India: Commission indicts BJP leaders for demolition of Babri Masjid

[Naveed Yaseen]

* Leaked report calls Vajpayee ‘pseudo-moderate’
* Uproar in Indian parliament over report leakage
* Advani describes report as ‘maliciously planned, false’

By Iftikhar Gilani

NEW DELHI: A judicial report – which was leaked in Indian parliament on Monday – indicts Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani and Murli Manohar, for the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992.

The report also allegedly describes Vajpayee as a “pseudo-moderate”, who cannot be absolved of planning the conspiracy to demolish the 450-year-old historic mosque on December 6, 1992.

The report by a one-man commission of Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan investigated the “sequence of events leading, and all facts and circumstances relating, to the occurrences at the Babri Masjid complex”. The commission was set up 13 days after the demolition, with a timeframe of three months, but it presented its report after 17 years, and 48 extensions in June. However, the findings were kept secret under high security at the Home Ministry.

Excerpts of the report – which appeared in the Indian Express – said that Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi could have been used as “tools in the hands of the ultra-Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as publicly acceptable faces of the movement and were still a party to all decisions”. The report said none of them had the capacity to defy the orders of the RSS without damaging their political future.

The commission described the Babri Masjid demolition as “meticulously planned”, and said there was nothing to show that these leaders were either unaware of what was going on or innocent of any wrongdoing, according to the APP news agency.

The report also comes down heavily on the leaders of Muslim organisations, who “constituted a class of their own and were neither responsible to nor were they caring for the welfare of those they claimed to represent … these leaders failed the community by failing to put forth a logical, cohesive and consistent point of view on the dispute, both inside and outside the courts”.

The newspaper report led to chaos in both houses of parliament, where the BJP demanded a debate on the “selective leaks”.

The entire opposition called for the report to be tabled, but the secular and Left parties refused to be associated with the BJP.

Home Minister P Chidambaram said the report would be tabled along with the action-taken report (ATR) by the government before the end of the session.

‘Maliciously planned’: Advani said in the Lok Sabha that he was shocked to find Vajpayee’s name in the leaked report, and described it as a “maliciously planned false report”. He said it would be best for the home minister to table the report in the House immediately.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp...009_pg1_12