Guiltless crime

Babri case is a sorry reflection on India's premier investigative agency

Special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court judge S K Yadav has passed a remarkable judgment acquitting all the 32 people accused of hatching a criminal conspiracy to demolish the 400-year-old Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. The principal points in the acquittal of the accused — which included former Bharatiya Janata Party stalwarts L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti and then UP Chief Minister Kalyan Singh — was that there was no evidence of pre-planning and that several of them had tried to restrain the mobs. The criminal case has a tortuous history, taking 28