NEW DELHI/LUCKNOW, 21 June 2003 — India’s prime minister conspired in the mob destruction of a centuries-old mosque that led to nationwide Hindu-Muslim rioting in 1992, a high-ranking former ally, former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Kalyan Singh alleged yesterday. Singh was the only man to have courted arrest for Babri Mosque’s demolition.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is known as the moderate face of his Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist group that came to prominence after the destruction of the Babri Mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh state.
Although senior party colleagues, including Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, have been charged with inciting the mob that destroyed the 16th century mosque, Vajpayee had never been named.
“I will rip off the mask of moderation worn by Vajpayee. He is a hard-liner,” said Kalyan Singh, who was the BJP’s head of government in Uttar Pradesh in 1992.
Singh said: “I was chief minister but they kept everything under wraps.”
“It was a conspiracy in which Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi ... all were involved,” Singh, now president of the National Revolution Party, told a news conference.
Joshi is human resources minister in Vajpayee’s Cabinet, and Advani holds the post of home minister, in charge of law enforcement, as well as being deputy prime minister. “These leaders betrayed me,” Singh said.
More than 2,000 people were killed in rioting between Hindus and Muslims in several parts of India after the razing of the mosque, and the controversy over who has a right to the land remains one of India’s worst religious disputes.
Singh’s state government did not call out troops that had been placed at the ready to head off a mob of hundreds of thousands of Hindus converging on Ayodhya after a national campaign by Advani and other BJP leaders aimed at building a Hindu temple on the site where the mosque stood.
Singh alleged that leaders of the National Volunteers Association, known by its Hindi acronym of RSS, and the World Hindu Council (VHP) were part of the conspiracy. The RSS is the fountainhead organization of the BJP and holds that India is a Hindu nation, rather than the secular multi-religious one enshrined in the constitution. Vajpayee and Advani are members of the RSS.
The World Hindu Council, whose leaders say Muslims should not live in India, is a close affiliate of the national party and the RSS.
“A meeting was held in the RSS central office in Jhandewalan, New Delhi, in which these leaders drafted a letter which they asked me to sign. I repeatedly asked them if there was a plan to demolish the mosque,” Singh said.
“They replied that when so many senior RSS and BJP leaders are present, (I should) take it for granted that there would be a symbolic kar seva (volunteer service),” he said.
The letter was sent to the Supreme Court, based on which the volunteer service was allowed on Dec 6. 1992, in Ayodhya. It turned into a riot.
The BJP denied Singh’s allegation, saying the destruction of the mosque was “a spontaneous reaction of volunteers.”
“Kalyan Singh’s blaming the prime minister and deputy prime minister is political propaganda. They were in no way involved with the demolition of the mosque,” said Vinay Katiyar, president of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh. Muslim groups demanded more details on Vajpayee’s role.
— Additional input from Agencies
