Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

As I have mentioned earlier in the book, Rao’s role during the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 was dubious. On 4 December, upon his return from Lucknow, Arjun Singh, Rao’s bête noire and Union Minister for Human Resource Development, told me there was every chance of the Babri Masjid being demolished by the 200,000 kar sevaks who had assembled at Ayodhya for the temple agitation. The leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, telephoned Rao and said that he should impose President’s Rule on UP because the BJP chief minister, Kalyan Singh, could not be trusted to protect the Babri Masjid and maintain law and order. This was the ‘field’ information Basu had obtained. The Babri Masjid was demolished exactly two days after Jyoti Basu made this phone call alerting the prime minister. In my view, by not taking strong action to save the mosque, Rao remained on the right side of the BJP. With the destruction of the mosque, Muslims who stayed with the Congress despite serious misgivings since 1947 came face-to-face with the stark reality: the Congress had short-changed them from the very beginning.