Babri Masjid Demolition:

17 years later – No Action Taken!

The Liberhan Commission that enquired into the circumstances leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992 submitted its report to the government on June 30, 2009, 17 years after it was set up.

Almost five months later, as the winter session of Parliament commenced, the government was reportedly "giving its final touches to the Action Taken Report (ATR)" before tabling it in Parliament. However, the Report was leaked to the media, putting the government under pressure to table it the very next day! Earlier, the government had planned to push it to the last day of the winter session.

The Report has indicted leaders of the BJP - Vajpayee, Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi for the demolition and has confirmed what was clearly evident to all - that it was a deliberate and planned event and not spontaneous, and it was calculated to set the scene for organised communal massacres of the most criminal kind. But what the Report has not said is that the Congress government at the Centre was as much responsible as the BJP government in UP - the two governments had colluded in the demolition of this historic monument and the communal genocide that followed. The Report cannot afford to bring out that it was a collaboration between the two leading bourgeois parties to deepen the criminalization and communalization of the polity at one stroke.

Even as the government tabled the ATR in Parliament on November 24, it was clear that there is going to be very little action. The government declared even before the tabling of the Bill that it had no intention of taking any punitive action! The ATR merely promised that the government would take the necessary steps to expedite hearing of the cases of the accused in this matter (17 years later!). The ATR said the government is contemplating a bill to check communal violence - but how can the Indian State whose very basis is communal do anything to check communal violence?  The Liberhan Commission calls for a special separate law providing for punishment for misusing religion to acquire political power. Apart from the general recommendations, the ATR noted the commission's suggestions on civil services, riot control, intelligence agencies, and listed action that it would take on these. Again, all these agencies are thoroughly communal, and as part of the State are used at various times to push the agenda of the bourgeoisie - so what action will the government take?

The debate that has ensued between the ruling Congress Party and the opposition BJP after the tabling of the Report reflects the same dirty and discredited politics that the people hear each time there is a revelation like this. Each side is blaming the other but also is covering up for the other. Each of these two parties has employed the same method of criminal and communal division and massacre, when it has been in power, so neither can be expected to bring out the truth or punish the guilty. In one typical debate, the spokespersons of the Congress and BJP argued hotly that the other was guiltier - the BJP said the Congress should be ashamed of what happened in 1984 and the Congress said that the BJP should be even more ashamed for 2002! But neither Party is ashamed nor does it show the slightest remorse for the genocide.

The Indian state and its political parties are experts in hiding the truth about the crimes committed against the people and in ensuring that those guilty of the most heinous deeds are never brought to book and punished. They have learnt their lessons from the colonialists, including the important lesson of organizing commissions of enquiry to defend the state and its players, to keep the people waiting in expectation for decades for a justice which will never be delivered.  Commissions of enquiry have been repeatedly used both to whitewash crimes, and for political one upmanship — never to ensure justice. 

Allowing seventeen years to lapse since the demolition of the Babri Masjid before placing the investigations before Parliament is an indictment of not only the Congress Party and the BJP, but many other parties which claim to champion the cause of communal harmony. Many have had chance to rule at the center and in the state of UP. All of them have done the same —used the demolition of Babri Masjid for narrow political ends, and never the end of ensuring that such crimes will never be ever again repeated on Indian soil.

The working class must never forget that the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the subsequent communalization of the polity served the Indian ruling class in dividing the people and pushing through its thoroughly anti people agenda of globalization through liberalization and privatization. United around this goal, the bourgeoisie and its political parties deliberately fomented divisions in the working class and people, and paralysed the resistance struggles of the working people.

The Indian people cannot expect any justice from this system, from this state and the ruling class parties - they will never let the full truth be revealed nor will they punish the guilty. People must have no illusions about the enquiry commissions set up by this state or its criminalised parties.