But none, including Arjun Singh, quit the party over the demolition. As such, it was a collective failure of the Congress and the Central government. To distance his family from the party at this stage and give the impression that only the Gandhi family was the custodian of secular values which the party did not uphold is unlikely to help the Congress’s overall image — and as such is bad politics.

But it is also skewed history because well before Narasimha Rao took over power, it was the Rajiv Gandhi regime’s flirtation with “soft Hindutva” that helped the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign launched by the RSS-VHP-combine from the mid-1980s.

In fact, apart from December 6, 1992, two other dates are significant in the bitter Babri Masjid-Ramjanmbhoomi dispute that eventually led to the demolition. The first is February 1, 1986 when the locks of Babri Masjid were opened to allow Hindus to worship the Ram Lalla idol in its precincts. The Faizabad court order allowing the opening of the locks and the Central government’s decision to overturn the Supreme Court verdict on the Shah Bano case by adopting the Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill in May 1986 were widely seen as twin initiatives of the Rajiv regime to appease fundamentalist elements in both communities, a balancing act of sorts that backfired badly.

Both the decisions gave a big fillip to the Hindutva forces — if the Shah Bano issue gave the BJP ammunition to accuse the Congress of “Muslim appeasement”, the opening of the locks played a crucial role in whipping up the VHP’s campaign for the “liberation” of Ramjanmabhoomi and the construction of a “grand temple” at the site of the mosque.

... contd.