Try again, Mr Vajpayee

The prime minister seeks to portray himself as prime ministerial by denouncing the demolition of the Babri Masjid — “the disputed structure” — as “a flagrant violation of the law, it certainly was”. Good. But how can we expect him in future to be “Constitutionally bound to implement the judiciary’s verdict, whatever it might be” if three of his key ministerial colleagues — including the home minister — are appointed and retained despite having been held prima facie by a court of law to have been culpable of the “flagrant violation of the law” which “it certainly was”?

That was the only matter at issue when, on the eve of the Winter Session, Vajpayee accepted Harin Pathak’s resignation. The Opposition demanded to know why there should be different standards for those indicted of “a flagrant violation of the law” at Ayodhya. It was the Treasury benches, not the Opposition, who dragged in extraneous matters as Vajpayee’s own twisted rendering shows. And twisted it is. He says, “The government of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had set up a committee for the reconstruction of the Somnath temple.” Vajpayee knows that on coming to know of the existence of the committee, Nehru denied it cabinet sanction and insisted that not a paisa of Government money would be spent on the reconstruction; he held religion to be a personal matter and said a secular government had no business building places of worship. After the Somnath temple was reconstructed out of private donations, the council of ministers in April 1951 advised the president, Dr Rajendra Prasad, not to attend theòf40ókumbabhishekam. If Babu Rajendra Prasad nevertheless went, it was in an entirely personal capacity and whatever he might have said there was not as the Rashtrapati but as a private citizen expressing private views.

Vajpayee’s callow speech-writers perhaps know none of this, but Vajpayee himself certainly does. For within three months of the Somnath òf40ókumbabhishekam, Shyama Prasad Mookherjee, who had resigned his portfolio as Nehru’s Food Minister, left the Congress and formed the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. His private secretary was the 26 year old Vajpayee. For Vajpayee, therefore, Somnath was a lived experience and it is disingenuous of him to mislead first the House and now the general public over what happened at Somnath.

The question of whether Lord Rama, his life and his teachings constitute a valuable, integral and essential component of our national heritage has never been at issue. What has been at issue is whether there was indeed a Ram temple at the disputed site which was destroyed by Mir Baqi to build the Babri Masjid in 1528. What has been in dispute is not whether a Ram temple should be built at Ayodhya — of course it must — but, as Vajpayee says, “where and how”. His ideological parivar is pledged to putting the òf40ógarba griha exactly at the spot where the òf40ómirab of the masjid once stood — òf40ó“Ram ki saugandh hum khate hain, mandir wahin banayenge”. Everyone else says, a mandir at Ayodhya, yes, but its exact location is a matter of court verdict — òf40ó“wahin ya aur kahin”. Vajpayee obfuscates the point by bringing in “national sentiment”. There is no “national sentiment”, only vicious communal politics, involved in proclaiming, òf40ó“Mandir wahin (aur kahin nahin)banayenge.”

Vajpayee deplores the “delaying tactics” of eight years ago. As a Congressman, I applaud him. It was on December 7, 1992 that I said, and was quoted in a section of the press, that Narasimha Rao had shown that death was not a necessary pre-condition for rigor mortis to set in. But is Vajpayee not preparing a cover for himself when he says that although he will adhere to the court verdict, “its smooth implementation would require a conducive social atmosphere.” Have his remarks over Ayodhya, and his insistence on retaining three key ministers indicted for their “flagrant violation of the law”, contributed in any way to a “conducive social atmosphere”? Look no further than Vinay Katiyar shooting himself in the foot at his first attempt to show himself a Vajpayee faithful. It fools no one. The atmosphere is not conducive. And Vajpayee’s persistence with the sangh parivar line only ensures a renewed stoking of tension.

Finally, his wholly bogus invocation of Rajiv Gandhi’s shilanyas to justify his claim to “national sentiment”. Rajiv Gandhi was second to none in recognising the seminal contribution of the sanatana dharma and all its cultural manifestations to the definition and preservation of our national heritage. But he did not think a masjid should be demolished to assert that heritage. He promoted through UP chief minister Narayan Datt Tiwari and home minister Buta Singh a negotiated arrangement under which the shilanyas would be held outside the disputed site and without prejudice to where the mandir would eventually be built — the latter, it was clearly understood, would have to be in conformity with the court judgment. He paid a heavy political price for effecting such a settlement, but it is unacceptable distortion for the prime minister to invoke that decision in justification of his anti-secular assertion that “national sentiment” enjoins the building of a Ram temple only at the precise location of theerstwhile mirab — and nowhere else in Ayodhya.

The Babri Masjid-Ramjanambhoomi imbroglio is not `a legacy of history’; it is a property disputdelse in Ayodhya.