax: 020 8806 6859, www.coimuk.org, coimuk@hotmail.com
Patron: Lord Adam Patel of Blackburn
PRESS RELEASE: For Immediate Release
6 December 2009
British Indian Muslims urge British Government to declare the 68 terrorists persona non grata
British Indian Muslims have urged British Government to declare the 68 people persona non grata found guilty by the Justice Liberhan Commission for the demolition of 16th centaury Babri Mosque on 6 December 1992.
In a statement issued to mark the 18th anniversary of the demolition of Babri Mosque, Chairman of Council of Indian Muslims—UK (CIM) Mr Mohammad Munaf Zeena said, “Although the role in the demolition of the historic mosque of these people, including former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and former Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani, was no secret, Justice Liberhan Commission has established their guilt beyond doubt. Not only are they responsible for the demolition of a religious historic monument, they are also guilty of inciting anti-Muslim riots over the country and the killings of thousands of innocent people. Therefore, in view of not only putting an end to any possible support from British soil to these fascists in India but also to prove that it is against fascism in any form, the British Government must declare these 68 people persona non grata and never allow them enter into the UK.”
Zeena also demanded that the Indian Government must also take without any delay all the necessary steps to prosecute and punish these guilty people and hand over the Babri Mosque site to Indian Muslims.
Babri Mosque was built in 1528 by Baqi Beg Tashqandi, the Governor General of Mughal Emperor Babar to mark the victory of Mughal army over a Pathan Muslim King, Sikandar Lodhi. There is no historic or archaeological evidence to prove either of Babar’s going to Ayodhya or any existence of a Hindu temple on Babri Mosque site. With the connivance of the administration the Mosque was closed to Muslims in 1949 and converted into a de facto temple after the statues of Rama and his consort Sita were smuggled and planted there. However, in order to gain political mileage and financial gains in the 80s BJP leaders suddenly turned their politics towards what they call the liberation of the birth place of Hindu deity Rama and on 6 December 1992 destroyed the mosque in full un-ashamed media glare.
Ends
Concerned Citizens of Gujarat for Prosecution of architect of demolition of Babri
Movement for Secular Democracy
C/o Narmad- Meghani Library, Natraj Railway Crossing, Meethakhali, Ahmedabad- 380006
Ph.No- 079 26404418
Date- 5-12-09
MEMORANDUM
Subject- Concerned Citizens of Gujarat for Prosecution of architect of demolition Of Babri
To,
Mr. Manmohan Singh,
The Prime Minister of India,
New Delhi.
Sir,
After 17 long years and over 4000 hearings Justice Liberhan has submitted his report on the demolition of Babri Masjid and it has been placed on the table of the House of the Parliament The report has named 68 important figures responsible for the demolition. It is a matter of concern that as there is no specific measures mentioned in the Action Taken Report(ATR) which was placed before the house of Parliament has encouraged the architects of demolition of Babri to vilify the atmosphere of the country taking advantage of the non prosecution.
The central thrust of the report expose the shameless betrayal and desecration of the Constitution and it’s basic Principles by the major ruling parties and cannot be ignored or put aside by legal squabbling and finding some loop holes here and there.
As they say justice delayed is justice denied. However, even after this long wait those indicted by the Commission’s findings are , duly prosecuted and punished, it will be a great , though belated service to our wounded nation and it’s torn secular fabric.
We the concerned citizens of Gujarat urge you to take immediate steps in this regard and hand over the case to CBI and open Fast track Courts with out delay to bring a logical end to years long judicial feud.
