by Kuldip Nayar
I wish I had asked G.B. Pant, when I was his information officer, about Babri Masjid. It is now well known that he was sympathetic to the people who placed the idols in the mosque on 23 December 1949. Nehru had warned Pant that ‘the whole atmosphere of UP has been changing for the worse from the communal point of view. Indeed, UP is becoming almost a foreign land for me. I do not fit in with them.’ Nehru’s was a voice of pathos, of a person who had been born and brought up in hate-free UP. He vainly referred to such Congress members who were behind the Hindu fanatics and responsible for the installation of the idols at Babri Masjid.
Pant never replied to Nehru’s indignant letter to him in which the latter had argued that there was no historical proof to support the temple theory. Pant, however, wrote a letter to Sardar Patel to argue that the masjid was originally built after demolishing a temple and the entire matter was sub judice.
It was known even then that a local administrator, K.K. Nayar, had placed the idols in the masjid on the night of 22–3 December 1949. The RSS’s official organ, the Organiser, reported the event as follows: ‘On the historic morning of 23 December 1949, the idols of Sri Ramachandra and Sita Devi miraculously appeared at the Janmasthan.’ Nayar was rewarded by the RSS in the form of a Lok Sabha ticket given to his wife Shakuntala in 1951, on which she was elected.
After the installation of the idols, an FIR was filed to the effect that two policemen were responsible for the act, and although nothing came of it, it showed that some outsiders were responsible for the mischief and that nothing like a miracle or pargat (appearing from nowhere), had occurred as many believers made out.
The Pant government in UP had to put a lock on the gate of the disputed Babri Masjid–Ramjanambhoomi site because of the heated controversy between Hindus and Muslims regarding the origins of the edifice. Muslims claimed that the masjid had stood at Ayodhya since the days of Babur, while Hindus maintained that masjid had been built after demolishing a Rama temple.
The climax came when Babri Masjid was demolished to the last stone on 6 December 1992 by thousands of kar sevaks egged on by the BJP and RSS leadership. It was daylight murder of secularism. So delighted were the BJP leaders who witnessed the demolition that they leapt into one another’s arms. They said it was a mere structure, yet this structure represented India’s secular ethos, the Ganga–Yamuna culture. One newspaper aptly wrote: ‘Mahatma Gandhi was shot at on January 30, 1948 but he died on December 6, 1992.’
So widespread was the protest that Advani resigned from the Lok Sabha to wipe off the stains of the demolition. The gesture proved to be a farce because he was not slow in taking back his resignation.
My information was that Rao had connived at the demolition. He sat at puja when the kar sevaks began pulling down the mosque and rose only when the last stone had been removed. Madhu Limaye told me that during the puja Rao’s aide whispered in his ears that the masjid had been demolished. Within seconds, the puja was over.
When there were riots in the wake of the masjid’s demolition, Rao invited some senior journalists to his house. He was at pains to explain to us how his government had made every arrangement to stop the demolition. Rao said that he was betrayed by UP Chief Minister Kalyan Singh. I asked him how a small temple could have been erected overnight at the site when the Centre was at the helm of affairs having dismissed the Kalyan Singh government. Rao said he had attempted to send a contingent of CRPF by plane to Lucknow but they were unable to land because of bad weather. He did not explain the inaction of Central forces at Ayodhya, but assured me that the temple would not be there ‘for long’.
Rao tried to wash off the stigma of the demolition of the mosque when he appeared before the Justice Liberhan Commission, appointed to apportion blame for the masjid’s destruction.
Admitting that the structure which had been demolished was a mosque, Rao said:
What else could it be? Was it a dwelling house? When the Government of Uttar Pradesh says that namaz was going on there until 1949, irrespective of the date, what else could it be but a mosque?
Rao said before the commission:
Personally I was not aware of the shilanyas but I can refer the Commission to Mr Buta Singh, who was then Home Minister, and who according to my information, was dealing with the subject from day to day. I believe that he will be able to shed some light on this. [Buta Singh told me when he was Home Minister that “he would not be a Sikh if he had not got the Ram temple built at the disputed site”.]
