Ever since September 30, 2010 when the high court of
Allahabad at Lucknow pronounced its verdict, my mind has been occupied
with that judgement: A medieval judgement written in an age when
secularism was farthest from the human imagination. On the way from
Chandigarh this morning I was browsing through Max Müller’s slim tract
written way back in the 19th century, now republished, Rammohan to
Ramakrishna – Ram Mohan Roy to Ramakrishna. Müller speaks of the
mythological process on the one hand, the dialogic or the dialectical
process on the other, in relation to religions of miracle and revelation.
And somewhere in his discussion of Ramakrishna he throws in this
expression, if my memory serves me right: “The miraculous tendencies of
devoted disciples… the miraculising tendencies of devoted disciples”.
It is not my purpose today to speak on the Allahabad
judgement. But before I move on to the important issues assigned to me
today, 1949 and 1992, allow me to say that the two judgements – the real
majority judgements – of Justice Sudhir Agarwal and Justice Dharam Veer
Sharma reflect, with some differences in style, language and approach but
essentially the same theme, the religion of miracle and revelation, the
miraculising tendencies of devoted disciples of an ancient, hidebound,
regressive, scriptural, ritualistic, sacramental Hinduism.
Let us return from that rhetoric to something which
happened in 1949, on December 23, 1949, which marks the starting point of
the modern history of the Babri Masjid.
Whatever be your views about the religion of Hinduism,
about the oral traditions, about Ramjanmabhoomi, Ram Janmasthan, Ram Lalla
in Ayodhya – I have very strong views on this – but whatever be your views
about history, about religion, about the oral traditions, about the
hazards and the terrors of reading oral tradition and a backward,
hidebound interpretation of religion into law, in the year of grace 2010
there can be no manner of doubt that in a way, in a manner of speaking,
all that is completely irrelevant, given what happened on December 23,
1949. At 4:00 a.m. on December 23, 1949.
That is when the idols of Ram Lalla, the baby Ram, were
surreptitiously imported beneath the central dome from the outer
courtyard, from the Ram Chabutra outside to beneath the central dome in
the inner courtyard. A first information report, or FIR, was recorded.
Though the fortuitous happenstance of his agreeing with Justice Agarwal on
giving the area under the central dome to the Hindus instead of the
Muslims makes it appear to the entire nation that he is one of the
majority judges, the September 30 judgement of Justice SU Khan of the
Lucknow bench is essentially a minority judgement. One of the great merits
of Justice Khan’s judgement is the light that it throws on the events of
December 1949.
I have by now read twice over, word by word, Justice
Agarwal’s 5,000-plus pages (in 21 volumes) and the 1,100-plus pages (in
four volumes) of Justice DV Sharma. They have to be carefully read to
develop a critique. Whatever one might say about the merits of these two
judgements on other issues, the extraordinary silence maintained by both
judges on 1949 destroys any merit their judgements might otherwise have
had.
As many as four volumes, almost five volumes, on the
Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) report. There is volume after volume
on the Vedas, on the Upanishads, on all kinds of Vedic and post-Vedic
scriptures. There is also volume after volume on the Gazetteers of Carnegy
and Nevill and Thornton and Benett, all of them in Ayodhya. There is
hardly anything on which Justice Agarwal, undoubtedly a very capable
judge, has not written. Yet he is comprehensively silent on one of the
central issues wherein the modern history of the Babri Masjid begins –
December 1949 – when the images of the child Ram, or Ram Lalla, were
installed under the central dome of the Babri Masjid. One suit that has
been decreed by the Allahabad high court is the Ram Lalla title suit, a
suit filed by the legal fiction of Ram Lalla which has a legal and
juristic personality.
Ram Lalla ki murti, December 23, 1949 ki subah, na jaane
kis tarike se, by some miracle of religion, is implanted under the
central dome and a masjid turned into a temple overnight. I asked Lal
Krishna Advani when I was cross-examining him before the Liberhan
Commission: Would you believe with your rational mind that something of
this sort could happen, that the apparition, that the image of Ram Lalla,
that the deity or the murti of Ram Lalla could itself appear one
fine morning, never before since 1528. Understandably, he ducked the
answer.
1949 to 2010. Sixty years have passed.
