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Journalism of Courage
The Congress and its leaders never get tired of singing paeans to Rajiv Gandhi, talking of him as a modernist prime minister, the one who initiated the Panchayati Raj system in India, reduced the voting age to 18, made computers a household name, and ushered in a telecom revolution, besides making strides in foreign policy.
But the Congress and its leaders never really mention – leave aside give credit to him – that it was his government that allowed the opening of the locks of the Babri Masjid in 1986.
This is why Congress Madhya Pradesh chief Kamal Nath’s remarks in an interview to The Indian Express emphasising that it was under Rajiv as PM that this had happened, and that the BJP can’t corner credit for the Ram temple in Ayodhya, are so significant.
The Rajiv government’s 1986 measure was a barely concealed attempt to appease the Hindu community after his government capitulated to the pressure of the Muslim clergy and overturned the Shah Bano verdict of the Supreme Court. Three years later, as the BJP stepped up its Ram temple campaign, the Rajiv government permitted shilanyas at the Babri site.
It took just three years after that for activists of the VHP and Bajrang Dal, among others, to pull down the Babri Masjid. The Congress has chosen silence since on the Rajiv government’s role in all this, the unsaid view being that his steps were ultimately imprudent, and ended up adding fuel to the BJP’s temple campaign while dealing a blow to the Congress’s Muslim support base.
A day after Kamal Nath’s remarks, the Congress kept up this silence. Sources said the party is not in any hurry to disassociate itself from what the leader said amidst the election season – the hand-wringing of its liberal sections and Muslim leaders, notwithstanding.
At the same time, the party hopes that the remarks of Kamal Nath, who is likely to be CM if the Congress wins in Madhya Pradesh, don’t blow up.
On Friday, the AIMIM’s Asaduddin Owaisi took on the party. “Kamal Nath has once again proved my point, as well as that of thousands and lakhs of others, that the Congress had an equal role in the demolition of the Babri Masjid,” he said.
Owaisi recalled that the Congress was in power in Uttar Pradesh when idols were kept inside the Babri mosque and was in power both at the Centre and in UP when prayers were permitted.
The AIMIM leader added that he “hopes” that Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledges Kamal Nath’s remarks by taking Rahul Gandhi along when he goes to Ayodhya in January 2024 for the Ram temple inauguration.
“Because the work his (Rahul’s) father started, Modiji is completing. So, the Prime Minister should take Rahul Gandhi along with him. It will be a ‘Ram-Shyam’ pair,” he said.
While turning the page on Rajiv, the Congress has been more than happy letting the blame for the Babri demolition fall on P V Narasimha Rao, who was the PM in 1992. Congress leaders have only half heartedly disputed, and often concurred with, the view that Rao let the demolition happen.
In 2007, Rahul Gandhi suggested that the Babri demolition would not have taken place had the Gandhi family been in politics in 1992 (after Rajiv’s assassination in 1991, Sonia Gandhi initially stayed away).
In his book ‘Memoirs of a Maverick’, released recently, senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was seen as one of Rajiv’s confidants, wrote that the former PM always maintained that “he was completely in the dark about this conspiracy to open the locks and learnt about it only after it was an accomplished fact”.
Aiyar added that Rajiv had ordered an internal party inquiry into the “respective roles” of senior Congress leaders Arun Nehru and M L Fotedar in the “imbroglio”. The inquiry, he said, exonerated Fotedar but pinned the responsibility on Arun Nehru, who was later sidelined and then dropped summarily from the Council of Ministers in October 1986.
In recent years, the Congress stand on Babri has got further complicated due to its attempts to court the Hindu community, with Rahul speaking more than once on how Hinduism was “different” from the BJP, RSS’s political Hindutva.
Speaking with The Indian Express, Kamal Nath had said: “Taala khola… Rajiv Gandhi got the locks (of the temporary Ram temple at the disputed Babri Masjid site) opened. Let us not forget history… The BJP wants to usurp the Ram temple as its property… They were in government, they built it. Apne ghar se toh banaya nahin hai. Government ke paise se banaya hai (They haven’t built it with their own money. It’s the government’s money).”
