Artists Of Ambiguity

PREM SHANKAR JHA
Senior Journalist

Demolition men A file photo of the razing of the Babri masjid Photo: AFP

JUSTICE LIBERHAN has taken 17 long years to complete his report. In those nearly two decades, the Indian political landscape changed almost beyond recognition. Between 1998 and 2004, under Vajpayee and Advani’s stewardship, the BJP moved away from its vision of a Hindu India towards a pluralistic one and gave India, by and large, a good government. Mr Vajpayee personally led the effort to make a lasting improvement in India-Pakistan relations and took the crucial step of holding free and fair elections in Kashmir. Not only did his government turn India into a nuclear power, it handled the political and economic fallout so skilfully that India scarcely felt the pinch. Finally, it was his government that brought down interest rates to less than half their levels between 2000 and 2002 and kick-started the prolonged economic boom of which Indians are so proud today. Dr Manmohan Singh’s government, therefore, inherited a state with solid political and economic foundations and was able to build upon them.

Success has changed what the Indian people expect of their leaders. A growing demand for effective government is taming the dreaded anti-incumbency factor and bringing a new accountability to state politics. It has led to a massive turning away from the politics of discord. The BJP could have justifiably claimed a large part of the credit for the change, but it did not see the change continuing. For five years, it dithered over whether to persist with Vajpayee’s policies of moderation and pluralism or revert to Hindu monolithism once again.

In May, the Indian electorate soundly punished it for its failure. The rebellion of the ‘Vajpayee moderates’ that this provoked within the party showed that large sections of it, including Mr Advani himself, had belatedly learned their lesson. So would it not have been better to give the Liberhan commission a quiet burial – report or no report?

The answer is no. The nation, the minorities and, above all, the families of the victims of the riots that erupted after 1992 have a right to know who was responsible. But they did not have to be subjected to the distorted version originally leaked to the Indian Express, which specifically attacked Atal Bihari Vajpayee. According to this version, Justice Liberhan had concluded that “there is nothing to show that these leaders (Vajpayee and Advani) were either unaware of what was going on or innocent of any wrongdoing”. But what the report actually says is that “It cannot be assumed even for a moment that LK Advani, AB Vajpayee or MM Joshi did not know the designs of the Sangh Parivar”(p 958). And on the very next page, it says, “Be that as it may, the evidence that has been laid before the commission does not show that the pseudomoderates were in charge of the situation, much less capable of changing the course that the campaign was taking”.

In sum, Justice Liberhan has come to two conclusions: first, that it cannot be assumed from the lack of direct evidence (of their complicity) that Vajpayee and Advani did not know of the plot; and second, that although they knew about it, they were in no position to stop it. Given Vajpayee and Advani’s eminence in the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, the second conclusion is scarcely credible. One is forced to conclude, therefore, that Justice Liberhan has come very close to contradicting himself.

What Justice Liberhan has rightly done is to hold the BJP’s leaders vicariously responsible for the demolition of the mosque because they took (or, in Vajpayee’s case, did not prevent) actions (between 1988 and 1991) that created an atmosphere conducive to it. This is something that even Advani has readily conceded about himself and his party. But Vajpayeee’s indictment, even on these grounds, is more problematic. For he was not even present in Ayodhya on December 6 and had openly opposed Advani’s rath yatra to Ayodhya in 1990. Indeed, as I was privileged to know at that time, Vajpayee had been in continuous contact with prime minister VP Singh in the days before Advani’s rath entered Uttar Pradesh and had admitted frankly that he felt like a fish out of water in the Sangh Parivar of 1990. But, he confessed, he had been a member of the RSS since the age of 12 and felt that he had no option but to try and change the organisation from within.

A close reading of the report also shows that to arrive at his core conclusion — that the demolition plot involved the whole of the Sangh Parivar — Justice Liberhan relied upon an impression of the internal structure of the Parivar that is unsupported by the voluminous research has been done on the subject. This research has shown that, although headed by the RSS, it is a loosely structured organisation whose component elements enjoy a considerable degree of autonomy in performing their tasks. It is therefore perfectly possible that the RSS leadership organised the plot and delegated its commission to a specific group or groups in the Sangh Parivar without others knowing about it. If nothing else, the ‘need to know’ principle would have dissuaded the masterminds from involving more than the minimum number of persons. Thus, it is entirely possible that not just Vajpayee and Advani, but most members of the BJP were in the dark.

The likelihood that they were in fact kept entirely in the dark increases when one examines the direction in which they were taking the BJP after the 1991 elections. The BJP’s failure — after six years of ‘Hindu’ mobilisation — to secure more than 21 percent of the vote had convinced them that it would never be able to come to power on its own on the narrow ideological base of Hindutva. They had, therefore, concluded that the only way forward was to build electoral alliances with the opponents of the Congress in other states. As a result, they had already begun to back-pedal on the building of a temple at Ayodhya, not to mention the abolition of Article 370 of the Constitution and other ‘core’ issues of the party.

It is therefore entirely possible that the plot to demolish the Babri Masjid was hatched not even by the RSS as a whole but by the hard core within it with the purpose of forcing the BJP back to the ‘purity’ of Hindutva once again. Had the BJP won the state elections that were held in 1993 in the four states from which Narasimha Rao had forced them out after the demolition, the hard liners would have won. But it was trounced in three out of those four states and Vajpayee and Advani stood vindicated.

Throughout the next five years, Vajpayee built alliances with secular non-Congress parties while Advani diligently recruited retired professionals from the bureaucracy, the armed forces and business to modernise the party and strengthen its capacity to govern. Nor did Vajpayee give this up when he came to power, for he continued to lecture the Sangh Parivar, in his annual ‘musings’, on the virtues of diversity and religious pluralism.

But in the end, Vajpayee was unable to follow the logic of his beliefs to their logical conclusion. Throughout his six years in office, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal repeatedly attacked Christians and Muslims with the intention of forcing Vajpayee to either leave the Sangh Parivar or become complicit in their actions. Tragically, he temporised and tried to patch matters up each time. This ambivalence climaxed in the carnage in Gujarat in 2002 and cost the NDA the 2004 elections, for several of the BJP’s allies in the NDA felt that they had lost in their home states because they had forfeited the Muslim vote. The voters therefore punished the BJP for 2002, but history has only begun to extract its price from Vajpayee.

WRITER’S EMAIL
premjha@airtelmail.in