The Liberhan Commission probing the demolition of the Babri Masjid has hit out at then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh for embarking on a "pogrom leading up to the events of December 6th 1992" as soon he entered office.
In a scathing indictment of the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) government headed by Kalyan Singh, the one-man commission said in its report: "Kalyan Singh's government was the essential component needed by the Sangh Parivar for its purposes. Kalyan Singh lived up the expectations of the Parivar".
It said in the conclusion chapter that the government had "systematically and in a pre-planned manner removed inconvenient bureaucrats from positions of power, dismantled and diluted the security apparatus and infrastructure, lied consistently to the high court and the Supreme Court of India and to the people of India to evade constitutional governance and thus betrayed the confidence of the electorate".
According to Liberhan, Kalyan Singh maintained a "studied silence" even at the height of the crisis in December 1992 and "refused to allow even a single measure which might impede the Ayodhya campaign or prevent the assault on the disputed structures, the journalists or the innocent people".
The report said that he and his cabinet members "consciously allowed the writ of the extra constitutional authority, i.e. the RSS, to run the state.
"The chief minister and his cabinet were the proverbial insiders who caused the collapse of the entire system."
Even when it was brought to his notice that the Babri Masjid had been demolished and mobs were attacking Muslims in Ayodhya, he did not direct the police "to use force or resort to firing to chase away the miscreants or to save the lives of those wretched innocents..."
"The wanton violence against human life and property continued unabated and even at that late stage, the chief minister did not use the central forces which could have been swiftly deployed," the report states.