Who Is Guilty For Babri? Answer: Its The Left-Liberal Elite Who Fed Muslims With Half-Truths And Lies

The Left-liberal-Islamist meltdown has begun once again after a special CBI court in Lucknow decided yesterday (30 September) that none of the accused in the Babri demolition case, including LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, could be held guilty on the basis of the evidence produced before it.

English newspaper editorials headlined “No one did it?” (The Times of India), “Guiltless crime” (Business Standard), and “Frenzy did it” (Mint) tell their own stories, with the usual suspect, Asaduddin Owaisi of the AIMIM, alleging it was a “black day” for the Indian judiciary.

We should not worry about Owaisi’s rant, for anything that does not meet with his approval by being explicitly favorable to the Muslim community is a black mark for the judiciary, but we should question the motivated breast-beating over the verdict of “not guilty”.

Did anyone expect that people sitting near the Babri structure as it was being demolished could be held guilty merely for being there on 6 December 1992? At best you can accuse them of nurturing a desire that a Ram mandir should be built in its place. Without clear proof that they knew about and aided and abetted the demolition, there was simply no case against them. The charges were political, and the only way the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) could have sent them to jail was by proving the conspiracy angle.

The Congress-Opposition chorus is that the trial court’s verdict runs counter to the Supreme Court judgment in the Ram Janmabhoomi case last November, where a five-judge bench said the demolition was an “egregious violation of the rule of law.”

True, but there is a difference between holding an act as violative of the law and laying the violation specifically at the doors of people you don’t agree with, whether it is Advani, Joshi, Uma Bharti, (the late) Ashok Singhal or the former Bajrang Dal chief Vinay Katiyar. The apex court ordered the trial court to expedite the hearings and give a verdict; it did not say specific persons must be convicted as a quid pro quo for awarding the disputed site to Hindus.

Let us refresh public memory a bit. In 2011, the Supreme Court cancelled all the 2G licences issued by Andimuthu Raja in 2008, but in 2017, a trial court rejected the charges against not only Raja, but all the accused in the scam, saying there was proof of no scam. But, at that time, the Congress did not say the trial court did not follow the Supreme Court’s broad observations in the case.

The top court decides cases on the basis of principles that may involve breaches of propriety or non-transparency in policy-making; trial courts have to go by evidence against specific persons accused of specific acts of wrongdoing. The two are not the same.

That said, there is little doubt that the Babri structure was brought down, and someone surely helped bring it down. What we don’t know is who did it, and with whose prior knowledge.

The following broader conclusions flow from the Babri verdict.

First, if we want our investigative agencies to deliver on convictions, they have to be empowered with better investigative skills and freed from political control. They can’t be made to chase politically motivated charges and be expected to find someone on whose neck the charges can be hung. Very often, the CBI is chasing people whose worst crimes may be procedural and/or about flouting norms or making policies to help specific cronies. Closing the loop between policy action and alleged beneficiaries is often not possible, since there may be no tapped conversations to provide proof of collusion, or an easily observable money trail to latch on to.

Second, conspiracies are even harder to prove, especially against persons at the top of the power pyramid. Reason: it is possible for a group of motivated individuals to decide to burn a train coach (in Godhra, for example) or to use crowbars and pickaxes to bring down an already shaky and dilapidated structure in Ayodhya. What is practically impossible to prove is that these acts of specific individuals or groups were sanctioned by higher-ups in the political hierarchy.

Once the Babri was demolished, misled Muslim masses were primed to think that only the jailing of key members of the Sangh Parivar could prove the judiciary’s independence. But, sorry, this is not how things happen or work. Acts of ordinary activists and groups are seldom traceable to higher-ups in any democracy, assuming they actually knew about it in advance.

Third, if many Muslims today feel unhappy about the trial court’s verdict, they should look for answers inwards and ask their own leaders some tough questions: What were we not told about Ram Janmabhoomi that both the Supreme Court and the trial court could not deliver verdicts that were agreeable to us? Did Left historians and the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board mislead ordinary Muslims about the findings of the archeological dig under the disputed structure? Why did the negotiations for a peaceful settlement of the dispute not succeed in 1991-92? Who scuttled those talks?

The simple message from both the Ram Janmabhoomi verdict of the Supreme Court last year and the Babri demolition verdict of the trial court yesterday is that ordinary Muslims must introspect and accept that they have been told lies just to maintain their vote banks in one piece.

The same set of lies has been used by the Left-liberal elite to instigate ordinary Muslims against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, when the CAA has nothing to do with Indian Muslims or their citizenship status. Nor are Muslim immigrants being barred from seeking Indian citizenship in future. Muslims are also not being told, or asked to vehemently deny, that minorities in Muslim-majority countries in the neighbourhood are being persecuted.

The only basis on which there can be communal amity is by acceptance of the truth, not by claiming victimhood status on the basis of lies and half-truths. The Muslim community is being kept in this self-created prison by the Left-liberal elite and by its own narrow-minded leadership. The ordinary Muslim needs to wake up and listen to the plain and unvarnished truth.