By IANS,
New Delhi : The Congress Wednesday accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allied groups of resorting to a “cold-blooded conspiracy” to demolish the Babri mosque in 1992.
“The central theme is not Atal Behari Vajpayee, P.V. Narasimha Rao, factual inaccuracies or leakage (of the Liberhan report) but who broke the mosque and why and how they did it,” Congress MP Abhishek Manu Singhvi said in the Rajya Sabha.
Taking part in the debate on the Liberhan report into the Babri mosque razing, Singhvi said the BJP was skirting the core issue of culpability in discussing the document.
He said the BJP’s Ayodhya campaign, which led to the razing of the 16th century Babri mosque, was a “sad, sordid saga of brazen, cheap politics.”
Accusing the BJP and the Sangh Parivar of double-faced conduct, the Congress leader said the mosque demolition was a “carefully conceived and cold-blooded conspiracy done with enormous pre-planning”.
Rejecting the BJP’s argument that the destruction was a spontaneous act, Singhvi said that over 200,000 people were present at the site in Ayodhya on Dec 6, 1992 and “kar sevaks” had been trained in pulling boulders.
He said the Sangh Parivar activists carried tools and even “manhandled” journalists to prevent any eyewitness account of the mosque razing in the temple town of Ayodhya that sparked off widespread communal violence.
“The Liberhan report was a formal vindication but the conduct (of BJP) was damned years ago,” he said.
Going into the history of the disputed land in Ayodhya, Singhvi said it was at best a local problem until the BJP made it a part of its political agenda following its dismal showing in the 1984 Lok Sabha election.
Hitting out at BJP leader L.K. Advani, Singhvi said the movement to build a temple for Lord Rama was launched “for pelf, power and self-aggrandizement, in particular of one man who is leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha”.
He said the “shilanyas” in 1989 at Ayodhya when Rajiv Gandhi headed a Congress government in New Delhi took place on a piece of land which was not disputed.
Singhvi said that BJP leader and former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee could not escape moral responsibility for the demolition but he could go to court to get his name removed from the Liberhan report.
He insisted that then prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was mislead by the Sangh Parivar and then BJP Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Kalyan Singh.
“Certainly, everybody was mislead including the Supreme Court, the Congress and Rao.”