JUSTICE (RETD.) MANMOHAN SINGH LIBERHAN passed away on August 2, 2026. He was 87. An obituary for a former judge, in the normal course, shall contain references to her/his judgments, whether in a positive light or otherwise. This, however, seems not possible in case of Justice Liberhan. Even as Justice Liberhan served for thirteen years as a judge across Chandigarh, Madras and Hyderabad, for eight of those thirteen years, he was straddled between his judgeship and the Liberhan Ayodhya Commission of Inquiry. Justice Liberhan is remembered, in his death, for having headed this One-man Commission of Inquiry whose life lasted longer than his years as a judge – seventeen years. In the end, in June 2009, the report noted that the Babri Masjid’s demolition was “neither spontaneous nor unplanned”, but the result of a carefully orchestrated conspiracy. It alleged that cadres and leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (‘VHP’), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (‘RSS’), the Bharatiya Janata Party (‘BJP’) and Shiv Sena had actively and passively supported the demolition.
However, beyond stating the obvious, it is far less discussed that the report failed to recognise the accountability of the Union government in the events leading up to the demolition, apportioned blame upon Muslims for being led by “fanatic” leaders, and helped establish the logic that the ‘dispute’, arising from a brutal demolition, was something to be “negotiated” between the communities. In some ways, it paved the logic of how constitutional courts, in later years, would frame and eventually dispose of the issue.
Justice Liberhan is remembered, in his death, for having headed this One-man Commission of Inquiry whose life lasted longer than his years as a judge – seventeen years.
“Oversimplified approach”
The Justice M.S. Liberhan Commission of Inquiry, appointed on December 16, 1992, exactly ten days after the Black Sunday, which marked one of the darkest chapters in independent India’s short history, witnessing the demolition of the Babri Masjid by an organized mob, was meant to submit its findings before March 16, 1993. Seventeen years and forty eight extensions went by before the judge submitted the report – a pretty much shoddy one indeed – on June 30, 2009.
Justice Liberhan and the Commission lived through several regimes: P.V. Narasimha Rao, H.D. Deve Gowda, I.K. Gujral, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and Manmohan Singh. By the time the report came out, had himself moved on from being a sitting judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which he was when then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao left him with the onerous task of unravelling the circumstances behind the demolition of the “disputed structure” on December 6, 1992, among a few other things connected with the demolition.
There was an element of absurdity even in the words chosen. The notification called it the “disputed structure” rather than the “Babri Masjid”. Even the least privileged sections of the society then, whose source of information and knowledge those days were news on Doordarshan knew the anatomy of the confrontation over the 16th century mosque in Faizabad and its eventual demolition in December 1992. The police had registered FIRs, even on December 6, 1992: FIR 197/1992 against unknown kar sevaks and FIR 198/1992 naming such persons as L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti. The chargesheets were already filed in courts in Rae Bareli and Lucknow even while Justice Liberhan was tasked with finding out the truth. And all that the judge would tell us, after seventeen years, was that “the demolition was pre-planned.”
The report contained some more such obvious facts as findings. That the BJP and its leaders, whom the Commission described as ‘pseudo-moderates’, were also responsible for the demolition, even while, it underscored, they were not party to the planning. In an interview to Frontline in 2009, Anupam Gupta, the sole counsel for the Liberhan Commission for eight years, between 1999 and 2007, who left the Commission because of differences with Justice Liberhan also noted that the final report adopted an “oversimplified approach”, seeing nothing but the “hands and the brains of the RSS”, and significantly overlooked the role of the VHP which was “directly germane and vital to the Ayodhya movement.”
The report also concluded, rather limitedly, that the Uttar Pradesh state government, then headed by the BJP’s Kalyan Singh, did all things at its command to ensure the demolition and the Union government was crippled with lack of intelligence. Justice Liberhan did not even consider the grounds, then in public domain, of the Supreme Court’s decision, in S.R. Bommai (1994), upholding the dismissal of the BJP led state governments of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh, on December 15, 1992 by the President of India (using Article 356 of the Constitution), a day before the Liberhan Commission was appointed.
The S.R. Bommai judgment contained elaborate details about the guilt of these state governments, all led by the BJP, in planning and executing the heinous act, defeating the constitutional scheme. The judgment was delivered as early as in March 1994, by when Justice Liberhan was already into his work. Unfortunately, the Commission made no reference to the extensive documentation relied upon by the Supreme Court and absolved leaders of these BJP led state governments of playing any role in orchestrating the act.
The report went on to simply apportion blame upon the mass of the Muslim population to have let them be led by “fanatics”, which eventually resulted in the events of December 6, 1992.