We have a judicial system capped by an apex court which, I
am fond of saying, is not only the most powerful but also the busiest apex
court in the world. A proactive apex court; all taken together, an
extremely capable apex court whose activism we are witnessing even today.
Would you believe it? If someone can correct me on this
point I’ll be happily corrected but to the best of my knowledge, and I
spent 10 years on the Liberhan Commission researching this, that FIR of
1949 was never investigated. A crucial FIR regarding the Babri Masjid
which would have demolished all those who sought to and did demolish the
Babri Masjid was never investigated. The criminal justice system simply
did not take off. That, I repeat – and this is not a cliché, emotion wells
up in me when I make this point over and over again – is the starting
point of the modern history of the Babri Masjid when, by a sudden,
dramatic, surreptitious, criminal overnight act, at 4:00 a.m. on the
morning of December 23, 1949 a masjid of 500 years was converted into a
temple.
The first lesson therefore is that – please internalise
this – Ayodhya goes far beyond the legal system, far beyond the justice
system, far beyond the criminal justice system. As to whatever happened
post-1949, we will come to that. But 1949 represents the visible abortion
or miscarriage of the Indian criminal justice system.
Those of you who have studied Jawaharlal Nehru, please
look up volume 14 of his Selected Works, the second series,
published by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund. Look up his letters
written in December 1949 (pages 434-444, if I am not wrong).
Although the rath yatra of 1990 nationalised the
Ayodhya movement and gave it an all-India character, before that, Babri
Masjid/ Ramjanmabhoomi was, as VP Singh told us in the Liberhan
Commission, just a local address in Ayodhya. Go back to volume 14 of the
Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, when no one knew about
Ramjanmabhoomi. It was not an issue at all, certainly not a political
issue. There was no rioting, just some local disturbances which you might
find in history books, something Romila Thapar and Dr S. Gopal,
Radhakrishnan’s illustrious son, might write about and the Hindutva
library might dismiss perhaps because it comes from them, these great
modern scholars of Indian history.
It was Jawaharlal Nehru who, in the confidentiality and
privacy of his personal communications to C. Rajagopalachari (the then
governor general of India), to Govind Ballabh Pant (then the chief
minister of Uttar Pradesh, later the home minister of India) and to
others, expressed his deep sense of concern at the crime, at the
sacrilegious act which had taken place, at the utterly irreligious act in
the name of Hinduism, in the name of Ram and Ram Lalla, which had taken
place in the Babri Masjid with the silent connivance, with the active
collusion, of the then district magistrate/ deputy commissioner of
Faizabad who later joined the Jan Sangh, KKK Nayar – three K’s, Nayar –
who openly defied the directions of the state government. Nayar wrote to
Govind Ballabh Pant, to Bhagwan Sahay, the then chief secretary of Uttar
Pradesh, who had forwarded Nehru’s message: “Have them removed? Remove
me,” he said, a man of religious conviction, “but I will not get these
idols removed.” And there they remained till December 6, 1992.
The domes are demolished from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and
from the Ram Katha Kunj barely a couple of hundred yards away, Advani,
Murli Manohar Joshi, Sadhvi Ritambhara, Uma Bharti and all the others
watch the show as if seated in the Distinguished Visitors’ Gallery in
Parliament, quietly, amidst all the chaos.
It was an act of god, they told us, some things happen on
their own… this was an act of god, beyond human control, unexpected,
unanticipated, beyond human foreseeability. But during that chaotic “act
of god” from morning till evening one small wilfully organised act of
stealth nonetheless took place, as had taken place in December 1949. The
idol of Ram Lalla which had been surreptitiously placed beneath the
central dome on December 23, 1949 was taken out, kept somewhere else and
once the demolition was complete, put back under the central dome.
I asked Narasimha Rao, I asked VP Singh, I asked Advani, I
asked Joshi about this but none of them had any answer. You could see it
in their body language. I said it to them publicly, with the fullest sense
of responsibility, with no overkill and no rhetoric, that this was a
simple rheostat which in itself proves that the demolition was a
conspiracy even if you have no other evidence for it. In that entire chaos
why should Ram Lalla be taken out and then be put back again?
