![]() Accounts Of A National TraumaSukumar Muraleedharan DESTRUCTION OF THE BABRI MASJID: A NATIONAL DISHONOUR By A.G. Noorani Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2014, pp. 506, Rs. 995.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 5 May 2015 Public memory is short. A regime of public accountability
requires safe-guards against the brevity of memory. For a nation such as India,
where the governmental presence is looming and large, disclosure norms are of
recent vintage and their functioning leaves much to be desired. Official
records are quirkly maintained and declassification rules neither transparent
nor consistently implemented. Events of consequence are mostly fixed in public
memory through sporadic media reports and increasingly ritualistic anniversary
observances.
A collateral benefit of the partial and hesitant emergence
of a critical public discourse in India, particularly in the years since the
1980s, has been the active intervention of individuals and civil society groups
in seeking to establish public archives that preserve memories of both triumph
and trauma. Drawn from diverse sources, these archives seek to eliminate the
clutter and distil out the elements essential to building a coherent narrative
that future generations could draw on. It is a process often impeded by the
equations of political power thrown up by election cycles, as with the 1984
carnage on the streets of the national capital and the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat.
But certain individuals have with their diligence and commitment conquered
these impediments.
A.G. Noorani, lawyer and media commentator with a prolific
and diverse output, belongs within this category. Destruction of the Babri
Masjid: A National Dishonour comes as part of a continuum that includes his ironically
titled two-volume work, The Babri Masjid Question: ‘A Matter of National Honour’,
published in 2003. Noorani here brings
the narrative up-to-date, assembling between the covers diverse accounts of all
significant events in the subsequent career of a national trauma.
The volume is dedicated to India’s first Prime Minister and
its epigraph reproduces Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous assessment that majority
communalism is a greater danger than its minority variant, since it often succeeded
in donning the garbs of nationalism. Nehru’s insistence in correspondence with Union
Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel and the U.P. Chief Minister Gobind Ballabh Pant
to defuse the Babri Masjid crisis when it emerged as a potential threat in 1949
is well documented in the 2003 volumes. The act of trespass by which the idol
of a mythological divine was introduced into the premises of a mosque was one
among many acts of Hindutva revanchism in the fraught aftermath of India’s
Partition. It was one among many abuses that remained uncorrected and yet the
only one that—... Table of Contents >> |