What should matter more — how a report on an undisputed moment of national shame ‘leaked’ its way into the public domain or what its findings are? So far, politicians across the divide have mostly huffed and puffed about how NDTV and The Indian Express were able to access the contents of the Justice Liberhan Commission report before it was tabled in Parliament. But given that we aren’t quite talking about state secrets or national security here, isn’t it time to stop diverting the debate to the non-issue of the leak? How about some real questions? What does the commission amount to after 17 years and 48 extensions beyond a waste of taxpayers’ money? Does the judge tell us anything we didn’t know? Doesn’t the platitudinous nature of both the commission’s recommendations and the centre’s action Taken Report (atr) make a mockery of the issue? And will the din over the report give L.K. Advani a new voice within his party? Frankly, the report is a dud. Yes, it punctures a hole in the BJP’s protective shield by crushing the party’s claim that the demolition at Ayodhya was ‘spontaneous’. Declaring that the “demolition cartel” could have been stopped by Advani had he done more than make ‘feeble requests’, the commission concludes that the kar sevaks went in to Ayodhya with their pickaxes and shovels with the specific intention of bringing the dome down. And in a humiliating irony for the BJP — given the recent crisis within the party — Liberhan decides that the RSS is the principal and the BJP a pliant student. But here’s the problem — most of these sweeping summaries, even if held true by history, read like an extended magazine article that didn’t get the benefit of a good editor. Surely, a judicial commission is meant to use the clinical tools of investigation and not the weapons of rhetoric? But while traversing through the history and geography of the Ayodhya dispute in his report, the good judge doesn’t empirically explain how he arrived at his destination.
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I’m not arguing that his conclusions are necessarily incorrect. For a movement whose war cry was, ‘Ek dhakka aur do, Babri Masjid tod do’, and whose deadwoods have come crawling out of oblivion this week to claim that December 6 remains the ‘proudest day’ of their lives, it’s not hard to believe that the demolition was planned. But a fact-finding commission that has the luxury of a 17-year single focus needs to clinically prove its hypothesis; not merely opine and grandstand. Sadly, Liberhan has taken almost two decades to write what most journalists could have written in the immediate aftermath of 1992. Ironically, the other gap in the report connects two men on opposite sides of the political trenches — Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Both were politicians who converted ambivalence and silence into a fine art of political strategy and thus remain opaque figures in many ways. History remains divided on the omissions and commissions of both in the shame of Ayodhya. The inclusion of Vajpayee and the benign forgiveness of Rao remain two other problem areas in the Liberhan report.
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The joke's on us - Hindustan Times