And what does Narasimha Rao’s government do? Narasimha Rao
also testified before us – by far the most formidable witness I have ever
examined. I must frankly confess that he almost gave me an inferiority
complex, and I am a very proud man. Advani saab loves to talk. It is easy
to draw him out. He is a master of the unrebutted half-truth; if you catch
him, the falsehood falls to the ground. But Narasimha Rao wore his
intellectual superiority on his sleeve. He would not speak and when he
did, getting a one-liner out of him needed three hours of
cross-examination. Yet that very learned, highly erudite, at the end of it
a little too wily – too wily even for himself – man was upstaged by the
sangh parivar.
One month after the demolition, Narasimha Rao enacts an
ordinance that was later replaced by an act (the Acquisition of Certain
Area at Ayodhya Act 1993) which was withheld by adjudication along with
the presidential reference to the Supreme Court in the Ismail Faruqui
case (M. Ismail Faruqui & Ors vs Union of India & Ors, 1994).
January 7, 1993 was the cut-off point: Let the status quo remain as before
January 7, 1993; as to the rest, please advise. For various reasons the
Supreme Court returned the reference but allowed the idol of Ram Lalla,
which had been installed on December 23, 1949 and which was temporarily
moved out during the demolition on December 6, 1992, to remain in the same
spot. The idol survived the demolition; nothing else did.
If I criticise the majority judgement in the Ismail
Faruqui case as well, please forgive me. Perhaps I am too secular for
contemporary consumption. But secularism for me is not merely the absence
of communal riots. It is not merely living in harmony or the absence of
disharmony. Secularism under the Indian Constitution as bequeathed by none
other than Jawaharlal Nehru is a secular consciousness which refuses to
compromise with anything that is not secular.
The Masjid was constructed in 1528. (Though Justice Sudhir
Agarwal said it was constructed in the 18th century. But I’m not on that,
I know his grasp of history. And Justice Sharma says it was not a masjid
at all. Then why demolish it? That almost ends the debate, the demolition
debate, as it were. But I’m not on that either.)
On February 1, 1986 the district judge of Faizabad, KM
Pandey, ordered the opening of the locks on the Babri Masjid so as to
facilitate puja of the idol that had been placed there in December 1949.
Judge Pandey was later elevated to the high court. After his retirement,
he published his memoirs, Voice of Conscience, the preface to which
was written by another distinguished high court judge. Pandey saab writes
that it was divine inspiration that prompted him to order the opening of
the locks. What was this divine inspiration?
“When I left the district court after ordering the opening
of the locks to facilitate darshan of the Ram Lalla idol which had
been placed there in 1949, I saw a monkey, a divine monkey, perched on the
roof of the courthouse (presumably a reference to Hanumanji). And when I
reached home at 4 p.m., I found the monkey was still there outside. I
saluted him. It was divine inspiration.”
What legal system are we talking about? In the 60 years
since then no one has seen fit to even begin investigations into the FIR
of 1949. Meanwhile, in 1986 we are presented with a fait accompli thanks
to “divine inspiration”. The judge who orders the unlocking of the gates
of the Babri Masjid is accompanied by a monkey from the courtroom to his
home. I salute him, this man of conviction. No, not a corrupt man; please,
for god’s sake, don’t describe him as a corrupt man. Here is a man acting
out of conviction. And that is the problem, the tragedy of Indian
secularism. The secularists have no convictions any more. They just want
to avoid, to avert a law and order situation.
The country was not plunged into crisis after the
September 30 judgement; there were no riots, no lives were lost, all is
well. What difference does it make? Who will read Agarwal saab’s
5,000-plus pages on Hinduism? You are not going to read them, nor will I.
It is a matter of history, another fait accompli, just as December 1949
became another fait accompli. Even Govind Ballabh Pant, a man as tall as
Sardar Patel, dithered when in 1949 Nehru asked to have the idols removed.
A district magistrate, a deputy commissioner of Faizabad had greater
strength and greater say than the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and
India’s first prime minister. The idols remained there.
Justice Khan mentions in his judgement that in September
2009 all the original files, the official documents pertaining to 1949
were summoned by the full bench of the Allahabad high court at Lucknow.
Interestingly, only Justice Khan refers to this fact; there is no mention
of it whatsoever in the 5,019 pages of Justice Sudhir Agarwal or the 1,130
pages of Justice Dharam Veer Sharma.
