THERE is a saying that justice may be delayed but is not out of reach. The wheel of fortune has turned slowly to expose Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, the state where some 4,000 Muslims were killed seven years ago.
It has been an open secret that he and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members were involved in the pogrom, with the connivance of the state machinery, including the police.
Modi would say in defence: where is the proof? He would also say that what happened in Gujarat was in retaliation to the burning of pilgrims in a train at Godhra, near Ahmedabad. There are too many versions of this to solely hold the Muslims responsible. The dust was somewhat cleared by the Supreme Court of India when it appointed the Special Investigating Team (SIT) to probe the matter last year.
The complaint against Modi was that he and his cabinet colleagues orchestrated the post-Godhra communal riots in 2002 in connivance with police officials and senior bureaucrats. The complaint filed by advocate Sanjay Parikh on behalf of Jakia Nasim Ahesan Hussain Jafri, the widow of an ex-Congress MP who was killed by a mob allegedly at the instigation of Modi, the 'architect of a criminal conspiracy to subvert constitutional governance and the rule of law'.
SIT, a sort of tribunal, is presided over by a retired CBI director, R.K. Raghavan, who is widely respected. His probe, it is conceded, will be fair, just and independent. The BJP is uncomfortable. The Congress is overjoyed for apparent reasons. And the people feel jubilant that the perpetrators of Gujarat may be brought to book.
The state, much less Modi, expected such a turn of events in the investigation. A human rights activist, Teesta Setalvad, who has doggedly pursued the culprits in the Gujarat killings, had submitted a petition on behalf of Ms Jafri. The petition was filed as an FIR with the police in Ahmedabad to contend that the killings were pre-planned and that the authorities did little to protect the victims.
The police refused to register the FIR. She went to the court which took little notice of the lapse in legality. The matter came to the Supreme Court where the lawyer appearing on behalf of the state of Gujarat said that all the information, whether registered or not, could be sent to the SIT. It was bravado. But it has served the purpose of justice. The whole matter, including unregistered FIRs, is before the Raghavan tribunal. Modi is now in the dock. He would have to disprove his involvement before the SIT. Many skeletons are bound to come out of the closet. Since then many retired police officials have admitted the involvement of the government.
The immediate reaction of Modi has been that of silence. The BJP’s former foreign minister, Yashwant Sinha, in a TV interview, did not react to the Supreme Court’s order but praised Modi for his developmental work in the state. One cannot expect anything else. The party’s youthful brigade is at a loss to make comments because it has been vying with one another in its projection of Modi as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate after L.K. Advani. They are all well-read, sensible persons. But their blind faith in Modi makes one wonder.
How can they or, for that matter, any sensible person think of putting Modi in any responsible position when there are charges of his involvement in the killing and the looting of Muslims in Gujarat? Whatever the BJP thinking, India is a pluralistic country, however, wanting in many ways. The party does not appreciate the secular temperament of the people.
But when the upper-middle class or the corporate leaders — there was a meeting of top industrialists in Ahmedabad to back Modi — throw to the wind the basic values of pluralism on which India’s democratic structure stands, they prefer pelf to principle. Sitting in their air-conditioned offices, they do not know how the mind of the nation ticks. Modi may be an efficient administrator but he has also the blood of at least 4,000 Muslims on his hands. To the unthinking corporate leaders, I can say only one thing: forgive them Lord for they know not what they are doing.
I was a Rajya Sabha member when the Gujarat carnage took place in 2002. It was devastating news. Nobody could find any reason to explain Modi’s role. The BJP criticised him in private, but dared not say anything in public lest the party should take disciplinary action. Before Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Ahmedabad for the first time after the carnage, I told him that he should have dismissed Modi straightaway.
After not having done so, I said, Vajpayee should take Modi to task before the public whenever he visited the refugee camps and felt relieved when he did so. He lost his temper in many places and admonished Modi.
But the youthful brigade of the BJP which travelled with him from Ahmedabad to Goa brainwashed him so much that Vajpayee attacked Islam at the meeting he addressed. He hardly talked about the pitiable conditions in the camps he had seen or the tales of murder and rape he had heard. His entire speech was to run down Islam. It seemed that the party had taken over the prime minister, whatever his feelings or impressions.
Till today, the BJP has not apologised for the killings in Gujarat. The Congress has behaved better. It has not only apologised for the killing of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi in broad daylight in 1984, but has also denied party tickets in the Lok Sabha elections to both Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, reportedly involved in the riots which took place at that time. The party has given rehabilitation grants to the uprooted and to the victims of 1984. The Modi government has not given even a single rupee to any Muslim for rehabilitation.
Whether the probe against Modi will affect polling in the current election is the question being asked increasingly. There is no doubt that the Supreme Court’s order will dent the BJP’s standing. However, it is difficult to assess the loss in terms of votes. Yet the damage to the party’s image will be immense. Other political parties have gone to town to attack the party. The tragedy is that neither Modi nor the BJP is willing to make amends. They should realise that Gujarat, like the demolition of the Babri mosque, is a millstone around their neck. They have to carry it for years to come.
