Warning from Rae Bareli

The right or wrong of an action is all that morality is. It is how you perceive it. Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi ...

The right or wrong of an action is all that morality is. It is how you perceive it. Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi felt that the right thing for him to do was to quit if the special court at Rae Bareli decided in favour of framing charges against him. True to his word, he did so when the judge chargesheeted him for his involvement in the demolition of the Babri masjid. But then came his party to his rescue. As if it has the power to determine the dividing line between right and wrong, moral and immoral, the BJP put pressure on him to take back his resignation because there was no legal compulsion for him to do so.

Of course, there was none. When he said he would go, it was even before the judgement was delivered. It was a tug of conscience. He vowed to do what any normal person occupying a high position should do. Joshi should, in fact, have sent his resignation straight to the president of India after the court ruling and gone home. This was what Lal Bahadur Shastri did once, when he had resigned as the country8217;s railway minister. The then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, when he looked for him was told that Shastri had left for his home town, Allahabad.

It8217;s strange, therefore, that Joshi should appear to be open to entertaining the request by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee or Party President Venkaiah Naidu that he should stay on; it8217;s as if he wants them to prevail upon him to take back his resignation. Really speaking, Joshi should have resigned soon after the CBI had filed a case against him. How does he compensate for the five years he has continued to stay in office and given decisions which he was not justified to make? The matter is no more in the domain of moral obligation. It has entered the domain of crime because the judge has asked the CBI to frame charges by October 10.

Why Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani has been let off is, of course, a matter of great conjecture. As he has said himself, he is clueless about why this has happened. The judge8217;s argument is that charges against Advani could not be sustained because of conflicting viewpoints by witnesses. Moreover, the CBI is, however, yet to explain why it withdrew the 8216;conspiracy8217; charges. Still, it has done a commendable job despite the handicaps it has faced in being a wing of the government. Recent developments only strengthen the case that the CBI should enjoy the same autonomy as the Election Commission does. The CBI should be made to report to Parliament directly.

The Babri masjid was not demolished on December 6, 1992. The process of demolition began many months earlier when Advani started the rath yatra from the Somnath temple to Ayodhya in late-1990. He created an atmosphere which made the masjid8217;s demolition inevitable. Whether he urged the crowd to demolish the masjid at Ayodhya on December 6, or did not do so, is irrelevant.

Having always had an eye to communal politics, Advani had criticised the 8220;perverse secularism8221; that ran down the movement to build a Hindu temple on the site. Conceiving of ways to deepen the Hindu-Muslim divide is no movement. As many as 2,000 people were killed. It was a diabolical plan to hit at India8217;s ethos of pluralism. Advani still compares the rath yatra to Mahatma Gandhi8217;s Dandi salt march. Whenever he repeated this in the Rajya Sabha, I would say: 8220;This is like comparing the ridiculous with the sublime8221;. Advani should have risen above communal biases after becoming India8217;s home minister. But he did not. How can he be timber for the prime ministership then?

Sessions Judge V.K. Singh of Rae Bareli deserves congratulations. His judgement may not be as epoch-making as R.K. Sinha8217;s was when he unseated Indira Gandhi on a poll offence. Yet V.K. Singh8217;s judgement may give birth to a new fervour in the country to save secularism from the growing onslaught of the comunalists. Just as the emergency had awakened people to the ills of authoritarianism and made them fight for democracy, this judgement may make the Hindu intelligentsia in India and abroad sit up and take note of the fundamentalism that has contaminated the top leaders in the BJP, the party which many NRIs based in America and Great Britain are today supporting and financing. If they have not been woken up by Gujarat, which has besmirched our reputation as a tolerant country all over the world, the judgement at Rae Bareli should serve as a warning bell.

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Like the Congress Party which 8220;organised8221; crowds to run down the judgement of Sinha against Indira Gandhi, the BJP is whipping up criticism on the V.K. Singh judgement. Party leaders are in fact making most irresponsible observations. For instance, Party President Naidu has said that 8220;the case involved political persecution, not moral turpitude8221;. By saying so, he does not change the gravity of the ruling. What is true is that the BJP reaped a political harvest by demolishing the masjid and misleading thousands of gullible Hindus. The identity of those who were persecuted, politically and socially, is no secret. They were not Hindus.

It is a pity that the Sangh Parivar will use the judgement as grist to its propaganda mill, making the atmosphere even more polluted and communal. There is already a call for an agitation over building the mandir slated for October 15. The BJP has no agenda other than the mandir or its fallout in the shape of Hindu-Muslim tension. The scenario, then, for the next 12 months 8212; with state assembly elections in some states followed by the Lok Sabha elections 8212; is dismal. It looks as if the nation is in for more tribulations. That it should happen when the economy is doing well and needs peace and stability to grow, makes the situation even more tragic.