Justice Sudhir Agarwal is a very capable judge, who can
write a judgement that runs to over 5,000 pages. I have yet to see another
judge in the country capable of such titanic intellectual labour for which
I compliment him even though I completely disagree with the entire
reasoning and the conclusions of his judgement, which are outright
perverse. A wrong reading of history, a wrong reading of religion, with
secularism as a value, as a word, as semantics, totally absent from the
entire judgement which reads as if it were written somewhere in 1528 or
whenever the Babri Masjid was constructed!
We learn from Justice Khan’s judgement that those files
were summoned and that Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters were found in the files,
something that was hitherto unknown. The files also revealed that KKK
Nayar wrote two long letters to Bhagwan Sahayji, chief secretary of Uttar
Pradesh, refusing to act against the illegality of 1949 on the plea that
it would lead to riots. Just as on December 5 and 6, 1992 the then chief
minister of Uttar Pradesh, Kalyan Singh, pleaded that if he were to order
police firing to prevent the demolition, it would precipitate a bloodbath.
This is exactly what the then district magistrate/ deputy commissioner,
KKK Nayar, claimed in the long letters written to Bhagwan Sahayji on
December 26 and 27, 1949.
Decades have passed, half a century has passed but the
basic argument remains the same: Hum isse touch karenge,
if we touch this, if we try to undo an unsecular, anti-secular, act,
toh fasad ho jayenge, peeche hat jao, there will be riots,
leave it alone.
The bar is lowered with every crisis. We just do not join
issue and everything becomes a grand fait accompli. A mosque is demolished
and a temple constructed in its place. Did anyone consult the ASI?
My last question on behalf of the Liberhan Commission was
put to Kalyan Singh who happened to be the last witness, the hundredth
witness, to appear before the commission. This was in 2004. For 10 years
Kalyan Singh had managed to stay away from the commission thanks to a stay
order which allowed him to avoid appearing before it. By the time he
finally deposed the 2003 excavations at Ayodhya had been completed and the
ASI had submitted its report. When he testified, in a deposition that runs
to 400 pages, he placed before the commission the last chapter of the ASI
report, ‘Summary of Results’ (in support of his stand on the Ram temple).
I had already read both volumes of the ASI report. It was
an excavation ordered by the high court of Allahabad. We had no
jurisdiction but since one of the principal accused had cited it in his
defence, I thought I could ask these questions. Justice Liberhan said:
“These are your personal questions, not those of the (Liberhan)
Commission.” I said: “Yes, I stand by these questions. I want my views to
go on record as a matter of history.”
You will see, I said, that this is a brazen departure from
the scientific bases and time-tested methods of archaeological excavation.
The fragmentary evidences contained in these two volumes, chapter
after chapter, they do not lend themselves to any conclusion that there
was a temple beneath, least of all that it was demolished. It is nothing
but a supremely imaginative, subjective conclusion. Finally, I said
that this report, especially the last chapter, has been written by
someone ideologically, intellectually and politically predetermined to
create a temple beneath the disputed structure and to provide the ultimate
historical justification for the demolition of the mosque above it. This
is what I put before Kalyan Singh when he deposed before the commission in
2004.
Debates on the issue will, of course, continue. You have
already heard KM Shrimali saab (also present at the symposium). If you are
seriously interested in the archaeological aspects, you must read the
books written by Professor D. Mandal, one of our finest archaeologists, in
2003 and, in 2007, Ayodhya: Archaeology after Excavation, a book
co-authored by D. Mandal and Shereen Ratnagar. Despite the fact that
Justice Agarwal has passed strictures against him, against all of them –
Jaya Menon, Supriya Varma and others who had testified before the court
along with Professor Mandal – they are men to be defended, at least men to
be read.
Archaeology is a very fragile, vulnerable, tricky subject.
Just because you can see the Taj Mahal aboveground does not mean that that
is the end of the matter. What lies beneath the ground, how many layers
lie beneath, to which period do they belong, what does it all mean? Animal
bones, terracotta fragments and other relics are found. It takes a whole
galaxy of archaeologists, epigraphists, numismatists a lifetime
to analyse and understand all that is unearthed. But
here, in less than a month, these people arrive at a definite conclusion.
