By IANS,
New Delhi : Terming Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) position on demolition of the Babri mosque as a “national shame”, the Congress said Thursday that the opposition party was taking the country in a wrong direction “in the name of Lord Ram”.
“Don’t make false arguments. You will regret it tomorrow. You are taking the country in a wrong direction — that too, in the name of Lord Ram,” Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal said participating in the debate on the Liberhan commission report in the Rajya Sabha.
Rejecting the BJP’s contention that the demolition of the Babri mosque was a spontaneous act and the Liberhan report was a “national joke”, Sibal said the demolition was “a scripted exercise” carried out for political purposes.
“Lord Ram made a sacrifice to keep promise of his father. You want use his name to come to power,” he said, asking if Lord Ram was alive, would he have carried out a rath yatra?
“He would have worked for better education and health,” the minister said.
Sibal said contours of administration were destroyed by the then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh. “There was no difference between a political party, police and bureaucracy,” he said, adding that the state agencies helped carry out the agenda of the ruling party.
The minister said that BJP leader Arun Jaitley in his speech Wednesday had skirted the core issue of the responsibility for mosque demolition.
“The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal and their office-bearers in connivance with Kalyan Singh entered into a joint enterprise for destruction of the disputed structure,” he said, adding that it was a canard to say that it was a sudden upsurge of sentiments.
“You are playing a joke on the people of this country. You, for a moment, destroyed the soul of India,” he said.
Extensively quoting from the Liberhan report, Sibal said Kalyan Singh acted to redeem the BJP’s manifesto. The BJP should own up responsibility for the demolition and apologise.
Sibal, whose speech was repeatedly disrupted by the BJP benches, said that the BJP had taken up the temple issue for political purposes after its dismal performance in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections.
Going into the details of events of December 6, 1992, he said that the para-military forces were not allowed to take action, police did not stop kar sevaks, and the state government did not associate intelligence agencies in reviewing security of the structure.
Noting that BJP leader L.K. Advani had said that the kar seva will be symbolic, Sibal asked where did the iron bars, pick-axes, and ropes, used to pull down the structure, come from.
He said the Kalyan Singh government had acquired land near the disputed structure so that the kar sevaks were in a better position to destroy the mosque.