On September 30, 2010, seventeen years and nine months
after the Babri Masjid was demolished through the execution of a carefully
planned and publicly acclaimed criminal conspiracy in which senior leaders
of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its parent and sister
organisations participated, the Allahabad high court delivered a verdict
on the Babri Masjid title suits that legitimised the communal and
criminal incursion into the mosque in 1949 and the destruction in 1992 of
a place of worship of India’s largest minority, the Muslims.
It is not insignificant that the one judge who hailed
from the minority community was alone among three in making even a
reference to these criminal acts. The other two, one of whom retired soon
after the judgement was delivered, did not only display in their
individual judgements a flawed understanding of history. Instead of
arbitrating the dispute based on time-tested principles of criminal, civil
and constitutional law, Justices Sharma and Agarwal chose to allow their
judicial minds to be swayed by personal faith. Thereafter, they
legitimised this flawed judicial approach through recourse to prejudicial
renderings of historical interpretation and fact. This judgement has in
fact re-emphasised the need for a comprehensive and long overdue critique
of the Indian judiciary, of its independence, its politics and its
ideological leanings.
The symposium, ‘Faith and Fact: Democracy after the
Ayodhya Verdict’, jointly organised by SAHMAT, Social Scientist and
Sabrang Trust, was an attempt to do just that. This issue of
Communalism Combat brings to our readers the results of the
deliberations held in New Delhi between December 6 and 8, 2010.
The campaign by the right wing, which spearheaded the
movement to mobilise hundreds of thousands for the demolition of a
450-year-old mosque at Ayodhya, employed a widespread propaganda spiel
that manipulated and misrepresented history in a bid to legitimise not
just the cold-blooded destruction of a place of worship of one section of
Indians but also the murder, in the thousands, of innocent and helpless
members of India’s Muslim community and the destruction of their homes,
businesses and properties. It was a movement calculated to sow seeds of
hatred and deep division and reap electoral gains among the majority and
to alienate and reduce a religious minority to second-class status.
The flaws in our constitutional governance are
reflected in the fact that despite criminal cases against them, two of the
masterminds behind this political and criminal campaign rose to become
union minister for home affairs (LK Advani) and union minister for human
resource development (Murli Manohar Joshi).
That this carefully orchestrated, unconstitutional
campaign has infiltrated democratic spaces and found an echo in Indian
institutions is reflected in the biased conduct of officers of the law
when dealing with communal violence and in textbooks that selectively
misrepresent Indian history. The Ayodhya verdict of 2010 is a clear
example of how the higher judiciary in India has also succumbed to this
brazen campaign. Justices (retd) PB Sawant, SHA Raza and Hosbet Suresh
gave detailed presentations on the politics of India’s higher judiciary.
It is within this situation that the failure to
criminally prosecute the perpetrators of these criminal conspiracies – the
surreptitious installation of the idols in 1949 or the destruction of the
mosque in full public view in 1992 – needs to be located. Despite the
findings of the Liberhan Ayodhya Commission of Inquiry, the Indian
criminal justice system has not punished those guilty of these acts.
Advocate Anupam Gupta, who was counsel for the Liberhan Commission for
over a decade, and journalist Manoj Mitta spoke at length on this
subversion of justice.
Detailed presentations at the symposium by the Aligarh
Historians Society, Professors Irfan Habib, Shireen Moosvi and S. Ali
Nadeem Rezavi, systematically explained how misguided the judicial
understanding of medieval Indian history has been. The two judges
deliberately seek to postdate the construction of the Babri Masjid from
the time of Babar to that of Aurangzeb. The judges have also deliberately
discredited the inscriptions on the mosque which indicate the date of its
construction. They give full credence to the BJP-led NDA government’s
archaeological excavations at Ayodhya in 2003, the findings of which have
not so far been made public – not even by the subsequent Congress-led UPA
government – thus thwarting independent scrutiny and analysis.
One of the most critical failures of the litigation
proceedings conducted in the Allahabad high court was the court’s failure
to follow due process in the recording of evidence. Dr Shireen Moosvi
eloquently brought out how the Allahabad high court had reduced the
process of recording of evidence from expert historians and archaeologists
to a technicality. Propositions, often rather complex, of historiography
and archaeology that needed to be explained in a couple of sentences were
confined by the court to monosyllabic “yes” or “no” answers. This reduced
the process of recording expert evidence to a farce.
Today world-renowned archaeologist D. Mandal faces
contempt proceedings initiated by the very bench that delivered the
Ayodhya verdict. Professor Mandal was served with a contempt of court
notice for his critique of the 2003 excavations in two volumes, Ayodhya:
Archaeology after Demolition and Ayodhya: Archaeology after
Excavation. The deliberate move by the higher judiciary to curb
independent academic thought bodes ill for individual rights and freedoms.
All in all, the verdict of September 30, 2010 has ominous implications for
Indian democracy.
We sincerely apologise to our readers for our inability to
bring out issues of Communalism Combat since the July-August 2010
special double issue. It will be our best endeavour to ensure that this
does not happen in the future.