Equality is a right, not a favour for Muslims Does Justice matter after 17 Years?

A special bench of the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court hearing the Ayodhya title suit yesterday rejected revision petitions filed by one Dr Mohammad Ismail Farooqui urging the court to review its judgement of September 30, 2010.

The special bench comprising Justices Mohammad Rafat Alam, Sudhir Agarwal and V K Dikshit rejected three petitions of Dr Farooqui for the review of the judgement in the title suit.

The court today ended the contempt petitions against a national news agency and a daily newspaper for reporting on the Ayodhya title suit trial in 2006. However, the court had imposed Rs 1000 each as cost on the editor and reporter of the news agency along with the Chief Editor of the newspaper.

The special court also ended the contempt proceedings against two authors and a printer for their controversial book on the Ayodhya excavations. The three were let off after the court penalised them with Rs 1000 each as cost. (United News of India)

The first inquiry into the demolition of the Babri mosque on December 6, 1992 was completed within seven days. On the morning of Sunday, December 13, Sharad Pawar, then defence minister, invited a group of friends and colleagues to the home of an associate MP. He watched a film - live footage of the whole episode, taken by some government agency, possibly intelligence. Those antique reels should still be somewhere in the archives. There was little that any inquiry committee could have added about the sequence of events on December 6 that ended with the fall of the mosque by the evening.

The causes of this historic event were also a matter of public record. L K Advani's rath yatra was not a surreptitious journey. Indeed, extensive media coverage may have been part of the purpose, since he wanted to create mass momentum for his political project. Neither was there any secrecy when Congress laid the foundation stone of the temple to Lord Ram in the middle of the 1989 polls. Babri was a central theme, along with Bofors, of those dramatic elections. The 1989 BJP versions of Varun Gandhi were full-throated, not muted, in their slogans as parties sought votes with a rhetoric that has been subsequently banned: Mandir wahin banayenge! and Mussalman ke do sthaan, Pakistan ya kabristan! No one hid anything: We shall build a temple on that precise spot! Muslims have two options, either Pakistan or the graveyard!

Democracy is a volatile game played in the open. What was there left to inquire into?

All that an official inquiry could do was place a stamp of judicial impartiality on known facts. It did not seem strange, then, that Justice M S Liberhan, appointed on December 16, 1992, was asked to deliver his report in three months. If he had extended it to six months or even a year, it would have been reasonable. Why did he take 17 years?

The key actors were known and available. No sleuths needed here. Why did Liberhan take more than nine years to obtain V P Singh's deposition, and nine-and-a-half for P V Narasimha Rao's? Surely they were not evading his orders? Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti were ministers in a BJP-led government when they gave evidence. Former RSS chief K S Sudarshan appeared only on February 6, 2001. Rao could have said all he had to long before April 9, 2001, four years after he lost his job as prime minister.

Had the commission already served its first purpose by 2001? It had outlived Rao's term in office and thereby, ensured that its findings could not be used to demand Rao's resignation. Rao survived December 6, 1992 by the cynical expedient of buying out those he feared most, Muslims within the Congress. Some inside government were given promotions; most outside were inducted in a January 1993 reshuffle. Conscience purchased, life went on.
It would be interesting to know if the Liberhan Commission has disclosed the one mystery of December 6: what was Rao doing that entire day? Babri was not destroyed by a sudden, powerful, maverick explosion. It was brought down stone by stone, the process punctuated by the rousing cheers of kar sevaks.

So, what was Rao doing during those minutes and hours from morning till sunset? Sleeping. That is what his personal assistant said to the many agitated Congressmen and women who phoned to ask why the government was asleep. They were shocked to learn that this was, literally, the official explanation. Their agitation cooled when they realized that the party would have to pay a horrendous price if government was destabilized. Plus, of course, there were concrete benefits in silence.

There may not be a rational explanation for a 17-year inquiry, but there is a political explanation. Every government between 1992 and 2004 had a vested interest in delay. The minority governments of H D Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral could not have survived a day without support from the Rao-Sitaram Kesri Congress. (Mrs Sonia Gandhi was not party president then.) Neither Gowda nor Gujral would have wanted a report that indicted their benefactors.

The BJP-led coalition that ruled for six years had the guilty on its front row. Only Uma Bharti has been candid enough to say that she was delighted when the mosque fell ("I'm ready to own up to the demolition and will have no problem even if I'm hanged"). Justice Liberhan could have punched mortal holes into the BJP front row when it was in office. And so when he sought one extension after another, there was public silence and private relief.

