New Delhi:
The
Liberhan Commission probing the demolition of the Babri Masjid has
hit out at then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh for
embarking on a “pogrom leading up to the events of December 6th 1992″
as
soon he entered office.
In a scathing indictment of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
government headed by Kalyan Singh, the one-man commission said in
its report: “Kalyan Singh’s government was the essential component
needed by the Sangh Parivar for its purposes. Kalyan Singh lived up
the expectations of the Parivar”.
It
said in the conclusion chapter that the government had
“systematically and in a pre-planned manner removed inconvenient
bureaucrats from positions of power, dismantled and diluted the
security apparatus and infrastructure, lied consistently to the high
court and the Supreme Court of India and to the people of India to
evade constitutional governance and thus betrayed the confidence of
the electorate”.
According to Liberhan, Kalyan Singh maintained a “studied silence”
even at the height of the crisis in December 1992 and “refused to
allow even a single measure which might impede the Ayodhya campaign
or prevent the assault on the disputed structures, the journalists
or the innocent people”.
The
report said that he and his cabinet members “consciously allowed the
writ of the extra constitutional authority, i.e. the RSS, to run the
state.
“The
chief minister and his cabinet were the proverbial insiders who
caused the collapse of the entire system.”
Even
when it was brought to his notice that the Babri Masjid had been
demolished and mobs were attacking Muslims in Ayodhya, he did not
direct the police “to use force or resort to firing to chase away
the miscreants or to save the lives of those wretched innocents…”
“The
wanton violence against human life and property continued unabated
and even at that late stage, the chief minister did not use the
central forces which could have been swiftly deployed,” the report
states.
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