The report went further by explicitly absolving the Union government of its complicity in the act, blaming “intelligence failure” for the demolition. Gupta, in his interview in 2009, noted that “Justice Liberhan consciously and purposely overlooked the wealth of information and intelligence available to the Central government regarding the actual evolving situation in Ayodhya in December 1992.” Prominent among these was a letter by then Uttar Pradesh governor Satyanarayana Reddy warning that the situation on the ground posed a real threat to the disputed structure (i.e., he flagged the danger of demolition or damage). However, despite that warning, Reddy recommended against invoking President's Rule in UP, which would have let the Centre take direct control from the Kalyan Singh government. During questioning by Gupta in the Liberhan Commission, Narasimha Rao pointed out that the Kalyan Singh government had already given assurance to the Supreme Court that the mosque would not be attacked, and governor Reddy had given a similar assurance to Rao. “So there is nothing to show that the State government did not intend what it assured. If it turned out otherwise, how can I be blamed?”, Rao said. According to Gupta, Rao’s argument was “accepted lock, stock and barrel by Justice Liberhan”, and further, basing everything on the governor’s “banal” report was “nothing short of a travesty.”
A failure to ‘negotiate’?
Another dubious aspect of the report, indeed, was that Justice Liberhan went too far beyond the brief or the terms of reference before the Commission. Although the report narrated the events during the months preceding the demolition, the mischief lay in the fact that right from the outset it was presented as a dispute involving two opposite claims to a place of worship between two communities: The Hindus and the Muslims. The report went on to simply apportion blame upon the mass of the Muslim population to have let them be led by “fanatics”, which eventually resulted in the events of December 6, 1992. Some seventeen years after the report was first submitted, it is apposite to cite this important passage from the report:
“While the RSS, VHP, Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal and the BJP brought the temple construction movement to the front burner and caused it to boil over, the fanatic muslim leadership making the counter claim were either completely complacent and had no substantive or effective leadership or was simply incompetent in projecting their own lopsided counterview to the people throughout the half century leading up to the 6th of December 1992. (See para 167.1 of the Report)”
An act of destruction by a violent mob, which in his own words, “was carried out with great painstaking preparation and preplanning” (even though Justice Liberhan did not identify who planned it and only ruled out the leaders of the BJP having had anything to do with the planning), in Justice Liberhan’s report, was attributed to the incompetence of the leadership of the Muslim community! The report had more such absurdities. But of relevance here, seventeen years after June 2009, when Justice Liberhan submitted his report, is that a basis was laid to treat the entire debate and the dispute as having to do with mere claims and counterclaims between two religious communities over a place and having nothing to do with the constitutional scheme in general, and the tenets of secularism in particular. In other words, Justice Liberhan framed the issues as merely to be “negotiated” between two communities.
Justice Liberhan’s legacy resides significantly in the Commission’s report spread across 999 pages, which will survive as an important record of these troubling times.
It did not take too long before this specious approach gathered mass. On September 30, 2010, only a year after Justice Liberhan’s report was submitted, the Allahabad High Court, in a 2:1 decision ordered division of the disputed land, 2.77 acres (in and around where the mosque stood before demolition), into three equal parts to be handed over to Shri Ram Lalla (represented by the Hindu Maha Sabha), the Nirmohi Akhara and the Sunni Central Wakf Board. The Supreme Court stayed this decision, soon after, pending hearing the appeals from all three parties to the dispute in the High Court. The status quo was once again disturbed when the matter was assigned before a five judge Constitution Bench in January 2019 by then Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi. Framing it as a failed attempt at “mediation”, once again, the highest court of justice reduced the whole dispute to some quarrel over property rather than a challenge to the constitutional scheme. The conscience of the nation was indeed stunned on November 9, 2019, when the Supreme Court gave its ruling in M. Siddiq v. Mahant Suresh Das.
Through a judgment that many argue was decided per incuriam (perhaps the second most prominent such instance in the Indian judiciary’s history since the A.D.M. Jabalpur (1976) ruling), the five judges struck down the High Court’s decision for a three-way division of the property and instead ordered all of the 2.77 acres to Shri Ram Virajman as well as the construction of a temple. The rest is history and of relevance here is to say that Justice Liberhan will be remembered for setting the stage for shunting out the constitutional scheme of the issue and holding that the demolition was the consequence of the Muslim leadership refusing to negotiate and concede space to the majority.
A record of our troubling times
Seen today, Justice Liberhan’s report appears as an exercise in absurdity. On one hand, his findings charged senior RSS and BJP leaders for their role in the violent demolition in 1992. Those were, to his credit, observations he stood by firmly, even after a special CBI court acquitted all the accused in the demolition case in 2020. “I found it was a civil conspiracy, I still believe in it,” he had said. However, when viewed beyond this contribution, the Commission has left behind a far more complicated, dual legacy. As per the records of the Rajya Sabha, as much as Rs. 9.02 crores of taxpayer’s money was spent on the Commission. The point is that the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 was a decisive moment in India’s slide into a fascist takeover. And when the history of this slide is recorded, certainly after democracy is restored, as American journalist William L Shirer did in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: History of Nazi Germany, with copious records as evidence, it will contain stories of the many complicities of fascist footsoldiers.
Such an account will certainly contain records of the several acts of commission, omission and facilitation that led to democratic erosion. Justice Liberhan’s legacy resides significantly in the Commission’s report spread across 999 pages, which will survive as an important record of these troubling times. For some, it will be a record that directly indicts those who spearheaded the Hindu nationalist movement, and for others, it will be a far more layered account, which in its hidden texts, its erasures, and its questionable framing of the issue, facilitated and legitimated some problematic retellings of what actually happened in the December of 1992.