Comment

Why is everyone dismissing the Liberhan Commission report? Because it didn’t come out with any startling new findings? Because it merely confirmed what all of us knew all along? Surely that is the purpose of a commission — to confirm through evidence what is hearsay, to put an official stamp on what is generally known through anecdotal evidence? After its many hearings and sifting through voluminous evidence, did the Warren Commission set up to investigate president John Kennedy’s assassination come up with anything new? It merely confirmed what everyone suspected.

You can only blame the Commission for the ridiculous 17 years it took to bring out its report. That’s something future governments must guard against; you can’t have retired judges extending their working life at public expense. The significant thing about the report though is that even the BJP has not disputed its findings.

Did any of us doubt that Kalyan Singh as chief minister of UP at that time was one of the principal villains of the Babri demolition? Let alone deny his role, he has been crowing about it to the media, calling it his finest moment. Other members of the saffron brigade have been equally brazen, secure in the knowledge that no legal action will be taken against them.

Only two people have kept quiet about their own roles in the Babri demolition, though at least one of them was its main architect (can you call someone who brings down a structure an architect? One should call him an anti-architect). It now turns out that Lal Krishna Advani, when he made the famous statement about the day being “the saddest of my life” was not talking about the demolition, but his sorrow that the movement he started with his infamous rath yatra had got out of his control.

(A small aside here. People have said that the Babri Masjid was a disused monument and Muslims should therefore have not bothered about its demolition. This argument overlooks two important points. The first is that when Babri Masjid was demolished it didn’t just bring down a useless building; what it brought down was a vital idea, the idea of a secular India, the idea that has made our country far, far greater than many of our bigoted neighbours. The second point is the importance of imagery. Those jubilant young men waving their flags and hammers on the dome of the masjid were conveying a message of victory and defeat which was potent and has remained vividly in our collective consciousness to this day).

The one ‘revelation’ of the Liberhan Commission has been about the role of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, hitherto the acceptable face of the BJP. Again, is this a surprise? As PM of this country, he presided over one of our country’s saddest chapters, the carnage of Gujarat in 2002. Narasimha Rao at least had the fig leaf of an excuse that UP state was ruled by an opposition party. Vajpayee had no such excuse: Narendra Modi was the BJP’s man, yet Vajpayee did nothing. All he did was visit Gujarat after nearly two weeks had passed and hundreds of innocent people had been killed and then give a high-sounding lecture on the need for a moral government.

The recent video tape of Vajpayee’s public lecture on the eve of the Babri Masjid demolition, shows him in his true colours. He was exultant, chortling with undisguised delight at the destruction that was to follow the next day. This is the real Vajpayee, the Mr Hyde his Dr Jekyll has skilfully hidden from public view for so long.

These are the two men whose guilt has kept them quiet about the Liberhan Commission, one an unapologetic communalist, the other a hypocritical secularist. Advani, the man single-handedly responsible for destroying the social fabric so carefully nurtured after Independence. And Vajpayee, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The BJP should thank its lucky stars that the two are now quietly fading away into the oblivion they so richly deserve.