In what could be an embarrassment for the Congress,former Union Textiles Minister Shankersinh Vaghela has been named by the Justice (retd) Liberhan Commission among the 60 people found to have a culpable role in fomenting communal trouble in the aftermath of Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. Vaghela,who is the only Congress leader to be indicted by the Commission,told The Indian Express that he was dragged into the controversy as he was a BJP leader at that time. He has been with the Congress since 1998. I had not taken part in any of the BJP meeting to push the Ayodhya agenda. You will find no record of my participation in a single meeting, he said. Vaghela added: I was never involved in generating funds or making travel or other arrangements for the Kar Sevaks. I had even opposed the party hardliners and the VHP and Bajrang Dal leadership and told them it was not going to do any good. The Kshatriya leader and former Gujarat Chief Minister began with the Jan Sangh before moving onto the Janata Party and the BJP. He was the party's vice-president,general secretary and the state president till 1991. He had engineered the Khajuraho rebellion within the BJP in 1995 to topple the party's first ever Keshubhai Patel government in Gujarat. Vaghela had rebelled in the party to dethrone another BJP Chief Minister,Suresh Mehta,with the Congress's help and then floated his own outfit the Rashtriya Janata Party (RJP) to become the Chief Minister of Gujarat with outside support of the Congress. He is considered to be the man who first noticed the 'spark' in the young RSS Pracharak Narendra Modi,whom he famously carried as a pillion in an old motorcycle through many Gujarat villages to organise the BJP in its early days. They parted ways after Vaghela's 1995 rebellion,and the chasm widened after Modi dethroned the second Keshubhai government in 2001. Report will have serious political fallout: CongGujarat Pradesh Congress Committee president Siddharth Patel said on Monday that the Justice (retd) Liberhan Commission report will have serious political fallout. In a statement,he,however,did not elaborate about the nature of the fallout like the involvement of any leader from Gujarat in the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992. He,nevertheless,said that the report has exposed the falsehood of BJP leader L K Advani who had earlier told the Commission that he was unaware of the demolition plans for Babri Masjid. Advani,Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Murli Manohar Joshi were well aware that the RSS,VHP and Bajrang Dal had prepared a plan and conspired to demolish the mosque. The report has exposed the falsehood of the BJP leaders that they had no hand in the demolition of the mosque, Patel said in his statement.
