New Delhi: Justice (retired) Manmohan Singh Liberhan, otherwise best known in the latter part of his career as the judge behind the Liberhan Commission, which examined the Babri Masjid demolition on December 6, 1992 has died at the age of 87.Born on November 11, 1938, he started out as a lawyer in Ambala, before shifting to the Punjab and Haryana high court in Chandigarh. Then going as ‘Manmohan Singh, advocate’, he was advised by a judge to use his sub-caste as his surname, as there were many Manmohan Singhs in the city, it was confusing. He went onto be a judge and was later given charge by the P.V. Narasimha Rao government to examine the conspiracy behind the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, which threw the country in turmoil, the resulting upheaval claiming hundreds of lives across India. He was expected to file his report in March, 1993, but was finally able to do so only after 43 extensions, on June 30, 2009. For six crucial years in the middle, an NDA government was in office. But this is also when Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president L.K. Advani, the person considered the commander of the BJP-led campaign, also among those charge sheeted by the CBI, finally deposed before it in 2001 and said the demolition was “unfortunate and painful” and that he “seldom felt as dejected and downcast as I felt that day.”He served as advocate-general for Haryana. He went onto become the chief justice of the Madras high court in 1997. He was also chief justice of the Andhra Pradesh high court. His distinguished legal career spanned four decades.He told The Indian Express in 2009 that he had read all of the Ayodhya material, “16 times”, as his counsel had left midstream.Known as a no-nonsense judge, blunt and straightforward, he had also said he was annoyed at what he termed, “publicity-seeking statements”. He told the newspaper, “Judges should be known by their judgments, not by their speeches.”He also said that he was “annoyed that judges, in his opinion, are spending more time inaugurating functions, attending parties or playing golf, rather than reading briefs, as they should be.” “You should just ask judges how many books they have drawn from the Judges Library in their stint. The answer will surprise you.”Liberhan in that interview, also spoke on judgments that did not stop at simply interpreting the law. “Why do judges have to impose their opinion and views on us?”“If a judge is a witness to a murder then he should depose in the witness box, not as a judge go on about the knowledge he has. Judges should not inflict their background on us, or their opinions on various things. They should dutifully interpret the law. That is their job,” he had said.The Tribune writes, “For the legal fraternity, he was never simply a former chief justice or the head of a famous commission. He remained “Justice Liberhan”– “always willing to stop for a conversation, generous with younger members of the Bar, and deeply interested in the institution to which he had devoted his working life.”