Thanking You
Yours
Prakash N. Shah,
Convener,
Movement for Secular Democracy
Date- 5-12-09
The Signatures of the concerned leading citizens
Mr. Chunibhai Vaidya
Ms. Ilaben Pathak
Ms. Mallika Sarabhai
Mr. Girish Patel
Mr. Mukul Sinha
Dr. J. Bandukwala
Mr. Gautam Thaker
Mr. Rajni Dave
Mr. Indukumar Jani
Mr. Uttam Parmar
Fr. Cedrik Prakash
Mr. Harinesh Pandya
Mr. Digant Oza
Mr. Manishi Jani
Mr. Dhiru Mistry
Mr. Mansoor Saleri
Mr. Rohit Shukla
Mr. Jagdish Shah
Ms. Saroop Dhruv
Mr. Hiren Gandhi
Mr. Chinu Shrinivasan
Mr. Dankesh Oza
Mr. Mahadev Vidrohi
Mr. Dilip Chandulal
Mr. Johannes Manjrekar
Mr. Bharat Mehta
Ms. Renu Khanna
Mr. Poonjabhai A. Patel
Mr. Ratilal Desai
Mr. Chandrakant Nai
Mr. Ratilal Dave
Mr. Chandrakant M. Trivedi
Mr. Omprakash Giri
Mr. Bharatsinh Zala
Mr. Ganpatbhai Rathod
Mr. Amrish Patel
Mr. Prafull Desai
Mr. Rahul Mehta
Mr. Pravin Pandya
Mr. Ashok Gupta
Mr. Soukat Ali Indori
Mr. Ishaq Chinwala
Mr. Vinod Pandya
Mr. Babubhai Desai
Mr. Kishorebhai Desai
Mr. Jagdish Patel
Ms. Damayantiben Parekh
Ms. Meenakshi Joshi
Mr. Jayesh Patel
Mr. Tapan Dasgupta
Mr. Mukesh Semwal
Ms. Bharti Parmar
Mr. Bhavik Raja
Mr. Satyendra Singh
Mr. Dwarikanath Rath
Copy -
Mr. P.Chidambaram,
Union Home Minister of India, New Delhi.
C/o Narmad- Meghani Library, Natraj Railway Crossing, Meethakhali, Ahmedabad- 380006
Ph.No- 079 26404418
Date- 5-12-09
MEMORANDUM
Subject- Concerned Citizens of Gujarat for Prosecution of architect of demolition Of Babri
To,
Mr. Manmohan Singh,
The Prime Minister of India,
New Delhi.
Sir,
After 17 long years and over 4000 hearings Justice Liberhan has submitted his report on the demolition of Babri Masjid and it has been placed on the table of the House of the Parliament The report has named 68 important figures responsible for the demolition. It is a matter of concern that as there is no specific measures mentioned in the Action Taken Report(ATR) which was placed before the house of Parliament has encouraged the architects of demolition of Babri to vilify the atmosphere of the country taking advantage of the non prosecution.
The central thrust of the report expose the shameless betrayal and desecration of the Constitution and it’s basic Principles by the major ruling parties and cannot be ignored or put aside by legal squabbling and finding some loop holes here and there.
As they say justice delayed is justice denied. However, even after this long wait those indicted by the Commission’s findings are , duly prosecuted and punished, it will be a great , though belated service to our wounded nation and it’s torn secular fabric.
We the concerned citizens of Gujarat urge you to take immediate steps in this regard and hand over the case to CBI and open Fast track Courts with out delay to bring a logical end to years long judicial feud.
Thanking You
Yours
Prakash N. Shah,
Convener,
Movement for Secular Democracy
Date- 5-12-09
The Signatures of the concerned leading citizens
Mr. Chunibhai Vaidya
Ms. Ilaben Pathak
Ms. Mallika Sarabhai
Mr. Girish Patel
Mr. Mukul Sinha
Dr. J. Bandukwala
Mr. Gautam Thaker
Mr. Rajni Dave
Mr. Indukumar Jani
Mr. Uttam Parmar
Fr. Cedrik Prakash
Mr. Harinesh Pandya
Mr. Digant Oza
Mr. Manishi Jani
Mr. Dhiru Mistry
Mr. Mansoor Saleri
Mr. Rohit Shukla
Mr. Jagdish Shah
Ms. Saroop Dhruv
Mr. Hiren Gandhi
Mr. Chinu Shrinivasan
Mr. Dankesh Oza
Mr. Mahadev Vidrohi
Mr. Dilip Chandulal
Mr. Johannes Manjrekar
Mr. Bharat Mehta
Ms. Renu Khanna
Mr. Poonjabhai A. Patel
Mr. Ratilal Desai
Mr. Chandrakant Nai
Mr. Ratilal Dave
Mr. Chandrakant M. Trivedi
Mr. Omprakash Giri
Mr. Bharatsinh Zala
Mr. Ganpatbhai Rathod
Mr. Amrish Patel
Mr. Prafull Desai
Mr. Rahul Mehta
Mr. Pravin Pandya
Mr. Ashok Gupta
Mr. Soukat Ali Indori
Mr. Ishaq Chinwala
Mr. Vinod Pandya
Mr. Babubhai Desai
Mr. Kishorebhai Desai
Mr. Jagdish Patel
Ms. Damayantiben Parekh
Ms. Meenakshi Joshi
Mr. Jayesh Patel
Mr. Tapan Dasgupta
Mr. Mukesh Semwal
Ms. Bharti Parmar
Mr. Bhavik Raja
Mr. Satyendra Singh
Mr. Dwarikanath Rath
Copy -
Mr. P.Chidambaram,
Union Home Minister of India, New Delhi.
