A Tear In Our Fabric

Use the Liberhan report to attain closure and make a fresh start

PREM SHANKAR JHA


Senior Journalist

NO ONE knows what the Liberhan Commission report contains, and the prime minister and home minister are far too honourable to allow any leaks. But this has not prevented a spate of rumour and speculation about its contents. Although the minister of state for parliamentary affairs has promised that the government will lay the report on the table of Parliament during the budget session, senior home ministry officials have already started a turf battle with their ministry, saying, in effect, that it is they who will decide when the people will be allowed to know its contents.

Turf war More than 2,000 people lost their lives after the Babri Masjid was demolished

Common sense, however, dictates that the report should be tabled as soon as Pranab Mukherjee has presented his budget. The mere existence of the report has begun to revive memories and reopen old wounds. It has already made some BJP leaders issue do-ordie statements about their eternal commitment to the building of the Ram temple on the site of the Babri Masjid. On the other side of the fence, rumours are flying that the report has indicted Advani, and demands are surfacing that he and other BJP leaders must be made to pay for their misdeeds. The longer this goes on the uglier the political atmosphere will become.

More than 2,000 people lost their lives after the masjid's demolition. And thousands more have died in the Islamist and extreme 'Hindutva' inspired terrorism that followed. The people have a right to know what started it all. They have the right to ascribe blame. And they should at least be allowed to debate what punishment, if any, should be meted out. No home ministry official, not even the entire government, has the authority to deny them this right.

The minister for parliamentary affairs said that the government intends to table an Action Taken Report along with the Liberhan Commission's report. That may be the right way to deal with lapses in administration, such as the ones regularly pointed out by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, or the Estimates Committee of Parliament. But the Ayodhya dispute did not arise out of an administrative lapse. It is a quintessentially political issue that goes to the heart of India's national identity and aspirations. Any action that the government takes must, therefore, be based upon a political consensus, or at the very least upon clearly displayed, overwhelming political sentiment.

What, if any, action should the government take? Our recent history gives us at least one powerful pointer. In 1977, one of the first actions of the post-Emergency Janata government was to set up a Commission of Inquiry, under former Supreme Court judge JC Shah, to probe the excesses committed during the Emergency. The Shah Commission submitted a 2,500-page report to the government in August 1978. But not a single one of its recommendation was even discussed, let alone implemented, because when it summoned Mrs Indira Gandhi to appear in court, it turned her into a martyr and ensured that her wing of the Congress would come roaring back to power in 1980.

The lesson to be learned is obvious: the right to punish the elected representatives of the people for specifically political acts resides with the people. The people had already punished Mrs Gandhi and the Congress for the Emergency. They regarded the attempt to take judicial action against her as an usurpation of their power and rose to defend her.

Dr Manmohan Singh and his cabinet would do well to bear this in mind as ultra-loyal party cadres in the Congress start demanding action against Advani and his colleagues. The results of state and central elections have shown, time and again, that the nation wants to put behind it not only the Rama Janma Bhoomi issue, but also the divisive communal politics of the past two decades.

Ironically, it first sent this message in the state assembly elections in Gujarat in 2007. Modi and the BJP won that election solely on the issue of governance. Proof of this was the fact that in central Gujarat , which had seen the bulk of the post-Godhra carnage, and where Modi had been able to profit from Hindu chauvinism to wrest 17 seats from the Congress in December 2002, the Congress took back all of those and an additional seven seats in 2007. Modi won because of the immense gains his party made in parts of Gujarat that had seen little violence in 2002.

The right to punish the elected representatives for specifically political acts lies with the people

The electorate sent this message a second time after 26/11 when it rejected the BJP despite its hyper-patriotic campaign during the Delhi assembly elections barely a week later. But it sent this message most unambiguously by turning away from the BJP in the 2009 parliamentary elections. The 3.4 percent drop in its vote from 22.2 percent to 18.8 percent was spread over 19 out of the 21 larger states of India. In percentage terms it meant that one in nearly six persons who had voted for the BJP in 2004 had gone elsewhere in 2009. In absolute terms this meant that very few of the youth - the first-time voters of 2009 - had voted for the BJP. This was in stark contrast to the 1990s and early 2000s when they flocked to the BJP's standard.

In a sense therefore, the electorate has already 'punished' the BJP for the misdeeds it committed in Ayodhya. The time has therefore come to close this sad and terrible chapter of our history. Instead of continuing to point the finger of blame at each other, it is time we reflected on how close we came during the past 25 years to losing the most beautiful part of our heritage. This is not our pluralism and diversity, for those exist in most large countries, but our sheer comfort with and easy accommodation of it. It is perhaps the only country in the world where most people still display their identities in full public view, in the clothes, headgear, even shoes and sandals they wear, in the cut of their beards, in their salutations and their forms of address. They do so because inspite of all that has happened in recent years, ours is still a society without fear, in which people take ethnic differences for granted and do not feel threatened by them.

This social fabric was first torn by Partition, but by the early 1980s, the rent had been largely repaired. Communal violence had died down and was endemic in only a few chronic trouble spots like Meerut, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Aligarh. A new, integrated and secure Muslim middle class had come into being. Sikh separatism was still a year or two away, the new Christian evangelism had yet to arrive and no one had begun to target the Christians in tribal areas.

The Congress too must shoulder its share of the blame for mistaking appeasement for secularism

We have only to look back on those days to see how far the country has drifted back towards intolerance and violence. The Sangh Parivar is largely but not wholly responsible. Intolerance has infected Islam and Christianity as well and the bigots have often fed off each other. The Congress too must shoulder its share of the blame for mistaking appeasement for secularism -as it did when it took the locks off the Babri Masjid in 1985 and over-ruled the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case in 1986, as it has done over Taslima Nasreen's attempt to make a home in India, and the Jammu anti-Muslim riots last summer - it has stoked the fires of intolerance.

The Liberhan Commission report has given us a chance to attain closure and make a fresh start. Instead of using it to score points off each other our political leaders would do well to invite a frank and thorough discussion of where we all went wrong in the past, and arrive at a basic consensus on where to go from here.

WRITER'S EMAIL


premjha@airtelmail.in