Affirming that the demolition structure was a mosque, Rao said:
“What else could it be? Was it a dwelling house? When the Government of Uttar Pradesh says that namaz was going on there until 1949, irrespective of the date, what else could it be but a mosque?”
Council for the Commission (Q): “Whether he had come across any anti-Muslim rhetoric during the Ayodhya movement”.
Mr. Rao (Answer): “As you find it today, as it has evolved today over a period of time, yes it was there”.
Q. BJP accused Congress government to get electoral benefits out of Ramjanmbhoomi movement and the Congress allowed to have shilanyas near the site of the masjid on Nov. 10, 1989.
Mr. Rao: “Personally I was not aware of the shilanayas but I can refer the Hon’ble Commission to Mr. Buta Singh, who was then Home Minister, and who, according to my information, was dealing with the subject from day to day. I believe that he will be able to shed some light on this.”
Q. How do you see the role of VHP and Dharma Sansad?
Mr. Rao: I refused to acknowledge them as organizations.
Q. What about cultural nationalism.
Mr. Rao: “Indian culture went far out of India, it also spread to Indonesia, Thailand and so many other areas. So the geographical entity which is called ‘India’ today is much smaller than what is comprehended in the phrase “Indian culture’.”
The Liberhan Commission gave Rao a clean chit, but a comment of Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi’s son, was significant. During an election campaign he said that if someone from the Gandhi family had been there, the masjid wouldn’t have fallen.
That temple is still there under government protection. I learnt later that State Minister for Home Affairs Rajesh Pilot told Rao that he could remove the temple overnight but Rao did not allow him to do so. I do not think any government at the Centre will dare to demolish the temple that has arisen overnight. Any such step would arouse a groundswell of anger from the majority community, however reprehensible the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
Rajiv Gandhi too is not immune from the blame because he began his election campaign from the place adjacent to Babri Masjid and laid the Shilanayas (on 10 November 1989) despite the Allahabad High Court ruling that the status quo be maintained at the disputed site.
Advani’s rath yatra brought the communal politics of the Sangh Parivar, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, and BJP into full focus, and it was self-evident that Advani had an eye on the UP elections. He reaped the harvest when the BJP won 57 seats in UP.
The RSS which assured control of these factions I installed Kalyan Singh as chief minister (24 June 1991) and prepared to demolish the masjid in a planned operation. Kalyan Singh and L.K. Advani’s hands were stained with blood of Muslims who were killed in the wake of masjid’s demolition.
Liberhan took seventeen years to prepare the report but gave an accurate account of what had happened. The RSS and BJP leaders had toured the entire country collecting money for the construction of the temple and spread communal venom.
Liberhan held 68 persons culpable, including L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Kalyan Singh and, surprisingly, Atal Bihari Vajpayee who appeared to have distanced himself from the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign. (When Vajpayee came to London I was high commissioner. He stayed with me. I asked him why he had come here and not gone to Ayodhya as other BJP leaders were doing. Vajpayee said: ‘Jo mandir ke bhagat hain wo Ayodhya gaye aur jo desh ke bhagat hain wo yahan aa gaye.’ [Those who are devotees of the temple have gone
there and those who are lovers of the country have come here.’]
The Babri Masjid demolition shocked me beyond measure. I knew that the BJP would try to create some mischief there but did not expect the party to go to the extent of destroying the mosque. A few Gandhians rang me from Ayodhya two days before the demolition saying they had been beaten up by RSS workers because of their silent march for the protection of the mosque.
The masjid for me was more than a structure. It represented our pluralistic ethos and the composite culture which we had built brick by brick over the centuries. I was not present at the site but saw everything on television. Subsequently, I watched a documentary which showed all that happened in graphic detail.