The writer is a leading journalist based in Delhi.
III. http://www.tehelka.com/story_main41.asp?filename=Ws090509Ram_Puniyani.asp
Gujarat Carnage-Role of Narendra Modi Ram Puniyani
In the worst ever communal carnage of this century, the post Godhra Gujarat violence, over 2000 innocents lost their lives. Most of the survivors not only lost their livelihood and shelter but also have been degraded to the status of second class citizens. Most of the perpetrators of violence, have not only gone scot-free; many of them had an upward political mobility. The efforts of the victims and human rights activists had yielded very few results and majority of the victims are grieving and living with the scars of their losses. In the whole process, the direction of Apex court to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the role of Modi, his cabinet colleagues and other top functionaries of state and those involved in violence, has come as a sigh of hope. The court gave the direction (April 27, 2002) in response to appeal by Jakia Ahsan Jafri, the widow of slain Congress MP, Ahsan Jafri. One complements the courage and doggedness of Jakia Jafri for all her efforts. This comes in the backdrop of the arrest of Maya Kodnani, Modi’s cabinet colleague who instigated and led the carnage in Naroda Patia. Just to recall, Ahsan Jafri ex Congress MP had made frantic calls to all those concerned but the police help was not forthcoming to save him from the mob assembled by the VHP-Bajrang Dal and others, the lead players in Gujarat carnage. So far the official inquiry committees have not pointed its finger on the role of Modi, while the Human Rights Commission report (2002) pointed out that state machinery failed to protect the innocent people. Most of the citizen’s inquiry committees by human rights activists have pointed out about the role of state administration and Modi in particular in the violence. In the major such report of ‘Citizens tribunal’ headed by retired Justice Krishna Ayer and Justice P.B.Sawant, (Crime against Humanity), a Minister in Modi’s Government Haren Pandya gave description of the meeting which Modi had called on the evening of Godhra train accident. As per Pandya Modi instructed all the top state officials to let the Hindu anger not be curtailed in the aftermath of Godhra. Modi popularized the thesis that Godhra train was burnt in a pre planned manner by the international terrorism, in collusion with the ISI and local Muslims. Infamously, he announced that every action has an opposite reaction, meaning that now Hindus will take revenge and state should sit back and let the opposite reaction take its course. Same Harem Pandya was murdered later and his father stated that his murder had taken place on the instance of Modi. While the carnage was on, the Central government, NDA led by BJP, kept watching and barring some stray noises by PM Vajpayee and Home Minister Advani, the carnage went on spilling the rivers of blood. Despite Modi’s claim that he controlled the violence in 72 hours, it took months for the din to settle. Modi’s acts of omission were more than obvious. Now as matters stand our legal system has lots of loopholes and most of the guilty are not punished. On the contrary, in the case of Gujarat, Modi ‘succeeded’ in splitting the Gujarat society along religious lines, and he took advantage of the communal divide by riding back to power and strengthened his vice like grip on the administration and state as a whole. And now, In Gujarat the matters are not seen as guilty versus innocents, they are seen as Hindu versus Muslim. While on one hand Modi is being projected as the future Prime minister of India, not only by many captains of industry but also by the party sustaining on the fodder of communal divide, the BJP. While most of the people with plural values and concern for national integration are welcoming the direction of Apex court, the others doing electoral calculations point out that this investigation will enhance the standing of Modi. BJP spokesman also pointed out that this direction of Apex court will be helpful to the BJP in electoral arena. The nation is standing on a tragic point where the communal polarization brought in by communal violence and anti-minority propaganda has resulted in the loss of sensitivity of a section of society towards the miseries and travails of large part of our own country, our own nation. In response to court directive, Modi asserted that he is ready to go to jail. This assertion is the outcome of his knowledge that in the polarzed state he will benefit despite his ciminal acts. The observation so far has been that Modi has shown no remorse for what happened in Gujarat, forget apologizing for the same. The path to power for the practitioners of divisive politics is through the rivers of blood, and they know it. So should we press for justice or fall in the trap of electoral arithmetic? The point is if we loose our basic human morality, if we compromise on the issue of rule of law, what is the worth of values of Constitution? Tragedy is not that the nation is knowing the guilt of the ilk of Modi and is watching helplessly, the tragedy is that our justice delivery system has been eroded from bottom upwards, where justice is sacrificed at the drop of a hat. The communal mind set cultivated by divisive politics, the large section of state machinery being guided by considerations other than the values of constitution is a matter of deep concern. It is because of this total communalization of state apparatus that the Supreme Court had to reprimand Modi, time and over again. It is because of this that the major cases were shifted out from Gujarat. It is the same place where Zahira Sheikh changed her versions times and over again, lured by the lucre offered to her by BJP workers. Modi bloating his chest while sitting over the corpses of thousands, is a symptom of deeper rot which has set in the society. By now first the cases are not investigated properly due to communal considerations, then when the reports nail the culprits, many of them are not touched for political considerations. Rather than having remorse and anguish on what happened to say that this Apex court direction will benefit BJP, is the most immoral and base statement which only heartless inhuman characters can make. |
.BMP)
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