People's Democracy
(Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)
No.
51
December 19, 2010
|
Vol. XXXIV
No.
51 December 19, 2010 |
THREE-DAY
SYMPOSIUM ON BABRI VERDICT
Sinister
Politics Leads to Subversion of Justice
Teesta
Setalvad
THE September
30, 2010
verdict in the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi case, that began as a
dispute over a
title suit but escalated into a full blown politico-religious conflict
--- one
that legitimised the criminal assault on a 450 plus years old mosque
and also
targeted minority life and property --- has raised serious issues for
the
future of Indian democracy, given the fact that the verdict was
erroneously based
on issues of contested faith and disputed histories.
Commemorating
the 18th
anniversary of December 6, 1992, a unique and well-planned three-day
symposium
organised in
ASSAULT
ON
CONSTITUTION
Over three
days, many
speakers made the point that the recent Ayodhya judgement is actually
an
assault on the Indian constitution and the foundations of a secular
democratic
state. The Ayodhya verdict, moreover, implicitly justifies the 1992
demolition
of the Babri Masjid and related criminal acts and, if upheld, it will
have serious
consequences for the future of our democracy.
Systematic
decimation of
the basic rational principles of the rule of law as laid down in the
Indian constitution,
and of historiography, archaeology and logic, are the critical features
of the
infamous Ayodhya verdict of September 30, said speakers Justice P B
Sawant,
Justice Hosbet Suresh, Justice S H A Raza and Justice Rajinder Sachar,
economist
Professor Prabhat Patnaik, and historians Professor Irfan Habib and
Professor
Shireen Moosvi, during the three-day symposium on Faith and
Fact: Democracy after the Ayodhya Verdict that concluded
in Delhi on December 8. Elucidating on the social composition of
From December
6 to 8, over
three days of intense sessions at the symposium, the issues that were
discussed
included (1) the consistent failure of the criminal justice system,
including
non-investigation of the FIR registered on the vandalism of the Babri
Masjid on
the night of December 23, 1949; (2) the systematic dilution of the
criminal
cases against the masterminds who instigated the criminal conspiracy
behind the
demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992; and (3) the motivated maligning
of
historians and archaeologists who testified with evidence during the
pendency
of the Ayodhya dispute before the
Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court. All these were held to be
the
collective reason for the passage of a verdict that has seriously
shaken the
faith of the common Indian in the administration of justice.
The
deliberate and
conscious absence of any substantive mention of the criminal acts of
1949 and
1992 by the two majority judges while dealing with the title suit was,
in the
words of advocate Anupam Gupta, counsel for the Liberhan commission for
over 12
years, the singular injustice in this verdict. The judgement goes into
thousands of pages over mythology and faith, but ignores the criminal
incursions into the Babri Masjid under law. Even worse, the evidence
presented
by historians and archaeologists in court was formally recorded in
monosyllabic
answers to deliberately curtail and hide the explanations that are
critical in
explaining historical theory and evidence. Today, archaeologists and
their publishers
face contempt notices served by the
Professor
Prabhat Patnaik,
who spoke in the inaugural session, outlined the intense need for
institutions
of democracy to justly adjudicate without being influenced by the
politics of
power, aggression and violence. The judiciary, especially in a seasoned
democracy, needed to stay aloof and distant from the unabashed efforts
to
influence courts in the deliverance of justice.
FLAWED
HISTORIOGRAPHY,
FLAWED
ARCHAEOLOGY
Professor
Irfan Habib,
senior historian from the
A significant
point made
in the critique is as below.
Justice
Sudhir Agarwal aimed
in his judgement to prove that the Babri Masjid was built not during
the reign
of Babur, in 1528, but only under Aurangzeb (died 1707). Relying on a
little
known traveller, Fr Joseph Tieffenthale, who visited Ayodhya between
1740 and
1765 AD, and quoting from him about the memory of the mosque being
built over a
demolished fortress called Ramcot (Tieffenthaler’s words), Justice
Agarwal has
rubbished the authenticity of the inscriptions over the mosque.
