SHODDY LIBERHAN REPORT HELPED THE BJP FIND AN ESCAPE ROUTE
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
By Swapan Dasgupta
The Free Press Journal
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The Liberhan Report presented the BJP a handy escape route from the
embarrassment of a misadventure 17 years ago. The shoddiness of the
findings, its blunders and howlers and the absurdity of its
recommendations made it difficult for even the "secular" parties to
use the Report as a weapon of self-righteousness.
Among the few quirky sidelights of the parliamentary debates on the
maverick report by Justice M.S. Liberhan on the events in Ayodhya on
December 6, 1992, was the speech by the Bharatiya Janata Party
President Rajnath Singh. Opening for his side in the Lok Sabha, the
MP for Ghaziabad, Singh was predictably outraged that the Report had
named the legendary Devraha Baba as one of the 68 persons culpable of
spreading communal disharmony 17 years ago. As someone with roots in
eastern Uttar Pradesh, the BJP President's indignation was warranted.
It was known that the Baba died in June 1990, well before kar sevaks
turned the 16th century shrine into rubble. To that extent, his
inclusion in the Commission's rogue's gallery was a travesty. Equally
needless and unsubstantiated was the Commission's observation (para
69.22) that Devraha Baba issued "open threats by exhorting...dacoits
to take to arms for Ram temple."
A fierce reverence for Devraha Baba was among the few points of
convergence between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party in a debate that
was otherwise polarised on familiar lines. The Baba, who commanded a
wide following and was regarded as a living deity, was a legend in
his long lifetime. According to his devotees, the Baba, who was
normally perched on either an elevated platform or a tree and blessed
his devotees by touching his foot to their head, had supernatural
yogic powers and was 250 years old at the time of his death.
Regardless of his exact longevity, celebrities flocked to secure his
blessings. As Rajnath informed Parliament, President Rajendra Prasad,
accompanied by Uttar Pradesh Governor K.M. Munshi, Chief Minister
Sampurnanand, Lal Bahadur Shastri and C.B. Gupta, conducted a puja of
the Devraha Baba during Kumbh Mela. Indira Gandhi too met the Baba
and was said to be a devotee. Before beginning his election campaign
in Faizabad on November 6, 1989, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi,
accompanied by Home Minister Buta Singh, UP Chief Minister N.D.
Tiwari and K.Natwar Singh, spent 40 minutes with the Baba, a move
presumably linked to his bid to gazump the BJP.
Having established the bipartisan appeal of the Hindu seer, Rajnath
went one step further. He made the astonishing claim, on the strength
of "old books", that "King George V went for darshan of Devraha Baba
in 1911."
Whether the King-Emperor departed from his dreary routine of being
showered with expensive gifts by the Indian Princes and attending
grand dinners to confer a Royal Charter on a holy man who, in 1911,
was either 170 years old or a mere child, hasn't been documented in
detail. The "old books" that Rajnath alluded to must contain details
that historians have been unwise to ignore for so long. Regardless of
the veracity or otherwise of George V's darshan of Devraha Baba,
Rajnath's injection of this unknown and somewhat questionable factoid
points to a larger malaise of a section of the BJP: the patent
inability to blend the discourse of faith into a modern idiom. To the
BJP President who, by common consensus, had a limited target audience
of his speechwriters and his "appointing authority", a euphemism for
the bigwigs of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, there was nothing
unnatural in embellishing the documentation of the Devraha Baba's
spiritual and Hindu credentials with his transnational appeal-the
paradoxical nationalist quest for foreign certification. To a less
committed audience, it was further evidence of an inability to
distinguish between legitimate history, conspiracy theory, mythology,
bazaar gossip and plain banality.
This became somewhat more pronounced during his bid to debunk
Liberhan's suggestion that the mobilisation for the kar seva was
contrived and achieved through money power and the misuse of state
resources. What others would have substantiated by casually citing
the election results of 1991 which elevated the BJP from a fringe
player to the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh, Rajnath tried to do with
a foreigner's certificate. In his speech, he went on to claim that in
November 1990 BBC Radio had claimed that popular participation in the
Ram Janmabhoomi agitation was greater than that witnessed in the 1942
Quit India movement.
The claim, despite its inherent heresy, wasn't incredible. L.K.
Advani's Somnath to Ayodhya rath yatra of September-October 1990 drew
spectacular crowds and certainly redefined Indian politics. It is
entirely possible that the numbers of those who turned up to chant
mandir wahin banayenge were greater than those who took part in the
Mahatma Gandhi's least successful movement in 1942. Yet, the belief
that the mass appeal of the Ayodhya movement could be demonstrated by
invoking a BBC programme was laughable. It was reminiscent of an
earlier age when village tea shops were abuzz with titillating news
allegedly originating from the BBC. All of us who covered elections
in the pre-TV age recall being told by local pundits that BBC had
forecast a victory for such-and-such candidate. In rural India, BBC
was often the shorthand for the bush telegraph-in an age when the
official media lacked all credibility. For Rajnath to invoke the same
BBC is very revealing. It is also a bit incongruous in the context of
his declamation against the "colonial mindset" of the Report.
Equally, Rajnath was quite unfazed and bereft of any squeamishness
when he approvingly referred to "genetic engineering", a term
suspiciously reminiscent of eugenics, and DNA tests to argue that the
genetic pool of India differed from that of Central Asia. This sudden
burst of science was aimed at demonstrating that Babur, a Chagtai
Turk, had nothing in common, at least genetically, with local Muslims
who were converts from either the Hindu or Buddhist faiths. Ever
since Nazi Germany used race and physical anthropology to perpetrate
some of the worst crimes against humanity, the invocation of race and
genetics in history and the social sciences have been viewed with
considerable suspicion.
These sensibilities were absent from Rajnath's speechwriters who are
still bound in a ghettoised world of like-minded individuals. Their
detachment from a new India that has become cosmopolitan and more
western was marked. They have become a caricature of the celluloid
Borat from Kazakhstan whose pathological aversion to Jews and
unfamiliarity with the social mores of America made him both funny
and unacceptable. The Liberhan Report presented the BJP a handy
escape route from the embarrassment of a misadventure 17 years ago.
The shoddiness of the findings, its blunders and howlers and the
absurdity of its recommendations made it difficult for even the
"secular" parties to use the Report as a weapon of self-
righteousness. The BJP just needed to ridicule the Commission's
clumsiness, indicate its lack of even-handedness and hone in on
Liberhan's record of freeloading to get over an event best left to
history to judge. L.K. Advani wisely chose to stay out of the firing
line; and Sushma Swaraj in the Lok Sabha and Arun Jaitley in the
Rajya Sabha did effective demolition jobs of Liberhan without
simultaneously provoking a secularist backlash. The two politicians
blacklisted by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat discreetly signalled to the
country that 17 years and two generations separated the past from the
present.
Rajnath's certitudes appealed to the fanatically faithful but seemed
comic to those for whom the Ayodhya years are a hazy memory. He
showed quite conclusively why any BJP that chooses to be bound in
ghettoised Hindutva will invariably hit road bumps in 21st century
India. Unwittingly, he also demonstrated why another BJP with a more
contemporary idiom has a future as the rallying point of anti-
Congressism.
More at:
http://www.freepressjournal.in
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
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