25 years ago, India was challenged, changed

IT will be 25 years this Wednesday (December 6) when India changed. And changed for the worse. On that day, a successful assault was made on the Babri Masjid. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the medieval mosque was brought down, vandalised and desecrated. 

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That was the day managers of the Indian State failed its citizens and defaulted on their oath to uphold the Constitution of India. Chicanery, cynicism and timidity dictated Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s strategy of profound inertia. The last of the Nehruvian elite was tested for its commitment to the ideals of secularism — and, was found wanting.

A Chief Justice of India (M. Venkatachaliah) found himself two-timed by a muffasil Chief Minister (Kalyan Singh). The judiciary lost its lustre and respect. More than its image, the judiciary lost its institutional reputation as the protector of fundamental rights of all citizens. It fell to a brave judge, Justice JS Verma, to retrieve the judiciary's lost prestige a few years later, and to firewall the apex court from the scheming politicians. 

December 6, 1992, was the culmination of LK Advani’s misconceived political mischief. His so-called Rath Yatra, from Somnath to Ayodhya, had been designed to excite and incite the Hindu masses and mobilise them in the service of the BJP’s narrow power games. 

This Advani-led journey to the December 6 demolition uncorked a process. New rougher forces and tougher politicians got an entree into the political arena and they have since refused to leave the ring. For a while, they needed the respectability of an Atal Bihari Vajpayee, behind whom they could hide their claws; but there was no rolling back of what December 6, 1992 had rolled out. The 2002 Gujarat was the next natural pit-stop. 

Politics is not without its capacity for meting poetic justice, even if in rough proportions. LK Advani finds himself reduced to a dispensable family elder. The people he promoted and protected in Gujarat had no qualms in unsentimentally shafting him. 

There is a certain naturalness to the progression from 1992 to 2002 to 2014. And, the battle is far from over. 

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DR Justice Adarsh Sein Anand passed away a few days ago. Not much has been written about the firm leadership he provided in the defence of the Constitution at a very critical time in the life of our republic. 

He was the Chief Justice at a time when the Vajpayee government, flush with the 1999 Lok Sabha victory, sought to put in play the Sangh Parivar’s oldest game: of junking the Constitution.

The BJP hardliners insisted on constituting a National Commission to review the Constitution. Since the Jan Sangh days, the saffron party has not been very comfortable with the liberal, federal, and parliamentary features of the Ambedkar-Nehru Constitution. After the 1999 victory, the BJP leadership thought it had the mandate to rewrite the Constitution.

Fortuitously, the President of India was KR Narayanan and Justice Anand was the Chief Justice. Both thought otherwise. The Constitution worked fine for them. And, that was that. 

While President Narayanan used the public platform to warn against any tinkering with the Constitution, Chief Justice Anand let it be known that the only authorised platform where the Constitution could be reviewed was the apex court.

I remember meeting Chief Justice Anand at a banquet in Rashtrapati Bhavan in January, 2000. With Prime Minister Vajpayee and a few central ministers standing just a few feet away, he whispered to me, indicating towards the ministerial cluster, “These guys do not know what they are getting into.”

He saw to it that the government renamed the panel as the “National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution.”

His behind-the-scene pressure also encouraged Attorney-General Soli Sorabjee to slow down things a bit. He counselled that the panel be composed of respected legal luminaries rather than BJP party hacks; in the event, it came to be headed by a former chief justice, Justice MN Venkatachaliah. Even though a few second-rate BJP spear-carriers sneaked in, the legal luminaries on the commission saw to it that the entire exercise added up to nothing. A very serious mischief was nipped in the bud.

All this because of the stern and steady leadership that Justice Anand as Chief Justice provided, that too without seeking any limelight for himself.  

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DR ‘Kumar’ Panipati of Panipat is an old-fashioned man of letters. Indeed, he signs off his communications as “Yours in the service of education & literature.” He is one of our seniormost readers. That makes him a man of reason, moderation and sensitivity. 

Like all reasonable men, Dr ‘Kumar’ Panipati is unable to understand the logic and motive behind changing the name of Dyal Singh College. He thinks it “is like committing a murder, pure and simple.” He is so unhappy that he penned a poem, trying to gauge the anguished spirit of Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia. 

He has very kindly provided the English translation as well: 

Maine toh sada qaum ko seenei se lagaya!
Is desh ke kan-kan ko aqeedat se sajaya!
Har shakhs ki har siski ko aawaz banaya!
Ik mo'jaza us daur mein bhi kar ke dikhaya!
Maine jo galat kuchh bhi kiya ho 
toh bata do!
Kyon meri aqidat ko bhulate ho azeezo?
Kiyon aaj nishan mera mitatei ho azeezo?
Kis saaz ki kis taan peh gaate ho azeezo?
Kyon aap meri arthi uthate ho azeezo?
Kis jurm ki detei ho saza, yeh toh bata do?

English translation:

I always — under all circumstances — stood for my nation;
I adored with devotion every particle of my motherland;
I gave voice to every sigh of every countryman;
I worked wonders even in those highly critical times;
Pray, tell me, then, if I had done anything wrong?
Why do you push, dear countrymen, my whole-hearted
devotion under the carpet?
Why do you intend, dear country men, to root me out like this?
To which tune of which musical instrument are you out to
set your song?
Why are you, dear countrymen, bent upon writing my name off?
For what crime of mine is the punishment being inflicted
upon me, pray tell me this at least?

Thanks are due to Dr Panipati for voicing the dismay of the people of Punjab over grave disservice to the public memory of a great son of Punjab — and that, too, in the noble name of Vande Mataram.

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ON impulse, I decided to stop by at the Book Fair organised by Rupa Publications in Lajpat Rai Bhavan in Chandigarh. It was the first day of a five-day show and it was very pleasing to see very many people, including young men and women, browsing and purchasing books. There is something superior, noble about books. 

It was a compact arrangement, inviting visitors to browse at leisure. And there was an incentive — a 10 per cent discount, not much, but it is better than nothing. I ended up purchasing 13 books, worth more than Rs 5,000. Some of them, like Wendy Doniger’s On Hinduism, of course, would not be read immediately but should be in one’s library; others like HM Patel’s Rites of Passage, Durga Das’ India From Curzon to Nehru and After have been read on loan and since returned to their rightful owners. I could not ignore Hillary Clinton’s What Happened, her take on the last US presidential election. Nor could I pass up P Chidambaram’s Fearless in Opposition. And, then, there was Saeed Naqvi’s Being the Other. It simply could not be ignored. 

I guess the advantage of an exhibition of this kind is that a publishing house can showcase most of its books at one go, offering the prospective reader a complete view. The experience is different, forcing a reader to make a choice from among a large number of books. It is certainly different from browsing in a bookshop, where the constraints of marketing and space force a bookseller to stock only the very latest tomes. And a book fair is certainly very different from online shopping or buying books in a hurry at an airport. 

I wish the exhibition was displayed in a less cramped space. It is worth a visit, even though the organisers had not thought of offering a cup of coffee to the visitors. 

Well, coffee is not everyone’s cup of tea. Join me.

kaffeeklatsch@tribuneindia.com