Only those who saw "grave communal disorder" as "a natural, if ghastly, process tending in its own way to the solution of the Indian problem" would have stood on the sidelines silently - or cheered lustily - as the Babari Masjid was reduced to rubble five years ago today. We now know that the Narasimha Rao government at the Centre was kept fully briefed about the deteriorating situation and could have intervened to prevent the mosque from being destroyed. Yet it chose not to. For this reason, the Congress is as guilty as the BJP for what happened in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.
The harsh reality of what the (BJP) did will not be forgotten for a long time. And the Congress, under whose watchful eyes the ancient monument was brought down, will never be able to live down its dishonourable role in the disaster either.
The demolition of the masjid was the culmination of a cynical and irresponsible game of competitive communalism played by the Congress and the BJP. The role of Rajiv Gandhi in reopening a dispute which had remained dormant for decades is too well known to bear repetition. The 1980s were a time when the Congress party openly fostered communalism on a broad scale, sometimes targeting Sikhs (as in the November 1984 massacres) and sometimes Muslims (as in Meerut in 1987). Together, Congress and BJP leaders tried their best to communalise the polity and divide Indians on the basis of religion - as a means of either holding on to or capturing power for themselves.
This strategy has not worked well for either party. It is not accidental that Congress today is on the verge of irrelevance. Its leaders have no agenda ... In many ways, the Congress party is the most spectacular victim of the curse of Ayodhya. The party couldn't claim credit either for the demolition of the masjid or for saving it. It could not even prosecute those involved ... All the cases launched by it are still meandering their way through our labyrinthine judicial system due to a lack of official cooperation. In the three years that the Congress remained in power after the destruction ... the Liberhans commission ... barely got off the ground, again due to governmental indifference.
Given its actual record on the communal front, how then was the Congress different from the BJP, a party it claimed to be in mortal combat with? this lack of space between the two is what has led to the decline of the Congress, especially in UP, with its former support base going either to the BJP or to those seen as putting up a real fight against the BJP.
The BJP's calculation that its reckless disregard for legal norms ... would generate momentum which would take it all the way to New Delhi has not happened and the party has been forced to backtrack. The fact that its leaders today are shamefaced and evasive about an act which was meant to be the crowning glory of a renascent 'Hindu nationalism' shows that they are aware of the limitations of their divisive politics. The experience of the past 18 months would suggest that the BJP is still far from overcoming the 'untouchability' factor brought about by its adherence to an agenda of historical revanchism.
Its leaders constantly raise the emotive issue of mandirs: most recently, Mr. L.K. Advani told a gathering of Muslims that should they give up their claim to the disputed site in Ayodhya, the BJP would not press for the 'restitution' of 'temples' in Varanasi and Mathura. Even this 'concession', however, has already been shot down ...The RSS rally in Lucknow attended by UP chief minister Kalyan Singh and other BJP leaders (told the) Muslims to give up their mosques in Varanasi and Mathura.
The major weakness of the BJP, however, is not that it is a communal party but that, like the other parties which are 'secular' it too has no solutions to the problems people face ... All it wants to do is replace the Congress as the central reference point of Indian politics. Above all, the BJP is a party of status quo and is deeply opposed to changes which will empower ordinary citizens ... BJP.'s 'Hindu nationalism' is a cover for an agenda that is totally sterile.
If Ayodhya discredited both the Congress and the BJP ... The politics of the 'Third Front' suffers from a natural limitation beyond which it seems unable to develop. In the name of secularism, the country has witnessed a government that has not only done nothing to redress people's grievances on the communal front (such as giving them justice) but has also not paid any attention to delivering justice on the social front ... The problems India faces are structural and run much deeper than the threat any one party poses. Five years after Ayodhya, it is time to move the debate beyond merely identifying who is 'secular' and who is not and then uniting on that basis ... If a political formation .. , on the basis of opposition to the BJP has no other agenda and, if elected, does nothing to fulfil the basic needs of the people, it will only end up handing the country over to the BJP. (Source: The Times of India, 6 December, 1997)
