BABRI MASJID
Pamela Philipose on Congress Government's Role in Demolition
The fate that visited a hoary three-domed mosque in December 1992 is today being played out upon the edifice that is the Congress. When 22 Congress MLAs smelt something in Lucknow's air and responded it was an open acknowledgement that the party that Mahatma Gandhi had died for no longer exists.
The betrayal goes far deeper than that by Lucknow's notorious 22. Never has this process been more manifest than on the issue of secularism. Defined variously by Gandhi and Nehru, it nevertheless came to mean a commitment to the idea of a nation comprising many communities, all of which exist in amity and enjoy equal rights and liberties.
Officially, the Congress is still a "secular" party. Even its most recent public document - the AICC resolution from Calcutta this August - reiterated that the "Congress Party is duty-bound to warn the people of this country that a diehard entity like the RSS will have to be fought politically by all votaries of a democratic, secular and egalitarian dispensation", But words mean what words do. There has not been a shred of evidence to suggest that this party is capable of politically challenging the communal project of the RSS. The one- time Congress voter has even stopped responding to the sound and fury of plenary pronouncements even as the party's percentage share of votes has steadily declined from 39.5 in 1989 to 36.42 in 1991 to 28.8 in 1996.
The Rajiv era marked the first clear break with the party's secular agenda. It could be discerned in the whiff of ammonia unleashed by the remarkably effective Rediffusion ad series for Rajiv Gandhi's 1984 campaign. The visual of barbed wire and a text that described Pakistan's borders creeping up to people's doorsteps seemed to jab an accusing finger at every Sikh. The enactment of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill in 1986 as an attempt to win over Muslim public opinion, in the wake of the Shah Bano judgment, paralleled the orders of a Faizabad district judge to open the locks of the Babari Masjid to Hindus.
On November 6, on the eve of the 1989 elections, Rajiv Gandhi allowed the foundation stone of the Ram Temple to be laid and then, shortly thereafter, had the construction stopped. The move was a decisive one. Former Cabinet Secretary B.G. Deshmukh once revealed that he had advised the PM at that stage to publicly state that the Masjid would never be demolished. Significantly, Rajiv Gandhi did not do so. To him must really go the honour of being the first kar sewak on the domes, pickaxe in hand.
For the Congress then, the hope from November 6, 1989 to December 6, 1992 was a logical one. Under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, the politics of shuffle and waffle was turned into a fine art. In his book, Unfinished Innings, then home secretary Madhav Godbole revealed that Rao remained indifferent to the detailed contingency plan that the Home Ministry had drawn up to deal with the Babari issue months before the actual demolition.
S.B. Chavan, then Home Minister, seems anxious to transfer his burden of guilt to Rao's capable shoulders, going by an interview he gave to a TV channel some months ago. But he cannot rewrite history. After all, wasn't it this man who, a day after L.K. Advani's speech on December 2 stating that "Kar sewa does not mean bhajans and kirtans", assured the Lok Sabha that he had no reason to doubt the intentions of the Kalyan government in UP or that of the BJP President? Short of shouting "Jai Shri Ram", the PM and his Home Minister did their bit to bring those domes down.
The perfidy continued. Not once has the Congress clearly and unequivocally condemned the demolition since then. Many within the Congress, like Arjun Singh, would like to appear more principled than they actually were at that point. Not one of them demurred when a resolution reposing confidence in the Rao leadership two days after the demolition got passed. A white paper, duly produced, whitewashed the party's own role in it.
The politics of shuffle and waffle still marks the party's responses to the Masjid issue. In January 1996 Union Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, feeling the heat of the impending elections, acknowledged that his party had made mistakes and begged crowds in Bareilly not to punish it again and again. The official rejoinder to this came swiftly. It was not us, it was Kalyan Singh who was to blame, clarified B.P. Maurya, then AICC general secretary.
Again at the AICC session in Calcutta the moment an unconditional apology for the demolition was mooted, the professional "water-downers" were at hand. The apology, when it came, was so mealy-mouthed that it might as well have not been made: "The Congress also regrets its inability to carry out the legal responsibility in protecting the Babari Masjid". There is no change of heart here, just another shuffle, another waffle.
Only Advani's famed phrase can describe such secularism. It's pseudo all right. For the BJP, secularism by its very nature, is a false value. But the falseness of the Congress brand of secularism is a different matter. It spells the demolition of the very foundation on which it rests.
(Source: The Indian Express, 28 October, 1997)
