The Cobrapost sting provides us a glimpse of a deeper conspiracy to bring down the Babri in 1992. However, it is unlikely to bring closure to the issue, which is now in the courts and does not look like ending anytime soon

The Cobrapost sting operation that purportedly unravelled the “real” conspiracy behind the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 brings out the futility of trying to use commissions of inquiry, the investigative agencies and an inefficient legal system to get to the truth and punish the guilty in large-scale crimes against society.

The evidence gathered through the hidden camera of a lone-wolf sting operator — despite being of doubtful legal validity — appears to have gotten to the who, when and what of the demolition better than the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Liberhan Commission of Inquiry, which submitted its report in 2009, 17 years after it was set up.

Briefly, it seems that the structure was not brought down by enthusiastic and angry karsevaks, as widely propagated, but was the result of a planned operation to train a committed demolition squad of Hindu militants operating under the nomenclature of Lakshman Sena. They were trained in secret by retired army experts, and in the actual demolition, there was even a plan B to dynamite the structure in case the implements with the squad proved inadequate for the job. (You can watch all the sting videos here. You can also read a Times of India story summarising the sting here).

Interestingly, the sting was mounted on the basis of a list of 68 people that the Liberhan Commission, headed by retired Justice MS Liberhan, had listed as bearing individual responsibility leading up to the demolition. By conducting interviews with some of them under the guise of writing a book, the sting got to the core of the conspiracy — unlike the commission that only made guesses about it.

The sting was mounted by K Ashish of Cobrapost, who appears to have got some people indicted by Liberhan to talk about how the plan was hatched, who was behind it, and how it was executed.

In contrast, the Liberhan Commission Report — all of 1,029 pages — seemed to focus more on the political aspects of the demolition, including the indoctrination and mobilisation of the Sangh Parivar cadres. In fact, the report seems to have focused more on pontificating about the evils of communalism and Hindu theocracy and less on the conspiracy aspects of the demolition. The closest it got to naming the guilty was in terms those who aided or abetted the demolition, and those who failed to perform their duty.

The Liberhan Commission was clear that the demolition was not just the work of unruly karsevaks, but it didn’t try to go beyond this surmise..

This is what a key passage in the report says about the conspiracy theory: “The theory or the claim made by the leaders of the movement... does not carry conviction to conclude that the demolition was carried out by the karsevaks spontaneously out of sheer anger or emotions. The mode of assault, the small number of karsevaks who carried out the demolition, and the constraints of the space to accommodate the number of people, veiling of the identity of the karsevaks entering the domes, the removal of the idols and the cash box from under the dome, and the subsequent reinstallation in the makeshift temple, construction of the makeshift temple, availability of instruments and material for demolition and for the swift construction of the makeshift temple categorically leads to the conclusion and finding that the demolition was carried out with great painstaking preparation and pre-planning.”

While pronouncing many political leaders of the BJP guilty of indirect complicity in the demolition — including people like Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani, whom the commission labelled as “pseudo-moderates” — the commission held Kalyan Singh, then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, directly responsible for aiding and abetting the destruction of the 16th century mosque by ensuring that it could not be protected from the karsevaks.

The Commission said: “To sum up, December 6th 1992 saw the state of Uttar Pradesh unwilling and unable to uphold the majesty of the law. The ennui flowed from the very office of the Chief Minister downwards and infected the minions down till the bottom. The state had become a willing ally and co-conspirator in the joint common enterprise to announce the revival of a rabid breed of Hindutva, by demolishing the structure they had denounced as a symbol of Islam.”

It further said that “Kalyan Singh, his ministers and his handpicked bureaucrats created manmade and cataclysmic circumstances which could result in no consequences other than the demolition of the disputed structure...”.

(You can read the full Liberhan report here).

The point of quoting some important passages from the commission’s conclusions is simple: Liberhan clearly said that the demolition was not something that just happened when crowds went out of control. It was pre-planned and meticulously executed. The Cobrapost sting validates this suspicion.

However, the sting may not have the desired impact of securing convictions of the guilty. Rather, given its timing, coming on the eve of another general election where communalism is again becoming a major polarising factor, and where Kalyan Singh is once again a key BJP mascot in Uttar Pradesh, it will only raise the level of the din.

The sting may or may not impact the outcome of the elections, but will surely generate enough heat in TV debates. The people in general and the main actors in this tragedy have all moved on.