The judge has
interpreted
the inscriptions as later forgeries made between, say 1760 and 1810,
despite the
fact that these inscriptions have been accepted and relied upon as
genuine by
practically every historian and epigraphist until now, and by Fuhrer A
S
Beveridge and the Epigraphic Indica,
Arabic an Persian Supplement, 1965 (an official publication of the
Archeological Survey of India).
The judge, in
his
voluminous judgement, uses harsh words to dismiss this official
publication and
the evidence brought in there of the inscriptions over the mosque,
entitled Inscriptions by Emperor Babur. Dr Z A
Desai, the then Superintendent, Persian and Arabic Inscriptions, ASI
and a
great authority among
This
inscription remained
in position at the entrance of the mosque until December 6, 1992, when
the karsevaks carried out their act of
demolition; if it does not exist now, it is owing to that criminal act.
As to
the significance of Tieffenthaler’s not mentioning the inscriptions, it
needs
stressing that in history negative inferences of this kind are hardly
ever
given credence. One famous example is of the famous “intellectual giant
and
linguistic wizard,” Marco Polo’s failure to mention the hugely ancient
Here, Justice
Agarwal also overlooks the fact that about 90 years before
the Epigraphia Indica, A &
P Supplement, 1965, both the gate and the pulpit inscriptions of
the
Babri Masjid had been mentioned in The Gazetteer of the Province of
Oudh,
edited by W C Benett, issued as an official publication in 1877-78, Vol
I, pp 6-7,
Plates 1-2.
INSCRIPTIONS
&
DATE
OF
CONSTRUCTION
“In two
places in the Babri Mosque,” it says, “the year in which it was
built, 935 H, corresponding with 1528 AD, is carved in stone along with
inscriptions dedicated to the glory of the Emperor.” It will be noticed
that
this is much older than Fuhrer’s reading of the inscriptions, but is
quietly
ignored in Justice Agarwal’s summary of the reports on the inscriptions
(para 1650).
Benett’s
statement is confirmed in H R Nevill’s Fyzabad District
Gazetteer, with a Preface dated 1905 (volume reprinted, 1920). On
page 179
we are told: “The Mosque has two inscriptions, one on the outside and
the other
on the pulpit and bears the date 935 Hijri.” Of the authenticity of the
inscriptions there can be no doubt. Thus two official reports clearly
say that
the inscriptions on the entrance and the pulpit gave the date 935 Hijri
(=1528
AD) and that they belonged to the reign of Babur. One of them goes on
to attest
their undoubted authenticity.
In reaching
the conclusion
over the allegedly later construction of the Babri Masjid, Justice
Sudhir
Agarwal ignores the crucial issues relating to the date of the building
such as
architectural design and technique of construction. In the critique
presented
at length by the Aligarh Historians Society, what emerged was not only
that a judge
of the High Court has based a substantive part of his 5,000 page
judgement on a
narrow understanding of faith but has, worse, misrepresented
historiography and
archaeology, especially with relation to Indian medieval history --- a
specific
target of Hindu communal forces since the early 1900s.
Not only does
the judge remark on Babur himself whom he views as a man
with “a completely Islamic person and (so?) lacked tolerance to the
idol
worshippers” (para 1563); his is
also a distinctly flawed understanding of medieval Indian history as a
whole:
“Another
surprising aspect was that the Indian subcontinent was under the
attack/invasion by outsiders for almost a thousand or more years in the
past
and had been continuously looted by them. Massive wealth continuously
was
driven off from the country” (para
1611). This sentence suggests a rather one-sided view of the
history of
medieval
Dr S Ali
Nadeem Rizvi’s erudite presentation on the evolution of mosque
architecture over the several hundred years of Mughal rule shows a
distinction
in the architecture between the times of Babur and Aurangzeb. It can
easily be
established, by the style and technique employed in a building, whether
it was
built in the pre-Mughal or early Mughal times or later.
FARCE
OF
RECORDING
The Babri
Masjid was recognisably built in the Sharqi style of
architecture (seen noticeably at Jaunpur) with the characteristic form
given to
the propylon. The domes, though large, are very heavy. This style
became
obsolete soon after; and well before Aurangzeb’s time, light (even
bulbous)
domes with free standing minarets became the hallmark of a mosque.