However, this is not my jurisdiction and with apologies for the
digression, let me return to my main theme.
Justice Agarwal describes the events of 1949 in a single
sentence: “A mere shifting of idols from the outer courtyard to the inner
courtyard”. A judge who writes thousands of pages on every conceivable
issue yet on this, the most important, the central issue – 1949 – he is
content with observing: “a mere shifting of idols”. That is how the crime
is described and smothered in history.
Most of us are now familiar with the role of KKK Nayar in
the events of 1949. On November 29, 1949 the then superintendent of police
(SP), Faizabad, Kripal Singh, wrote a letter to the deputy commissioner/
district magistrate (Nayar): The SP writes to his district magistrate
(DM). This letter has been referred to for the first time in Justice
Khan’s judgement of September 30, 2010.
That single letter is more important, far more important,
than all the Gazetteers of British India, of Oudh, Faizabad, Barabanki and
Lucknow put together, all of which Justice Agarwal has cited and which
historians wrestle over. On November 29, 1949, three weeks before December
23, after a visit to the spot, Kripal Singh writes to KKK Nayar that there
is a plan to install the idol of Ram inside the mosque so as to turn it
into a temple on the coming puranmashi (day of the full moon). He
adds that the mosque was being surrounded from all sides and that bricks,
lime mortar and other construction material had been kept in readiness.
You can read about this in Justice Khan’s judgement. The police and the
administration had advance intimation of what was brewing. But to date
there has been no investigation into the matter.
It needed the high court of Allahabad, a Muslim judge, to
make this letter public for the first time. Nearly a month before the act
was committed, the two top officials in the district were writing to each
other about the plot but for 60 years none of us even knew this – that’s
1949 for you.
With due apologies, let us return to the judgement of
Justice JS Verma and with him one of the most distinguished judges of the
Indian Supreme Court, a man for whom I have the highest regard, a paragon
of moral virtue, uprightness and erudition, Justice MN Venkatachaliah.
Justice Verma’s majority judgement on behalf of Justice Venkatachaliah,
Justice GN Ray and himself in the Ismail Faruqui case – which is
frequently referred to by the secular establishment – is the judgement of
three Hindu judges. Forgive me for saying so but I am prepared to take the
consequences of my statement. What do they say about 1949? Justice Sudhir
Agarwal has very intelligently taken the phrase “shifting of
idols” from Justice Verma’s judgement. Please read that judgement again in
the context of Section 7, Subsection 2, of the Acquisition of Certain Area
at Ayodhya Act which was in adjudication. It was stated that pending the
civil suits, status quo will be maintained as on January 7, 1993.
Which means that the Ram Lalla idol which was
surreptitiously placed inside the mosque in 1949, darshan of which
was allowed after the locks on the Babri Masjid were opened in 1986 and
which had been temporarily moved out during the demolition and then put
back inside the mosque in 1992, would continue to remain there.
Whatever you may decide, the Ram Lalla murti will
remain exactly where it had been placed through a criminal,
sacrilegious, irreligious act which does no credit to Hinduism or any
other religion. That is not the way any religion establishes itself. That
is not the way any religion fights another religion. You fight it by
logic, you fight it by faith. If you like, in certain circumstances, you
fight it by numbers. You do not fight it by a crime committed in the wee
hours of the morning, open crime bhi nahin, not openly committed
but a crime of stealth, chupke chupke.
I’ve criticised Justice SU Khan for other things but may
god bless him for drawing our attention to the communication between the
SP, Kripal Singh, and the DM, KKK Nayar, in 1949.
We also know the names of the two people responsible for
placing the Ram Lalla idol inside the mosque. A true understanding of
history requires thorough study. Mahant Ramchandra Paramhans had already
been examined before I joined the Liberhan Commission in 1999 so I did not
have the opportunity to cross-examine him. He passed away a few years
later. He was one of the two persons who carried the idol inside. Baba
Abhay Ram Das was the other. Both of them were named by the late Justice
Deoki Nandan Agarwal, a retired judge of the Allahabad high court who
filed the Ram Lalla title suit as the ‘next friend’ of Ram Lalla. A very
committed man, Justice DN Agarwal joined the VHP after retirement and
spent the rest of his life fighting this case. I did not have the
privilege of meeting him. In his statement under Order 10 of the Code of
Civil Procedure he had affirmed that Mahant Ramchandra Paramhans and Abhay
Ram Das had placed the idol inside the mosque. Abhay Ram Das did not
concede this but his disciple admitted it in writing. Paramhans admitted
to doing so.
