WHILE the BJP has given a patient hearing to all of AIADMK chief J. Jayalalitha's demands, her latest that L.K. Advani, M.M. Joshi, Uma Bharati and Buta Singh should quit the cabinet is being viewed with concern in the party. All four ministers have been chargesheeted.
While home minister Advani, HRD minister Joshi, and minister of state Uma Bharati were chargesheeted in the Babri Masjid demolition case, charges were framed against communications minister Buta Singh in the JMM bribery scandal.
The 49 accused in the Babri case includes Advani, Joshi, Uma Bharati, Kalyan Singh, B.L. Sharma, Vijayaraje Scindia and Bal Thackeray. Advani, Joshi, Uma Bharati and the others were booked under the IPC on October
5, 1993: Sections 147 (rioting); 149 (participant in unlawful assembly); 505 (statements which can lead to public mischief); 120B (criminal conspiracy); 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on basis of religion, race etc); 295 (intentional destruction and defiling of a place of worship); 295A (malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class); 395A (dacoity); 297 (trespassing on burial place); 332 (causing voluntary hurt, deterring a public servant from his duty); 338 (causing grievous hurt while attempting robbery or dacoity); 397 (robbery or dacoity with an attempt to cause death); 153B read with 505 IPC (153B—imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration.)
The leaders were asked to appear before the special designated court on Ayodhya on February 29 for the formal framing of charges against them. (This is necessary as the charges have to be read to them and then they are asked to plead guilty or not guilty.) The BJP leaders did not comply and challenged the order in the Allahabad high court on technical grounds, saying among other things, that the charges of incitement and actual demolition should not have been clubbed together.
At the political level the BJP has been arguing that its leaders are not guilty of any moral wrongdoing since the party sees the Babri Masjid demolition as part of a political movement. According to legal experts, some of the charges framed, if proved in a court of law, would debar them under the Representation of People Act.
After the April 17 Supreme Court ruling that bribe-givers are offenders and MPs are public servants, there is a cloud over Buta Singh's continuance in the Vajpayee ministry. Singh and a host of others were accused of having bribed MPs to save the Narasimha Rao government in 1993. The Union Communications minister faces cases registered under section 120-b of the IPC and section 7, 12, 13 (2) of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988.
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