Vajpayee had plan to resolve Babri dispute: Biography
LK Advani's Rath Yatra in 1990 led to a failed plan by Vajpayee to resolve the Ayodhya dispute, revealing political tensions and moral dilemmas within the BJP.
As LK Advani’s controversial Rath Yatra kicked up dust in the autumn of 1990, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his team came up with a formula to resolve the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute.
Under the plan, the government would acquire 67 acres of land in Ayodhya to give to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, except for the disputed site, and refer the case to the Supreme Court, Then prime minister VP Singh agreed to issue an ordinance to the effect but Advani, who didn’t trust Singh, backed out of the deal. Vajpayee continued to try, convincing Singh the next day to unilaterally issue the ordinance. The president was “pulled out of his bed at 12.30 at night” to sign the ordinance.
But the move infuriated the Babri Masjid Action Committee and Janata Dal leaders such as Mulayam Singh Yadav. On the other side, the VHP didn’t agree to defer its kar seva plans and Advani continued his yatra. A chastised Singh took back his ordinance.
This revelation is part of historian Abhishek Choudhary’s new biography of the former PM, Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power, 1977–2018, the second of a two-part volume.
In the book, Choudhary touches on Vajpayee’s initial friction with Morarji Desai in the 1970s, a secret meeting exploring diplomatic ties with Israel, and his zeal to bring Hindi into the external affairs ministry. He also touches upon Vajpayee’s “doublespeak” during the Babri Masjid demolition, his push for the nuclear test in 1998 under a shroud of secrecy, and his premonition of a loss in the 2004 elections. The book also looks at the genesis of the Lahore bus diplomacy and how close India and Pakistan came to resolving the Kashmir conundrum.
The book said the Mandal Commission recommendations for backward class reservations divided the BJP vertically. “Advani brainstormed frantically to think up a strategy to sidetrack Mandal. He arrived at an idea: What if he could travel on foot or in an open jeep from Somnath to Ayodhya...Others wondered if Vajpayee might be persuaded into a similar journey, say from Rameshwaram to Ayodhya…. Vajpayee shot down the idea, and was also not enthused by the idea of Advani doing this,” the book said. But Advani went ahead.
As the kar seva reached a fever pitch on the evening of December 5, 1992, Vajpayee spoke in Lucknow. “There are sharp stones there, one cannot sit there. The ground will have to be levelled so people could sit there,” he said, according to the book, in comments that can be interpreted to justify what happened the following day in Ayodhya.
The next afternoon, Vajpayee sat in his drawing room in Delhi, watching the razing of Babri Masjid. But weeks later, he “was in private having moral pangs about having to defend the indefensible”.
“The day after the demolition, his (foster) daughter Gunnu had joined a protest where people held placards saying they were terribly embarrassed to belong to the majority faith…A friend visited to find a ‘gloom in the house that hinted that he was going to quit … he was upset, it was not a put-on thing; the family was mourning,” Choudhury wrote.
Elsewhere, the book suggests that the grounds for the 1999 Lahore Bus diplomacy were laid during a trip by Vajpayee the previous year to the UN General Assembly. Vajpayee and Sharif met on September 23 at lunch. “Sharif talked wistfully about driving down in 1982 from Lahore to Delhi to watch the Asian Games, and then from Delhi to Agra. It was said only in passing, but an Indian official sitting nearby had a brainwave, and mumbled weakly about starting a Delhi–Lahore bus service. The idea immediately caught on. Even the quiet Vajpayee was all ears: ‘How should we go about it?” the book said.
Choudhury also pointed to a near-breakthrough on the intractable Kashmir problem in the last week of March 1999, when Sharif’s emissary Niaz Naik, a former high commissioner to New Delhi in the 1980s, secretly checked into a Delhi hotel to meet RK Mishra, a former Congress MP.
“Over the next five days, they discussed their impossible brief on Kashmir: a solution that was not just fair to all three concerned parties (one of them being the Kashmiris) but also practical to implement. Vajpayee encouraged the duo to innovate. After several rounds of trial and error, Mishra and Naik arrived at an identifiable geographical boundary as a border to partition J&K between the two countries. The Chenab formula, suggested by Naik, proposed giving areas to the west of the river, all Muslim-majority districts, to Pakistan; the ones to the east, all Hindu-majority, were to be retained by India,” the book said.
To be sure, this has never been India’s official position. India claims all of Jammu & Kashmir, including Pakistan occupied Kashmir.
When Naik came to meet Vajpayee before returning home on April 1, the PM sent a message for Sharif. “It would make everyone’s lives easier if both sides did away with the decade-old tradition of infiltration and shelling in the summer,” the book said, referring to the message.But that trust was betrayed. Weeks later, the Kargil war began.
The book suggested that when Vajpayee lost the trust vote by one vote in 1999, he broke down. “After the vote, the digital screen flashed in red: ‘AYES 269 NOES 270’. The stunned prime minister gave the overhead screen a mock salute. Head bowed, Vajpayee walked slowly to his office in room no. 10 in Parliament House, where his family and ministers had already gathered. Aware that there were no live cameras in the room, the usually stoic prime minister broke down: ‘Hum keval ek vote se haare, keval ek vote (we lost by just one vote),’ he cursed his luck as tears trickled down his cheeks,” the book said.
Eventually, Vajpayee would triumph in the 1999 elections and serve a full term. But as 2004 approached, the clamour for early polls reached a fever pitch after the BJP did well in December 2003 state elections.
“At first Vajpayee was cold to the idea. He had an inkling that the December 2003 wins were more the results of anti-incumbency (or misgovernance) rather than a pro-BJP mandate…Asked in private, the prime minister dismissed the idea as idiotic: ‘Paagal hue hain ki chunaav pehle karayenge?’ (Are we mad that we’ll hold early polls)
But other leaders in the party – the book named Advani, Venkaiah Naidu and Pramod Mahajan – apparently read the mandate differently, and ally, the Telugu Desam Party joined the chorus. Vajpayee let himself be persuaded but was dealt a rude shock when Advani’s Bharat Uday Yatra arrived in Lucknow on April 5 to a poor reception, the book said. “Soon after they met and hugged,the prime minister quietly confided in his deputy that the signs were ominous: that they were probably going to lose.”
They would, and it would mark the retirement of Vajpayee.