That the RSS and its parivar were triumphant was not surprising but some of the images, for instance Uma Bharti jumping on Murli Manohar Joshi’s shoulders were quite shameful. I was certain about Kalyan Singh’s active participation and thought the Supreme Court let him off excessively lightly when it imprisoned him for only one day as punishment for contempt of court. He had brazenly flouted the Supreme Court order to the Uttar Pradesh government to maintain the status quo.
I wondered whether Vajpayee’s remark to me at London was serious because the day after the demolition I met him to request that the BJP should make amends. I was horrified when he said: ‘Let the temple come up.’ My experience tells me that the liberal Vajpayee took a back seat whenever the RSS asserted itself. Liberhan was correct in characterizing Vajpayee as a ‘pseudo-moderate’. The observation in the report was: ‘There can be no greater betrayal or crime in a democracy and this Commission has no hesitation in condemning these pseudo-moderates for their sins of omission.’
I also met Jaswant Singh, a BJP leader who was then a close friend. I told him that he should resign from the party. He said he had not slept all night and was deeply disturbed by the destruction of the Babri Masjid. ‘Suppose I were to resign, tell me which party should I join?’, he asked. I told him that was his business but he could not remain in a party that had severely damaged India’s pluralism. I could appreciate his feelings but I began distancing myself from him.
Riots in Mumbai broke out when followers of the Shiv Sena and BJP came out on the streets to celebrate the demolition of the masjid raising anti-Muslim slogans, and as had been the case in earlier riots, the police sided with the majority community. The riots shook Narasimha Rao and he sent Defence Minister Sharad Pawar to Mumbai to supervise the arrangements to curb them but did not requisition the army. This reminded me of the 1984 riots in Delhi. A contingent of the army undertook a flag march in Mumbai, as was the case in 1984 in Delhi but only after the full fury of the riots had subsided.
The Government of India appointed Justice B.N. Srikrishna to inquire into the riots of Mumbai during December 1992–January 1993. After the announcement was made there were bomb blasts in Mumbai (25 May 1993). Muslims were so incensed by the masjid’s demolition and the murder of so many members of their community that they retaliated. The Srikrishna Commission’s terms of reference were expanded to include the bomb blasts.
The Commission’s verdict was damning. Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray, MP Madhukar Sarpotdar, and other leaders like Gajanan Kirtikar, and Milind Vaidya were directly indicted. The report was also critical of ‘Muslim aggression’. Srikrishna also made adverse remarks against the Mumbai police.
I was so impressed by the Srikrishna Report that I rang Justice Srikrishna to congratulate him when I was in Mumbai within a week of the report’s publication. I went to personally tell him what a wonderful job he had done to strengthen the cause of justice and fair play. I was surprised to find in his room life-size idols of gods and goddesses and a kamandal (a vessel which Hindus carry in water to a temple). Finding me somewhat surprised, Srikrishna said that he was ‘a practising Hindu’ and went to the temple every day.
Aware of Pawar’s proximity to Shiv Sena I did not expect any action against Bal Thackeray but thought the government would take some action, particularly against the police officers mentioned in the Srikrishna Report. Nothing happened and the report was filed like so many others on the riots. One day I rang Srikrishna in Delhi and he remarked that had he known about the fate of the report he would have not accepted chairmanship of the commission. ‘I could have disposed of many cases during the time I wasted at the commission.’
I wish the lack of action on the Srikrishna Report had evoked a countrywide debate on Hindu–Muslim relations and the role of the security agencies when dealing with the minority community. Nothing of the kind took place.
The prejudice between the two communities continues to be demonstrated in one form or another. Partition, it seems, has only aggravated the issue and not solved it in any way. The two-nation theory has disturbed the sense of accommodation between the two communities that was shown when they lived together for centuries. The countryside in India remains more or less unaffected and follows ancient traditions and norms. Despite the deliberate policy of the RSS parivar to establish a Hindu rashtra (nation) the country is by and large pluralistic. In recent times the evidence of Muslim extremism has also surfaced but appears to take inspiration more from across the border than from what happens within India. For the past two years the evidence of Hindu terrorism has also come to the fore. This is ominous for the future.