If after 60 years, you can look backward, if you can dig
up the dead from the grave when the mosque no longer exists – one judge
even says it was never a mosque, the other says it was built in 1870, not
in 1528 – if the dead must be resurrected, if we must go back to the
Vedas, the Upanishads, the Koran, if such important matters of religious
consciousness, of spiritual consciousness, must be explored, then please,
in god’s name, in Allah’s name, in Ram’s name, take a look at these facts
as well. Take a look at the SP’s letter, look at Mahant Paramhans, look at
Abhay Ram Das.
And although there can never be a retrospective indictment
under criminal law – which is impermissible under our Constitution for the
right reasons – if we could but revisit the crime committed in 1949 and,
even if metaphorically or notionally, conduct some investigation, some
inquiry into the incidents that took place at the time. For if 1949 had
not happened, 1992 would not have followed.
I will end this argument with what Justice Verma
had to say about 1949. Again, as is evident throughout the
judgement, it is a question of conviction, of analysis, at the highest
level of the apex court.
The contention was that this was an anti-secular reference
(to the apex court) so the court should not respond. But controverting,
reverting this contention, Justice Verma says no, this
is not an anti-secular reference. Why? Because it is not only the Muslims;
Hindus are suffering too. The Muslims had the greater right to worship in
December 1949, which continued unrestricted till December 1992. However,
Section 7, Subsection 2, of the Acquisition of Certain Area at Ayodhya Act
protects the restricted right to worship as established in December 1992.
Thus Justice Verma essentially accepts the fait accompli of December 1949.
This is the Supreme Court of India for you, in a judgement which is often
cited against those who demolished the Babri Masjid. It is a tragedy of
perception, a tragedy of convictions, a tragedy of fait accompli upon fait
accompli.
The Allahabad high court judgement of September 2010 is
also totally silent about the demolition of the mosque in December 1992.
Two writ petitions had been filed, by Mohammad Hashim and the Sunni
Central Board of Wakfs, against the 1986 court order allowing the
opening of the locks on the Babri Masjid. These writ petitions, kept
hanging for 24 years, were also decided, by a separate order, on September
30, 2010.
Justice Agarwal said the demolition
was barbaric and shameful and it appeared that the order allowing the
opening of the locks was wholly illegal but since it was an interlocutory
order that would be merged in the final judgement, we express no
opinion. That is how he sidestepped it. And in his separate order Justice
Sharma repeats five times that the subject matter is no
longer there, it has been demolished, so it has no relevance; no,
no, I agree with the order of 1986.
We are talking about the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
Both these judges are deeply spiritual, both are devotees,
as is evident from their judgements. Justice Agarwal is also extremely
capable. I do not doubt the sincerity and the strength of their
convictions and I cannot help complimenting Justice Agarwal for the
immense labour put in by him every time I refer to the judgement and
criticise him. But what is their moral fibre? What is their spiritual
fibre?
This is litigation unlike any other litigation in India;
this is the Babri Masjid dispute. If the Babri Masjid has any significance
in your view, in anyone’s view, whether it is those who demolished it or
the Muslims or the secular establishment, how can its demolition leave you
totally untouched? The suit filed in 1950, the suit of 1959, the Ram Lalla
suit of 1989 which was the biggest suit of all, these were filed prior to
1992; and as for what happened in 1992, what’s done is done, and that’s
all? The act of December 1992 leaves no imprint on your judgement, on your
thinking, on your reflection. You are intellectually untouched, you are
morally untouched, you are psychologically untouched.
And therefore I have repeatedly raised the question and I
raise it before you with all due respect to these two very distinguished
judges of the Allahabad high court. Are they really judges who have taken
an oath under a secular Constitution in an India governed by our
Constitution? What substance are you made of that things like this don’t
touch you? You write 5,000 pages on everything else but nothing on the
demolition?
