The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” The BJP would agree that William Faulkner got that one right, as it contemplates its reaction to the Liberhan Commission’s revelations. The commission, which has been probing the “sequence of events leading, and all facts and circumstances relating, to the occurrences at Ram Janma-

bhoomi-Babri Masjid complex” is obviously a live bomb for the BJP. Dragging on for 17 years, with over 4000 sittings, it was unclear when it would ever amount to a real accounting for the events of December 6, 1992. And now, in a moment when the BJP is most brittle, dealing with its own ideological drift, it is faced with its own original sin.

Where will the party go now? Will it choose to decisively exorcise the incident and look within to forge a responsible and intellectually vigorous conservatism, or will it decide to play it both ways, which has been its undoing? Babri Masjid and its aftermath have scarred the country for years after, and split Indian politics along the seams — for the BJP’s allies and antagonists, it remained the single defining factor for years. For all too long, the party has tried to finesse the system — speaking in a moderate, mature voice to govern and returning to its rabble-rousing roots when it thought that would prove politically useful. Now, faced with this long-ago issue at a time when India and Indian politics have decisively moved on, the BJP has a stark choice. Will it disavow its bigoted base and become a pivot for centre-right coalitions, or will it fall back on the angry, polarising politics that once propelled it to power?

... contd.