Everyone with a reasonable memory remembers 26/11, but how many can instantly recall 31/10, 21/5 or 6/12? Those were equally shattering dates in the nation’s political calendar that led to convulsive bloodletting, grief and trauma. They are the dates when Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were assassinated and the Babri Masjid was demolished. Public memory is notoriously short, but unless personally affected by tragedy, catastrophic moments lie chiefly in the province of chroniclers of history. There are thousands of others who perished in other recent calamities, natural or man-made — terrorist strikes, Naxalite encounters, floods, earthquakes and rail accidents — but can anyone precisely recall when? Of course not.
With media and public attention firmly telescoped on revisiting Mumbai’s tryst with terror, Ajmal Kasab’s ongoing trial, a dilatory Pakistani court finally coming down on the plotters and Indo-US ties being cemented in Washington, who’s interested in the revelations of a retired judge, MS Liberhan, dishing us the dope on the demolition of the Babri Masjid?
Justice Liberhan took 17 years, 1,029 pages and 48 extensions at a cost of Rs 8 crore — and added an 18-page postscript and blamed his own counsel to explain the delay in handing out news that everyone has known or suspected all along.
Seventeen years! Many of the politicians and officials who testified before the Liberhan Commission in more than a decade-and-a-half have retired, some have passed on, the country’s political map has been dramatically redrawn and the Sangh Parivar’s grandiose plan to erect the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya is long buried as an elusive dream. The BJP itself was paralysed at the idea during its term in power. It’s now a defeated party, bereft of ideology, bitter about its own leaders and atrophied in its relations with the RSS. It is irrelevant, what Manmohan Singh Liberhan has to say except for nitpicking historians?
A child born in 1992 would be on the brink of graduating today, a 17-year-old on that fateful December morning would have entered middle age by now. A generation has passed and the world has changed since that time of Hindu-Muslim bloodshed. Why blame the public for its short memory? And is it any wonder that the majority regards the misdoings of lawmakers and law-enforcers as “beneath contempt” (in the words of Justice Liberhan’s own counsel Anupam Gupta). The only saving is that there won’t be a commission to investigate why the Liberhan Commission dawdled for so long.
To show that India isn’t ruled by kangaroo courts as in Pakistan, where the trial of LeT operatives behind 26/11 has seen judges change three times since last May, it’s crucial that the trial of Ajmal Kasab in Mumbai be fair but fast. Public prosecutor Ujwal Nikam promised that it would be over on the first anniversary of the attacks, but now he’s asking for more time. He has produced more than 200 witnesses and Kasab is a drain on the state exchequer as the costliest prisoner in the country. It’s a clear-cut case — even Kasab’s defence is only going by the rule book in a special court — so there’s no excuse for the lone surviving terrorist to not receive swift retribution for one of the audacious strikes the world has ever seen.
Because of 17-year marathons, such as the one Justice Liberhan has run, inquiry commissions are increasingly time-barred, but extensions should be severely restricted under their terms. They are often granted from a combination of political expediency and pliant judges eager to prolong their sinecures of privilege in retirement.
If Indians are accused of a poor sense of history and a bad head for dates, it is because justice is convoluted, time-consuming and expensive. Verdicts and inquiry commission reports are lengthy, obscure and very boring. For every crime there is punishment, but for people to remember the equation clearly, it should not take 17 years to establish guilt.