Posted on Wednesday, December 09, 2009 - 12:44 pm:

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Vjavasi:

It is hopelessly shoddy and biased, but its malicious conclusion that the BJP leadership engineered the demolition, though false, is paradoxically quite fair and fitting.

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Vjavasi:

what actually took place was a lesser evil compared with the continuation of the Babri structure, at least in the real world. For one thing, it saved many lives. Just compare the riot toll in the years preceding the demolition with those in the subsequent years.

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Vjavasi:

The crime is not that a usurper structure was demolished, but that the government (egged on by the English media, the CPM, the JNU historians and similar usual suspects) had been thwarting the restoration of a Hindu sacred site to its pilgrim constituency, the Hindus. The right policy would have been to acknowledge and act upon the self-evident principle that a Hindu sacred site should be in Hindu custody and adorned with Hindu architecture. Will the secularists insist on the imposition of a Rama temple on the Kaaba site in Mecca, or on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? Of course not, and for the same reason there should not be a mosque on a hill that for centuries has been the main site dedicated to Rama.

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Vjavasi:

Some people were ready to act upon this simple and logical insight. When Rajiv Gandhi had the locks on the Babri Masjid opened, he clearly embarked on a policy of accommodating the Hindus in compensation for (and in proportion with) the plentiful Muslim â??appeasementâ?? by his own and previous governments. It was a typical instance of the Congress culture with its compromises and horse-trading. Nothing very noble, but with the virtue of pragmatism. That approach would normally have led to a deal, with the Ayodhya site for the Hindu lobby and some sweeteners for the Muslim lobby, of which package the ban on Salman Rushdieâ??s book The Satanic Verses was an opener. Indeed not quite noble, but it would have saved a lot of lives and political energy. Today the Rama Janmabhumi temple would have become just one among many uneventful Hindu places of pilgrimage. Come to think of it, that option could still be tried by the present Congress government.

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Vjavasi:

But in 1989-92, that option was thwarted by the offensive of Babri ultras, and by this I donâ??t mean the warriors for Islam but the conformistic intellectuals shrieking and howling that the contentious building was the last bastion of â??secularismâ??, a matter of high principle, of life and death. Under their fierce calls for â??hard secularismâ??, no administrator dared to reduce the controversy to its true and manageable proportions anymore. Not the Congress, not the various left-populist parties, and not the BJP either. They were all paralysed and consequently bought time all while taking sides against the weaker party, the pro-temple movement with its vacillating and politically incompetent leadership.

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Vjavasi:

And this shows us another sense in which the BJP is politically responsible for the demolition and for its erratic implementation by an unguided crowd. They too took the side of the status-quo against the Hindu demands.

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Vjavasi:

So the ordinary activists had rightly sensed the unwillingness of the leaders to take the movement forward. That is why they took the law into their own hands.

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Posted on Wednesday, December 09, 2009 - 01:18 am:

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quote:

BJP chief Rajnath Singh may have elbowed out party colleague and deputy leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj to open the debate on Liberhan Commission report in Lok Sabha but Swaraj on Tuesday beat him by making an impassioned defence of her party as well as taking a strident Hindutva line that appeals to the Sangh.

Leader of Opposition L K Advani, architect of the Ayodhya movement, placed his hands over his deputy�s head in blessing her in appreciation of her performance, which also took the party "back to basics".

She even tried keeping Muslims on board by declaring that the Liberhan report had the potential of starting communal riots, as it asked Hindus and Muslims to dump their community leaders. While asking the home minister to scrap the Liberhan report "lock, stock and barrel", she said "khuda ke liye is report ko kharij kijiye", using the Urdu word for God instead of the usual BJP style of invoking Ram or Ishwar.

Harping on the Hindutva theme, Swaraj said the report should be dismissed as it says the Ram temple agitation was "not a people�s movement". Slamming Justice Liberhan, saying he would not know the facts of the wave in favour of the temple by sitting in an air-conditioned office in Chandigarh, Swaraj told the House, "It was the largest people�s movement of post-Independent India that turned L K Advani into a mass leader."

She went on to say how during Advani's Ayodhya yatra, she participated in the Haryana leg and every morning she would do an "aarti" of the vehicle and pick up the dust from the wheels and put it on her head. She said Liberhan had dared to call Ram a Hindu God when "Ram was really the soul of India".

Swaraj dared the government by declaring that its leaders were ready for any punishment. "Did kar sewaks dismantle the disputed structure? Yes. Was there a conspiracy? No," she said, adding "Yes, we are ready for any punishment, if you want to punish us. Both leaders inside and outside the House are ready."

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