One of the
most critical failures of the entire process of litigation
undertaken by the High Court was brought out eloquently by eminent
historian Dr
Shireen Moosvi who pointed out how the process adopted by the court of
recording evidence from expert historians and archaeologists had been
reduced
to a farce. Propositions, often rather complex, of historiography and
archaeology
need to be answered/explained in a couple of sentences. Yet by
insisting that
such expert witnesses testified only in monosyllabic “yes” or “no,” the
court reduced
the business or process of recording expert evidence within the court
to a
farce. In Indian criminal law too, each
witness has a right by law to record explanations after his/her answer
and the High
Court’s refusal to allow this basic legal process has subverted the
course of
justice. Two publications Archaeology after
Demolition and Archaeology after
Excavation, authored by world renowned archaeologist D Mandal,
faced
contempt proceedings initiated by the very bench that delivered the
Ayodhya
verdict. The deliberate act of the higher judiciary in curtailing the
academic
thought and freedoms of independent historians and archaeologists by
using a
colonial and archaic Contempt of Court’s Act was evidence, if any was
ever needed,
of the sinister politics behind the process of subversion of justice in
this
case.
Whereas
Justice Agarwal has high praise in his judgement for the team of
ASI officials set up by the BJP driven NDA regime in destroying the
valuable
portions of the historical Babri Mosque including what survived after
the
demolition, the judges have failed to go into the politics behind this
excavation unleashed by a virulently communal BJP led NDA regime in
which the
architect of the bloody rath yatra
that has been castigated by Justice Liberhan in his report was led by L
K
Advani who later became India’s home minister and deputy prime minister
and Dr Murli
Manohar Joshi who later became the minister for human resource
development. Far
from questioning the politics behind the motivated excavations, the
judge
reposes full trust in the ASI’s subsequent doctored report that has
also not in
full form been made available for study by experts. Professor Irfan
Habib
pointed out that the present government at the centre was complicit in
allowing
a flawed report of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to stand.
SYSTEMIC
RESPONSE
TO
ILLEGAL ACTS
Advocate for
the Liberhan commission for
about a dozen years, Anupam Gupta spoke passionately on the
history of
this litigation that had conspicuously failed to deal with the illegal
actions
of criminal trespass into the mosque on the night of December 23, 1949
and
placement of the Ram Lala idols within --- an action that could not be
reversed
despite repeated written communications and directives of India’s first
prime
minister Jawaharlal Nehru to the superintendent of police K K K Nayyar
who
thereafter joined the Jan Sangh, the precursor of today’s BJP. He was
strongly
critical of the judgement of Justice Agarwal that could spend over
5,000 pages
on the mythological aspects of Lord Ram’s birth but had no space, nor
concern
for the criminal actions of 1949 and 1992. The FIR for criminal
trespass,
lodged reluctantly by the SP or by the district magistrate P P Pandey
who too
later joined the political frenzy for demolition of the mosque, has
never been
investigated by the law enforcement agencies.
During the
much publicised and widely watched karseva on December
6, 1992 that took place in violation of the undertakings
made before India’s Supreme Court by the then Uttar Pradesh chief
minister Kalyan
Singh, interestingly the frenzy displayed by karsevaks
under the leadership of L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi
and Uma Bharati --- that was also celebrated by mediamen Chandan Mitra
and
Swapan Dasgupta present at the spot --- did not extend to destroying
the idols that
were placed surreptitiously within the mosque, in 1949. These were
carefully
removed and brought back to the spot four days later.
Speakers also
commented upon the role of the then central government
headed by Narasimha Rao. Though the centre had deployed central
paramilitary
forces on the spot, these stood by and watched as a mob unleashed
criminal acts
there.
Journalist
Manoj Mitra detailed the deliberate dilution of the criminal
cases related to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, especially
during the
NDA regime. Of the 49 FIRs lodged at the time, 47 related to attacks on
journalists. Of the other two, one related to the criminal conspiracy
and mob
attack on the mosque in which L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi had
been named
as the masterminds, and the second related to the venomous hate
speeches
delivered before, during and after the act of demolition. During the
five years
of the NDA regime, the central government deliberately deleted the
names of
three top leaders of the BJP as master conspirators though they are now
arguing
that a headless mob had performed the illegal act. Now the two cases
are being
heard separately, deliberately weakened by partisan interference by the
executive.
