Justice Liberhan has delivered only two real surprises in his report. It is also entirely understandable why only one has been taken note of in political debate. That, indeed, is his repeated censure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But the other real surprise, in fact even bigger and more significant than the somewhat gratuitous indictment of Vajpayee, has gone unnoticed — and that is entirely understandable too. In fact, the Liberhan Commission’s total exoneration of Narasimha Rao has left the BJP cold, the left-secular intelligentsia stunned, and the Congress confused.

You can understand why the BJP does not care. You can also understand the indifference of the left-secular intelligentsia, because they had always led the canard that Rao was somehow complicit in that crime, that he was a closet Jan Sanghi. Pull down his dhoti, and you will find a pair of khaki shorts, they would say. But why is the Congress silent and unwilling to even acknowledge with a sense of vindication if not joy that they, their government and their prime minister were not to blame, and have been unfairly pilloried and punished for a crime Justice Liberhan says they never committed? That’s because the commission destroys the canard they themselves have built against their own party. They did it not because they really believed Rao was a bigot and complicit in the destruction. Most of them (remember the ones who broke away from the party in the name of genuine secularism then?) saw it as a great excuse to pressure the then hands-off Sonia Gandhi to bless an insiders’ coup, and replace Rao, preferably with Arjun Singh. Rao survived many internal coup attempts, but never recovered from the damage. In 1998, Sitaram Kesri even denied him a ticket to contest for the Lok Sabha.

... contd.