Initiate immediate civil and criminal action against all accused in the Liberhan Report (Indian Muslim Council USA)
Indian Muslim Council USA
Indian American Muslim group demands immediate civil and criminal action against all accused in the Liberhan Report
For Immediate Release
Washington D.C.,
December 6, 2009
Indian Muslim Council-USA (http://www.imc-usa.org), an advocacy group dedicated towards safeguarding India's pluralist and tolerant ethos, demands the Indian government to bring the criminals to justice involved in the demolition of the 16th century Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya in the State of Uttar Pradesh, India as identified in the Report of the Liberhan Ayodhya Commission of Inquiry that was released recently.
Indian Muslim Council-USA further demands that the Indian government honor the promise given by the former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to re-build the mosque on its original site.
On December 6th, 1992 defying the orders of the Supreme Court of India and their own promise to the nation, the Hindutva fascist forces demolished the historic Babri Mosque in northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. This 16th century Muslim place of worship was destroyed by a frenzied mob of kar-sevaks in spite of assurances from the Hindutva Leaders and the State Administration officials that only symbolic prayers will be performed and that the structure of the Babri Mosque will be safe.
The Liberhan Commission appointed by the Indian government to investigate the destruction of the Babri Mosque submitted the report earlier this year that took more than 16 years of proceedings and recording statements of politicians, bureaucrats and police officials. Led by Indian Supreme Court Judge M S Liberhan the commission key identified individuals and organizations who played a direct role in planning what the commission termed as a "joint common enterprise" that lead to the destruction of the Babri Mosque.
"The Liberhan report is another testimony to the sad state of communal affairs in India and a clear verdict on deep seated resistance towards speaking the truth" said Rasheed Ahmed National President of IMC-USA. Ahmed further stated that "It took 17 years to document the two obvious facts, first that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was a premeditated criminal act by Hindutva leaders and second that BJP is simply a means for RSS to impose fascist regime in India"
Liberhan Commission named 68 individuals as the leading planners and participants directly or indirectly involved in the destruction of the Babri Mosque. Most of the perpetrators listed in the Commission report are associated with Hindutva-fascist groups such as the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal, all of whom are closely allied with the political Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP, in alliance with several other parties, was in power from 1998 to 2004. These religious extremist groups garner significant support from Non-Resident Indians living in the United States.
Dr. Hyder Khan, National Vice President of IMC-USA said that "I am hopeful that current leadership in India will take moral and bold decisions to check the criminalization of politics through regional tribunals as proposed by the Liberhan Commission and not allow the Hindutva extremist groups propagate intolerant agenda and sectarianism"
After 17 years the Muslims of India who still feel aggrieved at the criminal destruction of the mosque demand that Indian Government immediately initiate criminal and civil action against all accused in the Liberhan Report and that all politicians, individuals, and organizations involved in the crime are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Indian Muslim Council-USA is the largest advocacy organization of Indian Muslims in the United States with 10 chapters across the nation.
