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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
to 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.
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