The Rao that I knew

Rao, India's former prime minister. Probably, he deserves all that. But there were chinks in his armour. The two incidents to which I am privy showed him in a different light. So did the interview I had with him when he was in the wilderness. His reactions might have been healthy and positive. Yet, he did not give them a concrete shape.

The first incident refers to the demolition of the Babri masjid. Whether he did little because he did not want to or whether he was helpless to take action because of the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, where the demolition took place, is a matter of conjecture, if not opinion. I do not want to comment on that. I will confine myself to what I know. Two or three days after the demolition, he invited some senior journalists to give his side of the story. I was one of them. He was at pains to explain that BJP chief minister Kalyan Singh betrayed him after giving a solemn promise to protect the Babri masjid at all costs. Rao said that the BJP leaders also assured him on that point but they, he said, cheated him. I tried to meet Kalyan Singh who promised to call me whenever he visited Delhi. He did not contact me although he was critical of the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the BJP some time after the demolition. My purpose was to verify Rao's allegation that Kalyan Singh went back on his word. Kalyan Singh has returned to the BJP fold since and does not want to open his mouth.

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When Rao said repeatedly that he was let down, we did not press for an answer to the charge that he had connived at the demolition. His officer-on-special duty Naresh Chandra, former cabinet secretary, gave us details of how the demolition took place and tried to explain why the Centre could not do anything to save the masjid.

I asked Rao how a small, temporary temple came up overnight after the Centre had taken over the administration of UP. He said he sent the Border Security Force from Delhi but the plane could not land at Lucknow due to fog. He had no answer when asked why the Central Reserve Force Police or the army, already at Lucknow, was not deployed.

However, he assured me that the temple would not be there "for long." Those words still ring in my ears. I have written about his assurance, but I had no reply from him even though he lived some 12 years after meeting us.

To be charitable, I could argue that he wanted to implement what he had promised but found little support from his Congress party colleagues. Or, he thought he would give the BJP a propaganda point in the state elections after he had dissolved the assembly and had forced the party to face the polls. To be uncharitable, Rao had no intention of ever removing the temporary temple and he made the remark to cover up his deliberate inaction so as to allow the masjid's demolition.

Nearly four years after the demolition, he tried to defend himself in an interview he gave me at his residence. He said: "If one of the parties goes with non-secular, religious programme, saying that they are going to build this or that, the results cannot but be disastrous. There are communities which may be having a lot of difficulties, constraints, and conflicts in the religious affairs, but election is not the way out for resolving them."

"The BJP wants to polarise India, 85 per cent of the people on the one side, and 15 per cent on the other," Rao said. "This polarisation is going to be disastrous for the country. If you take Ram as your weapon, I cannot fight Ram although I can fight you. I refuse to believe that Ram belongs to you. You are trying to monopolise Ram." The worst period in the country, according to Rao, was the 13-day rule of Vajpayee in his first stint. Even before getting a vote of confidence, they went about doing things which even a legitimate government would hesitate to do. He said:

"Their law minister wanted to start all types of inquiries and made no secret of his intentions against whom he was moving."

Rao made no secret of his determination to keep the BJP out of power at the Centre. This was why, he said, his party was supporting the Deve Gowda government. He could not say how long this position would continue. It could be for two or three years. He said they would not falter. "History will not say that it was because of the Congress party that the Deve Gowda government fell."

The second incident refers to Kashmir. The late Rajesh Pilot, then minister for state for Home Affairs, phoned me on behalf of Rao to inquire whether I could help the government to persuade Yasin Malik, a youthful Kashmiri leader, to break his fast-unto-death. I did not know anything about the fast till I met Yasin at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). His demand was that the security forces should be withdrawn from the Hazratbal where they had been camping for some days. The government wanted to stop militants from using it as a shelter like they had done earlier. The government was willing to move out the security forces, provided there was an assurance that militants would not return. Yasin was willing to appeal to militants not to misuse religious places, but he could not give assurance on their behalf.

I could not understand why the government was not prepared to station the security forces at some distance from Hazarabal. The force did not have to be inside the shrine to stop its misuse. J and K governor Gen Krishna Rao was totally opposed to shifting the security forces. Pilot seemed helpless. This was when Narasimha Rao intervened and told Pilot to agree to the phraseology of the statement which I had drafted in consultation with Yasin. Ultimately, the government agreed to withdraw the security forces and placed them at a point where they could keep a watch on Hazratbal. It took some time to finalised the statement.

I rushed back to AIIMS to convey the news. To my horror, I found some hefty security men already surrounding Yasin trying to feed him forcibly. Doctors were ready with a tube to push it down his throat. Even the delay of a few minutes would have been a disaster. I wondered how the right hand of government did not know what the left did. Bureaucrats in the government who negotiated the agreement had not kept the government servants at the AIIMS informed. Tension in Kashmir disappeared with the breaking of the fast. Rao's accommodation was bold and effective because the withdrawal of the security forces from Hazratbal had become a matter of prestige. He did not bother about the criticism once he felt he was right. I was not surprised when, subsequently, Rao said that "the sky is the limit" to reach an agreement with the Kashmiris. Why that assurance was not pursued is beyond me.

Kuldip Nayar is an eminent Indian columnist.