Studies by the home ministry have revealed that communal riots have their source more or less in equal proportion, 50 per cent instigated by Hindus and 50 per cent by Muslims. The studies have, however, shown that the loss of Muslim lives is far in excess of Hindu lives. Another disturbing aspect which the studies have revealed is that over the years the rioters have developed a passion to kill rather than injure.
Of some twenty-five inquiry reports on riots in India which I have analyzed I have found that the same old issues such as playing music in front of a mosque, the route of a procession, and raising provocative slogans lead to the initial trouble which essentially testifies to the failure of intelligence to anticipate a riot or identify extremists seeking to foment trouble. The authorities choose to take only perfunctory action, if any at all, before a riot occurs, which is generally one sided because the police tend to side with the majority community.
Inquiry commissions appointed in the 1970s and later make one point in common: the anti-Muslim policy of the RSS has fouled the atmosphere. Even at places where Hindus and Muslims have lived peacefully for centuries, the RSS has been able to foul the environment. There are innumerable examples of this.
The Congress cauldron was boiling, not because of the Babri Masjid’s demolition but because of internal conflicts. Sonia Gandhi never liked Narasimha Rao, particularly when he assumed both leadership of the Congress party and its government. She did not want to join issue with him, preferring to remain aloof from party matters. Even so, the infighting within the Congress and its shrinking space in the country bothered her. Many Congress leaders from the Centre and the states met her individually to appeal to her to lead the party. To them she seemed the only person who represented the consensus in the party.
Her inclination was to stay away from politics, as she had advised her husband to do. Even so, she was convinced that the future of the country was interlinked with the future of the Congress. Her gravest concern was that communal forces, representing the BJP were claiming the political space. The only occasion I spoke to her she came across as a committed secularist who firmly believed that pluralism was the bedrock of Indian society. She devoted 50 minutes out of one hour to underline how democracy and whatever economic plan the nation had in mind would go awry if communalism was not suppressed. I could gauge that she was coming around to the view that she would have to join politics if she wanted to fight against communalism and that the only instrument she had for this was the Congress.
Had she wanted the party’s presidentship she could have merely sent a message to Sitaram Kesri, who was holding the charge, to resign and he would have obeyed her even if Rao had opposed the mov
e. Kesri told me that she wanted to publicly demonstrate the strength she wielded in the Congress. She therefore held a parallel meeting of key Congress leaders at the very time when Kesri called them to his house. Virtually no one came for Kesri’s meeting and he resigned. He went out, unwept and unsung although he had been the party’s treasurer for many decades. He was hardly a person to evoke attention because he was involved in too many scandals and undesirable people in the country. My regret was over the manner in which he was pushed out. Did this reflect Congress culture? During Sonia Gandhi’s tenure as party chief, the Congress blossomed and went from strength to strength.
In the elections in 1996, the BJP was the largest party with 161 seats. The Congress under Sonia Gandhi won 140, trailing the BJP by 21. I was therefore surprised to hear the BJP claim that it would be able to muster sufficient votes to prove its majority. President K.R. Narayanan’s decision to give it an opportunity to prove its majority on the floor of the House was that it was the largest party in the Lok Sabha. I did not see any other political party supporting the BJP and wondered how it would reach the magic figure of 277 in the 545-member House. On the thirteenth day, before seeking the vote of confidence, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said that he was going to submit the resignation of his government because no party had agreed to support them. I saw from the press gallery the first BJP government since Independence resigning. It had been a foolhardy exercise destined to end unceremoniously.
The Congress party had no choice other than to support a hastily cobbled together 15-party minority government. This was the United Front coalition which came to power with the sole purpose of ‘containing communal forces and consolidating the secular forces’. That was how first Deve Gowda and then Inder Gujral became prime ministers.