Whether advertently or inadvertently, Justice Liberhan protected politicians on both sides of the great divide. There remains a curiosity question. Why did he not submit his report in 2004? Admittedly Dr Manmohan Singh was finance minister in the Rao government, but he had nothing to do with the politics of Babri. When delay becomes so comfortable, why bother?

A potent threat to Indian secularism comes not from its perceived enemies but from a section of the vanguard, the secular fundamentalists: those ideologues who forget that an Indian's identity — as distinct from India's identity — is shaped substantially by his faith.

The Congress that gave us freedom and reshaped India never made this mistake. The three venerable icons of secularism are a Mahatma, a Pandit and a Maulana. Their faith was gentle, culturally harmonious and hence quintessentially Indian. They protected the power of religion from the dangers of religiosity.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was anointed Mahatma during the Khilafat-non-cooperation movement of 1919- 1922, an inspiring instance of Hindu-Muslim unity in the common cause of nationalism. Gandhi aborted this awesome upsurge suddenly, after Chauri Chaura, to the bitter disappointment of particularly the Muslims, who had staked their all on his leadership. A chastised Gandhi often said that the term 'Mahatma' stank in his nostrils, but he never abandoned it. He did not need the title. But he knew that Indians needed a Mahatma as father figure of a nation awaiting rebirth. He understood that Hindus wanted this promise to be a Ram Rajya.

Abul Kalam Azad was a genuine Maulana, whose tafseer (analysis and translation) of the Holy Quran commands respect, and whose oratory soared above the high levels of his contemporaries. Among Azad's early enthusiasms, quickly abandoned, was an organisation called Hizbollah, or Party of Allah: you might be familiar with the name from the present politics of the Middle East.

But when did Jawaharlal Nehru become a Pandit? Nehru's liberal-democratic worldview was shaped by an European education and Indo-European sensibility. His personal lifestyle preferences were hardlly 'native'. Details of his breakfast need not detain us; suffice to note that they would not appear on the table of an orthodox Brahmin club. 'Pandit' was a political gesture, shaped by Gandhi, towards a conscious identification with an Indian reality. Indira Gandhi took care to visit the temple of Lord Krishna on his birthday. Their political heirs have lost this subliminal connect with the Indian psyche.

Indian Marxists, still convinced that class is the predominant determinant, are still reeling from the uppercut they received from Bengali Muslims in the recently held panchayat elections. Their grief is mixed with resentment: they gave Muslims protection from riots, and is this the reward? Peace was their sole exchange rate for the Muslim vote. It was a patronising view of secularism.
The CPM has not changed in three decades of power in Bengal, but the Bengali Muslim has. The young Bengali Muslim does not want to be a protected species. He believes he is an equal under the Indian Constitution. Safety of life is his right, not a favour. He wants jobs, education and healthcare, like the Bengali Hindu. And he wants the protection of his faith-identity. Biman Bose, the state party chief, attributed his party's sudden implosion to the corruption of its cadre. If that was the principal reason, the CPM ebb tide would have begun three elections ago. The tectonic shift has been led by the change in the Muslim vote.

Here is a paradoxical thought. The most successful Muslim leader of the 20th century, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was a secular-fundamentalist in his personal life, and a man with a single-point mission in his politics: security for Muslims. Jinnah had open contempt for Gandhi ("That Hindu revivalist!"). Jinnah was privately contemptuous of the Muslim mullahs. He understood only the law, and convinced himself that equality for Muslims could never be achieved in any Constitution acceptable to an united India.

Six decades later, Bengali Muslims are upending that logic. Their politics is born out of the self-confidence of equality. They have the right, as much as a Bengali Hindu, to tell the state that law and order is a duty and not a gift. They insist on stretching security to faith, food, incomes and jobs. The fog of uncertainty in which the fear psychosis of the 1940s flourished has given way to the clarity of a citizen's rights, and the anger of citizens denied their due. Jinnah, incidentally, was perceptive to say, at one point, that the passions of Indian Muslims were like soda water. He maximised its power before the water went flat.

But the new power of Muslims is stable; it is the power of an equal. Jinnah, it is not widely known, enjoyed going to the races in Bombay. In 1946, just a year before Pakistan was born, he gave a tip to a friend, telling him to bet on a horse called Hindustan, which was giving odds of nearly seven to one. The friend protested: how could Jinnah recommend anything called 'Hindustan'? "Never mind," said Jinnah, "it is only a horse."

Two generations later, Hindustan is showing the pedigree of a champion, galloping ahead despite the scepticism of punters who gave it no better odds than seven to one. Indian Muslims want to gallop to victory on that horse, for it belongs to them as much as it does to any other Indian community.