Contact
Dr. Hyder Khan
Tel: 1-800-839-7270
E-Mail: info@imc-usa.org
References:
Complete Liberhan Commission Report
http://imc-usa.org/reports/liberhan.comission.report.inquiring.destruction.babri.masjid.ayodhya.dec.6th.1992.htm
For History, Chronology of events including pictures and video related to Babri Masjid demolition
http://babrimasjid.info/
Babri Masjid demolition was planned: Liberhan
http://www.hindu.com/2009/11/25/stories/2009112558130100.htm
Kalyan govt executed demolition plan: Liberhan Commission
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5265687.cms
Searing indictment of RSS, BJP, but action to be taken: nothing
http://www.hindu.com/2009/11/25/stories/2009112560941000.htm
Liberhan Commission submits Babri Masjid demolition report to PM
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=adcbd5f4-88fd-4ced-b50b-83fbe32e1f37
'Vajpayee, Advani brought India to brink of communal discord'
http://www.centralchronicle.com/viewnews.asp?articleID=20190
Indian Muslim Council USA
Indian American Muslim group demands immediate civil and criminal action against all accused in the Liberhan Report
For Immediate Release
Washington D.C.,
December 6, 2009
Indian Muslim Council-USA (http://www.imc-usa.org), an advocacy group dedicated towards safeguarding India's pluralist and tolerant ethos, demands the Indian government to bring the criminals to justice involved in the demolition of the 16th century Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya in the State of Uttar Pradesh, India as identified in the Report of the Liberhan Ayodhya Commission of Inquiry that was released recently.
Indian Muslim Council-USA further demands that the Indian government honor the promise given by the former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to re-build the mosque on its original site.
On December 6th, 1992 defying the orders of the Supreme Court of India and their own promise to the nation, the Hindutva fascist forces demolished the historic Babri Mosque in northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. This 16th century Muslim place of worship was destroyed by a frenzied mob of kar-sevaks in spite of assurances from the Hindutva Leaders and the State Administration officials that only symbolic prayers will be performed and that the structure of the Babri Mosque will be safe.
The Liberhan Commission appointed by the Indian government to investigate the destruction of the Babri Mosque submitted the report earlier this year that took more than 16 years of proceedings and recording statements of politicians, bureaucrats and police officials. Led by Indian Supreme Court Judge M S Liberhan the commission key identified individuals and organizations who played a direct role in planning what the commission termed as a "joint common enterprise" that lead to the destruction of the Babri Mosque.
"The Liberhan report is another testimony to the sad state of communal affairs in India and a clear verdict on deep seated resistance towards speaking the truth" said Rasheed Ahmed National President of IMC-USA. Ahmed further stated that "It took 17 years to document the two obvious facts, first that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was a premeditated criminal act by Hindutva leaders and second that BJP is simply a means for RSS to impose fascist regime in India"
Liberhan Commission named 68 individuals as the leading planners and participants directly or indirectly involved in the destruction of the Babri Mosque. Most of the perpetrators listed in the Commission report are associated with Hindutva-fascist groups such as the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal, all of whom are closely allied with the political Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP, in alliance with several other parties, was in power from 1998 to 2004. These religious extremist groups garner significant support from Non-Resident Indians living in the United States.
Dr. Hyder Khan, National Vice President of IMC-USA said that "I am hopeful that current leadership in India will take moral and bold decisions to check the criminalization of politics through regional tribunals as proposed by the Liberhan Commission and not allow the Hindutva extremist groups propagate intolerant agenda and sectarianism"
After 17 years the Muslims of India who still feel aggrieved at the criminal destruction of the mosque demand that Indian Government immediately initiate criminal and civil action against all accused in the Liberhan Report and that all politicians, individuals, and organizations involved in the crime are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Indian Muslim Council-USA is the largest advocacy organization of Indian Muslims in the United States with 10 chapters across the nation.
Contact
Dr. Hyder Khan
Tel: 1-800-839-7270
E-Mail: info@imc-usa.org
References:
Complete Liberhan Commission Report
http://imc-usa.org/reports/liberhan.comission.report.inquiring.destruction.babri.masjid.ayodhya.dec.6th.1992.htm
For History, Chronology of events including pictures and video related to Babri Masjid demolition
http://babrimasjid.info/
Babri Masjid demolition was planned: Liberhan
http://www.hindu.com/2009/11/25/stories/2009112558130100.htm
Kalyan govt executed demolition plan: Liberhan Commission
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5265687.cms
Searing indictment of RSS, BJP, but action to be taken: nothing
http://www.hindu.com/2009/11/25/stories/2009112560941000.htm
Liberhan Commission submits Babri Masjid demolition report to PM
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=adcbd5f4-88fd-4ced-b50b-83fbe32e1f37
'Vajpayee, Advani brought India to brink of communal discord'
http://www.centralchronicle.com/viewnews.asp?articleID=20190
Indian Muslim Council USA
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
