Please spare me your sympathy: Rao

New Delhi: 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 PM 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 UP government of  Kalyan Singh was dismissed  on December 6 itself and  a week thereafter, the BJP  governments in Himachal  Pradesh, Rajasthan and MP  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”. According to Khurshid, the politics shaped by  the temple-mosque contest  drove the Congress to an  existential crisis in UP and,  after temporary empowerment of the SP and BSP,  gave the BJP a springboard  for dominance in the state  and in Centre. -(PTI)