Interestingly,
the Supreme Court has itself not pursued the contempt case
against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national and state level top
leadership
that consciously and shameless broke their undertakings to the apex
court of
the country.
A screening
of Ram ke Naam with
a discussion by filmmaker Anand Patwardhan brought live to the audience
the aspects
of the narrative that were deliberately made to vanish from public
consciousness. The sudden, brutal and unexplained murder of Baba Laldas
in 1993
---the court appointed Mahant of the disputed site after he had openly
criticised
the politics of the VHP and BJP --- was one of these aspects. Another
was the
similarly mysterious murder of an IAS officer carrying valuable
documents from
the Faizabad Collectorate to the Liberhans commission in the late
nineties.
None of these crimes have been investigated.
Acharya Jugal
Kishore Shastri and Magsassay award winner Sandeep Pandey
spoke at length on the manner in which democracy, dissent and syncretic
worship
have been stifled at Ayodhya. The murder of 17 Muslims on December 6,
1992
while the demolition was on has gone uninvestigated, as has the
deliberate
arson of over 300 Muslim homes and businesses while the Babri Masjid
was being
brought down in 1992.
POLITICS
OF
THE
JUDICIARY
Justices P B
Sawant retired from the Supreme Court, Justice Hosbet Suresh
retired from the Bombay High Court and Justice S H A Raza from the High
Court,
Allahabad and Lucknow, spoke extensively on the politics within the
higher
judiciary related to the Babri Masjid dispute as also majoritarian
Hindutva
politics in general.
A panel that
dealt exclusively with the implications of a spate of
election petitions emerging from Bombay High Court in the late 1980s
elucidated
how a bench of the Supreme Court had, in one of these, legitimised the
politico-religious movement of Hindutva
and deliberately confused it with Hinduism,
thereby consciously or unconsciously according judicial weight to the
politics
of aggressive majoritarianism symbolised by the emergence of the
Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) with over 90 seats in India’s parliament. Election
speeches
made by Shiv Sena leaders Subhash Desai, Ramesh Prabhu and Manohar
Joshi,
during state assembly elections, invoking a politically aggressive Hindutva and accompanying these with
derogatory statements against India’s religious minorities, had been
uniformly
held by the Bombay High Court. As we know, these speeches violated
sections of
the Representation of People’s Act, as they blatantly misused religion
for
political ends. Unfortunately, however, while upholding the High Court
rulings
in two of the cases, the Supreme Court legitimised in Manohar Joshi’s
case the
election of the man who had by then become the Lok Sabha speaker.
Since then,
in two cases, Abhiram
Singh v/s CD Commachen and Ors and another, the Supreme Court has
held that
these contentions made in the Hindutva judgement (December 1995) needed to be placed
before a five member or seven member Constitution Bench and reassessed.
However,
the apex court has since not found time to constitute a larger
Constitution
Bench for these cases.
Advocate B A
Desai from Mumbai, who was instrumental in getting one of
these cases referred for review before a Constitution Bench, attended
the
symposium and spoke at length on the distinction between Hindutva
and Hinduism.
Teesta
Setalvad, co-editor of Communalism
Combat, presented her conclusions in a paper titled Hate
Speech and Indian Courts. She pointed out how the judiciary in
general and the higher judiciary in particular had been markedly lax in
developing a sound jurisprudence on hate speech. Offences under Indian
criminal
law related to sections 153a, 153b, 505 and 295 of the CrPC and related
to
words and speech, written or oral, meant to foment violence and hatred
against
sections of the population. In regard to Bal Thackeray’s rantings in Saamna in 1992-93 at the height of the post-Babri
Masjid violence, while the Bombay High Court justified the venom used
against
India’s Muslims on the ground that “the words were against
anti-national Muslims,” the Supreme Court (J B
De Souza and Dilip Thakore v/s State of Maharashtra) did not correct
the words.
