NEW DELHI, 22 November — The leader of a Hindu right-wing group yesterday accused two former prime ministers of insincerity in dealing with the dispute over the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
“I want to say that V.P. Singh and P.V. Narasimha Rao didn’t want good relations between Hindus and Muslims and therefore kept the dispute alive,” Bajrang Dal President Vinay Katiyar told the M.S. Liberhan Commission that is probing the demolition of the mosque.
Hindu fanatics had torn down the mosque on Dec. 6, 1992. The Bajrang Dal is the militant wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which is leading a movement to construct a temple at the site where the mosque stood. The VHP contends that Mogul emperor Babar had built the mosque after demolishing a temple.
Katiyar is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from Faizabad, of which Ayodhya is a part. “V.P. Singh’s government had issued an ordinance acquiring the land on which the mosque was situated. He withdrew this a day later after pressure from the Muslims. “When Narasimha Rao became prime minister, we went to him and asked him to let us begin constructing the temple as the ‘shilanyas’ (groundbreaking ceremony) had already been performed. He first agreed and then went back on his decision,” Katiyar said.
Katiyar denied suggestions that his organization had connived at the destruction of a number of small temples after a one-hectare plot adjacent to the mosque had been acquired by the Uttar Pradesh government in October 1991, ostensibly to develop facilities for visitors. “It is not our tradition to demolish temples. We only renovate temples. If there is danger of any structure falling, we repair it,” Katiyar contended.
The demolition had been halted after the priest of one of the temples filed a lawsuit in the Allahabad High Court. The court had, on Dec. 11, five days after the destruction of the mosque, overturned the order acquiring the land. Home Minister L.K. Advani has been quoted as saying that the delayed verdict had contributed to the destruction of the mosque. Katiyar hedged repeated questions on whether the Bajrang Dal had objected to the acquisition of the land and then finally said that it had done so, agreeing at the same time that there was no documentary evidence to back this up.
The Ayodhya issue yesterday also figured in the Rajya Sabha (upper house) with the opposition led by the Congress party urging the government to prevent temple construction by the VHP at the disputed site even as the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) accused the prime minister of “complicity‚” in VHP leaders’ entry in the makeshift temple last month. Raising the issue, Suresh Pachouri of the Congress and Sarla Maheshwari of the CPM urged the government to direct the Uttar Pradesh government to issue fresh notification in the demolition case including the names of the three Union ministers, L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti.
