National

Asleep At The Wheel?

Or did the BJP-RSS leadership trick him into a sorry complacency?

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Asleep At The Wheel?
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Taken By Surprise

  • Rao did not expect things to go out of hand in Ayodhya
  • This, his former aides say, was because he had received assurance from Vajpayee and Shekhawat and RSS leader Rajendra Singh
  • Had he gone by intelligence reports, he could have acted in time to prevent the demolition

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On the fateful morning of December 6, 1992, even as kar sevaks were assembling  in the temple town of Ayodhya, around the 400-year-old Babri Masjid, Prime Minister
P.V. Narasimha Rao was ensconced in his official residence, 7, Race Course Road, deep in conversation with a close associate. He was perfectly calm and composed, the associate told Outlook, as though he was totally in command of the situation. Around 11.30 am, the phone rang. It was the director of the Intelligence Bureau. He tersely informed the PM things were getting out of hand in Ayodhya.

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Rao, the associate recalls, turned “ashen”, instantly realising he had misjudged the situation. “It was clear to Rao saheb even at that moment what the consequences would be—both for the country and for him,” the associate said. Rao had invested so much faith in talks with the Sangh parivar, he couldn’t believe he’d be betrayed, especially because he had received assurances from people like Atal Behari Vajpayee and Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, not just Kalyan Singh.” But that, says the associate, cannot absolve him of the “moral responsibility” for what happened that day. “The problem with Rao saheb,” says the associate, “is that, being a lawyer, he tended to take a legalistic rather than political view.” And that’s the view of a sympathiser.

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Seventeen years on, the Liberhan commission has absolved Rao of all responsibility for the Babri demolition. For the Congress, which had lost Muslim support after that watershed moment, the exoneration couldn’t have been better timed, for it coincides with the gradual return of the minorities to the party, even in Uttar Pradesh. Privately, though, many Congress functionaries have not quite forgiven Rao. Sitaram Kesri, whom Rao made party president, denied him a Lok Sabha ticket in 1998. And Rahul Gandhi declared in the run-up to the 2007 general elections that, had a member of his family been PM in 1992, the mosque would be standing today. Indeed, the Congress has made it a public point to demonstrate its anger at and disapproval of Rao in a bid to win back the Muslim vote it lost in the wake of the demolition. The Muslim community believed—and continues to believe—that Rao failed in his duty by failing to protect the mosque.

So why did the commission accept Rao’s arguments and underscore in its report that the Supreme Court’s own observer as well as UP governor Satyanarayan Reddy and the intelligence agencies—all “charged with acting as the eyes and ears of the government”—had failed to alert the Rao government, depriving it of the legal ballast required for intervention, either through President’s rule or deployment of paramilitary troops? One view, from an Intelligence Bureau officer of that period who holds Rao “50 per cent responsible” for what happened, is that the commission was set up “to exonerate Rao”. Indeed, chapter 11 of the report, entitled ‘President’s Rule’, says the commission’s terms of reference did not include examining the Centre’s role, but since it was charged with finding the reasons for the events of December 6, it felt this, too, demanded scrutiny. Understandably, says the intelligence official, the commission—like Rao—has taken the “legal view” and given him a clean chit.

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But conversations with top officials of that period also point to sharp differences between the pmo and the Union home ministry. A senior advisor to Rao who was a key facilitator in talks between the Hindu and Muslim leaders maintains that the Rao government was faced with only “bad options”. “Even Arjun Singh (one of Rao’s most vocal critics),” he says, “had returned from Lucknow a couple of days before December 6 after meeting Kalyan Singh and assured the PM things were under control.” He says if President’s rule had been imposed, “it would have set a bad precedent. And if the kar sevaks had been fired on, there would have been a conflagration. What would have been the political impact?”

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The home ministry, clearly, did not agree. Madhav Godbole, the then Union home secretary, says, “We felt the only way the structure could be saved was to take it over and impose President’s rule. In fact, the home ministry had made all preparations. The law ministry was consulted and they’d concurred. The cabinet note was ready on November 20. The question was of getting clearance from the top. It never came.” He adds that, constitutionally, the governor’s report was neither required nor binding on the government: “The government of India could have taken its own decision.”

An IB officer of the period concurs. “True, the governor hadn’t sent a report. But Rao shouldn’t have taken cover behind legalities; there was a political decision involved. It wasn’t just a mosque—the security of the nation was involved. Where there is suspicion that the state government is playing foul, the Centre has inherent powers to intervene,” the officer says. “If nothing had happened, at worst he’d have been accused of high-handedness, but posterity would have remembered him differently.”

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Clearly, Rao chose to disbelieve his own intelligence officials and trusted the “tacit understanding” he’d reached with Vajpayee, Shekhawat, and Rajendra Singh of the RSS. In its December 13, 1992, issue, the RSS mouthpiece, The Organiser, wrote: “The Sangh parivar played its cards well in this battle of wits with the PM.... It was decided to devise a strategy to confront the Centre while avoiding a clash with the judiciary. It was as part of this strategy that the UP government filed (an) affidavit in the Supreme Court...that the government would not allow violation of the court’s orders.”

Rao fell into the parivar’s trap. And though the commission has cleared his name, history may not be so kind.

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