I would like to make one last point, about the
Liberhan Commission report. Since I was on the Liberhan Commission from
1999 to 2008 when it turned its searchlight on all the top leaders of the
sangh parivar, including Advani, Joshi and so on, I happened to
cross-examine all of them. You rarely get an opportunity like this – to be
engaged with an issue for over 10 years at close quarters, to
examine witnesses face to face from morning to evening. It was a historic
opportunity for which I shall remain ever grateful to Justice Liberhan.
His report, released and tabled in Parliament last year,
is a very searching, powerful, comprehensive critique of the complicity of
the state government, the state bureaucracy and the police apparatus and
the wilful, organised collapse of the administration on December 6, 1992.
It was a wilful organised collapse. But as far as the central government
and the former prime minister, Narasimha Rao, are concerned, the report
gives him a complete clean chit. I don’t want to get into that, on how
he could have resorted to Articles 355 and 356. That’s a separate chapter.
We are dealing with post-Allahabad; we are not dealing with post-Liberhan.
But there is one point I wish to make about 1992. Justice
Liberhan said something that I wish he had not because it
compromises me as his counsel and I want historians to ponder over this,
to research this in all seriousness. He said the commission had no other
source of information except the government. We will leave aside the
report that Narasimha Rao had instructed the Uttar Pradesh governor to
write. Let’s leave aside this 18-page report on which he based his entire
constitutional argument.
In his report Justice Liberhan says there was also an
intelligence failure (p. 859, para 144, point 2). It is a failure of the
intelligence agencies, they were the eyes and ears of the central
government, they did not act, they failed. So how can you blame Narasimha
Rao?
Forgive me for the sharpness of my reaction, but to say
that the intelligence agencies failed on December 6 is a white lie. I say
this on the basis of my knowledge of one year of top-secret Intelligence
Bureau reports on the Ayodhya issue by the director/ joint director/
deputy director of the Intelligence Bureau throughout 1992 right up to the
last date, December 6, 1992, submitted to the prime minister’s office, to
the adviser to the prime minister, to the cabinet secretariat, to the home
minister, to the ministry of home affairs. That entire file was before the
Liberhan Commission.
You will perhaps not find anywhere in the world, and I
want to give credit where it is due, you will not find more comprehensive,
swifter, more precise, more meaningful intelligence reports submitted at
the highest levels of the Intelligence Bureau to the highest levels of the
government of India, including the prime minister’s office. Multiple
copies were sent out on a day-to-day basis, especially from November 24 to
December 6, 1992. If you read these reports, you need not read anything
else. Or read everything else and then read these reports. Not only can
you not accuse the Intelligence Bureau or the agencies of the central
government for intelligence failure. On the contrary, any and every person
in a position of policymaking and decision-making in the government of
India – the ministry of home affairs (the home minister, SB Chavan), the
cabinet secretary, Naresh Chandra, and the principal secretary to the
prime minister, AN Verma – were kept constantly updated.
And this was about Ayodhya, the most important national
issue in November-December 1992. A meeting of the National Integration
Council was convened. Opposition leaders, Advani, VP Singh,
everyone was meeting the prime minister. It was a concern that was no
longer buried in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. The
central government was being kept abreast of developments all the time.
Yet the government, the prime minister, chose to turn a
blind eye to report after disturbing report from the Intelligence Bureau.
Narasimha Rao’s inaction was certainly not due to intelligence failure. It
was in spite of very efficient and efficacious surveillance and monitoring
of the ground situation by the Intelligence Bureau.
So that then is 1949; that then is 1992. We will, of
course, continue to discuss the judgement of September 30, 2010 for a long
time. But secularism is not merely about the absence of disharmony, it is
not merely ostensible peace or indeed the absence of rioting. Secularism
is an uncompromising internal secular consciousness and perception which
is appalled by the slightest intrusion into the public domain of matters
which do not properly appertain.
Thank you very much.
(Anupam Gupta, a senior advocate,
High Court of Punjab and Haryana, was counsel for the Liberhan Ayodhya
Commission of Inquiry. The above article has been excerpted from his
address at the three-day symposium, ‘Faith and Fact: Democracy after the
Ayodhya Verdict’, organised by SAHMAT, Sabrang Trust and
Social Scientist and held in New Delhi from
December 6-8, 2010.)