The morning after the Babri mosque was demolished on December 6, 1992, the Union Council of Ministers met and when they tried to convey how they all felt for the then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, he retorted: “Please spare me your sympathy.” This anecdote finds mention in senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid’s new book “Sunrise over Ayodhya: Nationhood in Our Times”. Khurshid says the immediate shock of the “unthinkable happening” gradually settled down to a kind of numbness. The demolition happened on a Sunday and on the morning of December 7, the Council of Ministers gathered in a crowded ground-floor room at Parliament House, he says. The mood was sombre, and a pall of gloom hung on the gathering.
“Understandably, most were at a loss for words, but Madhavrao Scindia broke the ice to say how we all felt for Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. The reaction of the embattled PM took us by surprise when he retorted, ‘Please spare me your sympathy’,” Khurshid recalls. He also says after Rao’s “curt response”, there was no further opportunity for discussing the subject again and the meeting ended. The Uttar Pradesh government of Kalyan Singh was dismissed on December 6 itself and a week thereafter, the BJP governments in Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh were dismissed by the President, as advised by the cabinet, he says.
Khurshid also writes that on the night of December 6, he and some other young ministers, “gathered at the residence of Rajesh Pilot to take stock, and then proceeded together to C K Jaffer Sharief -thus two bold voices in the government were roused”. He says calls were “made to Principal Secretary A.N. Verma, who suggested that we speak to the PM. We got through to the PM and suggested to him that Rajesh Pilot be included in the group that was flying to Faizabad”. Rao “in turn asked us to speak to A.N. Verma again, and thus the chase continued for a while, until we were told that the PM would not be available, having turned in for the night. The urgency was for a senior functionary of the government to intervene before the idols, which had been shifted during the demolition of the mosque, were reinstalled on the site”, he writes.
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