Setalvad pointed out how the Supreme Court also ignored a nationwide
campaign
urging it to review its decision to dismiss the special leave petition
backed
by 30,000 signatures. Similarly, a campaign by citizens in May 2007
after Varun
Gandhi’s venomous speeches made during the Uttar Pradesh state
elections, did
not make the Election Commission put effective curbs on the candidate.
Not only
did the candidate win from Pilibhit but neither the political class nor
the
executive, nor the CEC, nor the judiciary pursed any logical steps to
ensure
that he or his party paid punitively for the hate and venom used by him
during
elections in 2007.
In the S R
Bommai v/s Union of India case that dealt with the dismissal
of the BJP governments by the centre following the demolition of the
Babri
Masjid on December 6, 1992 and nationwide violence against minorities,
a
landmark judgement passed by a larger, nine member bench of the Supreme
Court (based
on Justices Pandian, Ahmadi, Kuldip Singh, J S Verma, P B Sawant, K
Ramaswamy,
S C Agarwal, Yogeshwar Dayal and Jeevan Reddy) had in 1994 had held
secularism
to be the basic and inalienable feature of the Indian constitution.
However,
this judicial landmark was ignored by the Hindutva
judgement passed a year later in 1995.
FALLOUT
OF THE
POLITICS
OF FAITH
Participation
of vibrant panels from the states of Karnataka, Madhya
Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh gave grassroots level
insights
into the fallout of the politics of faith since the late 1980s and
early 1990s.
The serious
contestation over the Baba Boodangiri shrine in Chikmagalur
district of Karnataka has been averted by a vibrant movement of the
Karnataka
Communal Harmony Forum (Karnataka Koumu Souharda Vedike) since 1998. A
decade
after mass mobilisations in the district to contest the violent
mobilisation by
the BJP and rest of the Sangh Parivar, the
Veddike and Citizens for Justice and Peace moved the Supreme Court
against the
illegal actions at the local level. Though the Supreme Court granted a
stay on
these acts, subsequent moves by the government of Karnataka and the
Collectorate
of the district where the shrine is located, amounted to contempt of
court but
the Supreme Court has not seriously or severely commented upon them.
This and
other matters, filed under the Places of Worship Act 1991, have
failed to evolve a robust jurisprudence with the reluctance of the
higher
judiciary to curb and censure criminal and illegal acts. Teesta
Setalvad
pointed out how, in May 2003, Communalism
Combat had reproduced a list of 30,000 temples the Bharatiya Janata
Party
and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) had listed and mentioned for illegally
seizing them,
though they are at present minority or syncretic places of worship. In
Varanasi,
on December 29, 2002, BJP MP Vinay Katiyar, who built his political
career
through the Bajrang Dal, demanded that Muslims must hand over the Kashi
and
Mathura mosques to the VHP-Bajrang Dal. Thereafter, on March 1, 2003
and again
on March 10, 2003, Praveen Togadia, international general secretary of
the VHP,
repeated the threat still more venomously in Bhadohi, Uttar Pradesh.
The RSS
too, through its spokesman M S Vaidya, declared its full support to the
VHP
plan to “free” the Kashi and Mathura shrines. Renowned historian K M
Shrimali has
elaborated how the Baba Ramdev shrine in Rajasthan has been taken over
by right
wing majoritarian politico-religious groups. Setalvad pointed out how
the
Piarana Dargah in Gujarat is in a similar way the target of communal
forces.
A vibrant
citizens’ initiative from the minority community since 2005 has
managed to curtail the hate speech of Swami Adityanath in Gorakhpur.
Advocate
Assad Hayat and Parvez Parvaaz spoke about their successful efforts to
get the
judicial order of registration of an FIR against the virulent godman
who had to
rush to the Supreme Court for a stay order.
The
intellectually stimulating and rich discussions over three days
covered professional historiography, archaeology, activism, legal and
judicial
precepts, and the rule of law. The real motive and intent behind the
politics
of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement was not for a temple in the name of Lord
Ram,
but to misuse the language and discourse of faith to politically mould
the
country academically and otherwise into a majoritarian state.
