Liberhan’s wasted effort

Seventeen years of effort have yielded a mouse. The Liberhan Ayodhya commission, set up to probe the demolition of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid structure, has not said anything that we have not heard before. We all know who was responsible for bringing down the domes (some hardcore members of the Sangh parivar), who failed to stop the demolition (the Narasimha Rao and Kalyan Singh governments), and who was responsible for the build-up and escalation of communal tension before after the events of December 6, 1992  (the Sangh Parivar, and rabid elements of the Muslim leadership).
A close reading of the report shows that Liberhan wasted everybody’s time and the taxpayer’s money in these 17 years. His disclosures do not add anything significant to our knowledge of what really transpired that day. He did not need 1,029 pages and Rs8 crore to pronounce judgment on the Sangh Parivar, for the latter has never hidden its agenda from anyone.

After fulminating against all and sundry, Liberhan does not even clearly answer the central question: which specific individuals actually brought the structure down? While he blames everyone in the parivar for conspiring in word and deed to crash the structure so that a Ram temple can be built, we don’t know who wielded the pickaxes and crowbars. His best stab at the question is an incredulous one: “The hands that tore down the disputed structure and shredded the very fabric of society belonged to the common man”.

Democracies celebrate the common man and his uncommon wisdom; Liberhan has reduced him to a gullible goop. The common man he is blaming is really a mob that was egged on by the Parivar’s agent provocateurs.

But let that pass. If you are the suspicious kind, you would wonder whether Liberhan is really batting for the Congress party. The general naming of all Sangh Parivar outfits cannot but serve the party’s propaganda interests. The party can now quote chapter and verse from the Liberhan scripture because it gets off lightly. The Narasimha Rao government is off the hook and Kalyan Singh gets all the blame. Even the apex court’s rapporteur, Tej Shanker, is shown like a village bumpkin who is taken in by the state government’s promises to protect the structure.

The Congress should be happy with the commission’s efforts to caricature the top leadership of the BJP. Always smarting under the BJP’s efforts to label it as “pseudo-secular”, Liberhan has now given the Congress a comeback line: the BJP’s leadership’s pseudo-moderate leadership. Was it any part of Liberhan’s brief to demonise the country’s main opposition party — even if many of its members were guilty of aiding and abetting the demolition? This is no different from blaming all members of one community for the acts of a few. Liberhan’s effort to tar the entire party, including the easy-going Vajpayee, with the pseudo-moderate label is condemnable. With this one phrase, he has demolished his own credibility.

The best parts of his report relate to disclosures on Kalyan Singh’s sins of omission and commission, and the failure of the police and bureaucracy in the events leading up to the demolition. But this is the story everywhere. In Maharashtra, even after 26/11, the police are not free from political interference. Mayawati uses the bureaucracy as a pliant tool in UP, exactly the way Kalyan Singh did in the early 1990s.

Liberhan’s recommendations will thus fall on deaf ears. None of his pious recommendations will pass muster in the current political climate of suspicion between castes, religious groups, linguistic minorities and coalition partners. He wants the Centre to have the power to send in the riot police without state consent. The suggestion is dead on arrival. He wants a commission of experts to decide whether the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri area housed a temple or a mosque. This is what an Allahabad court asked when the NDA was in power, and the expert verdict was that there was some kind of temple under the structure. But several secular scholars have disputed this. So how is a new commission going to solve the problems left by history?

Liberhan’s suggestion to bar political parties from raising religious or caste issues is downright foolhardy. It is one thing to exhort them to eschew parochialism, quite another to ban them for it. Parochialism cannot be abolished this way, for politicians will then develop their own coded language to communicate their thoughts. Narendra Modi used “Mian Musharraf” effectively to demonise Muslims; Rajiv Gandhi used the Anandpur Sahib resolution to canvas for Hindu votes after Indira’s assassination. Not only that. Where will it leave parties that are already overtly religious: the Akali Dal, the All-India Muslim League and the Majlis-Ittehadul-Muslimeen, to name just a few, are all parochial even in their identities. Will they all be banned?

In the final analysis, Liberhan’s opus is — to use the ex-judge’s own coinage with some modification — little more than a pseudo-liberal’s rant against communalism.