Author: Sankarashan Thakur
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: May 19, 2001
To begin with, Home Minister L.
K. Advani ducked and dallied for months but when he decided to go to the
Liberhan Commission on the Ayodhya demolition, he went there on the front-foot.
His four de-positions before the
Commission so far haven't shown up a man in the dock, as many might have
expected, but a man very much on the Ayodhya platform, forging ahead with
the temple campaign.
Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee stopped
short of calling the Ayodhya temple movement an "expression of national
sentiment" and created widespread uproar. Advani has not just glorified
the movement but sanctified the existence of a Ram Temple at the disputed
site in Ayodhya without so much as creating a ripple.
The temporary structure erected
on the rubble of the Babri Masjid, according to the Home Minister, is "nothing
but a temple ... it was earlier a de facto temple, now it is de jure",
or, in plain English, by law right. This, he said at his second deposition
to the Commission in April.
The Commission asked if this did
not mean he was bypassing the judiciary and pronouncing judgement on the
dispute when the courts were still hearing the Ayodhya case. Advani said
he wasn't talking legally, he was "using words loosely" and talking about
public perception: "It has by and large been accepted by all that on the
place believed to be the birthplace of Ram there is only a temple". Advani
said what he had to essentially say on Ayodhya and yet escaped charges
of violating propriety or brief.
Advani has performed an adroit balancing
act between his two faces - that of the Home Minister, who cannot be seen
to be defending the unlawful, and the Sangh loyalist, who must uphold the
Ayodhya movement and its manifestations as a badge of honour. He may have
teased the law but he has pleased his constituency. He has made it clearer
than ever before that the requirements of government may have made the
BJP put Ayodhya on the backburner, but the requirements of politics are
that the party keep the burner on the bum.
Advani's deposition has been less
a deposition and more a message to a constituency that he believes needs
to be humoured because it is still useful.
The Liberhan Commission has been
less a probe into Advani's role in the demolition and more a stage for
his political expositions on the nature and justifications of the temple
movement. Advani ignored the Commission's summons for neatly four months
before deciding to appear in April. He has appeared before Justice M.S.
Liberhan four times, and each time his silence has spoken as much as his
words. He has, for instance, not uttered a word condemning those who razed
the structure; neither has he shed a tear for the widerspread communal
violence that the temple movement and the demolition set off. Vajpayee
may have felt the need to neutralise the saffron sting of his "national
sentiment" statement with his liberal musings from Kumarakom. Not so Advani.
For him there can be no faulting the Ayodhya movement or the demand for
a temple at the disputed site.
Even when he said the demolition
of December 6, 1992 had left him "depressed and downcast", he felt proud
to defend the temple movement and his rath yatra and underlined his continuing
commitment to the construction of a Ram Temple at the disputed site.
He was "not ashamed" of the temple
movement or the rath yatra, he said; on the contrary, it was a moment of
national glory. "We used to see it in the eves of the people, particularly
the rural and tribal folk. It was a sense of reverence normally bestowed
on religious men ... It was the rath yatra that made me understand Vivekananda's
statement-that religion is the soul of India..."
Advani's deposition can nowhere
be faulted for defending the demolition of Babri Masjid. But at the same
time, his support for the forces and the psychology hat effected to the
demolition are almost eloquent.