RIGHTS-INDIA: Justice Catching Up with Gujarat Chief Minister

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Sep 15 2003 (IPS) - The anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat state last year, which left more than 2,000 members of the minority community dead, may have ensured electoral victory for its chief minister, but justice is fast catching up with the perpetrators of the worst sectarian violence since India’s partition along religious lines in 1947.

On Friday, the Supreme Court told the government of Chief Minister Narendra Modi that if it could not provide justice for the survivors of the violence, then it had better quit.

The violence was sparked off by the torching at Godhra station of a train full of Hindu pilgrims returning from the temple town of Ayohdya in northern Uttar Pradesh state in February 2002.

”I have no faith left in the prosecution and the state government,” said Chief Justice V N Khare.

He was responding to a petition by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) demanding retrial of what is popularly known as the Best Bakery case – one of the worst instances of atrocities committed during the pogrom that lasted months after the Godhra incident.

Khare was incensed by counsel for the Gujarat government Mukul Rohtagi, who tried to argue that the massive popular mandate gained by Modi in state elections held after the pogrom somehow vindicated him and his policies. ”Democracy does not mean you will not prosecute,” he retorted.

Fourteen people were killed at the Best Bakery in the town of Baroda, most of them burned to death, according to the testimony by the survivors and main eyewitness Zaheera Sheikh, daughter of the baker who was also killed.

The NHRC stepped in after 21 people, accused by Zaheera, 19, and her mother, of attacking the bakery and its workers, were acquitted on Jun. 27 by a special court in Gujarat. This confirmed fears by the victims of the pogrom that could not expect justice from the law and order machinery in the highly polarised state.

Commission chairman A S Anand, Khare’ predecessor as chief justice, had then described the acquittals as a ”grave miscarriage of justice” and one with ”dire implications” for the rest of the country, which is constitutionally committed to the principle of religious secularism.

Curiously, the special court did not take into account the NHRC’s report of the pogrom that indicted the state government, the administration and police of taking insufficient action to protect civilians, most of them Muslims.

The Best Bakery case is being seen by major human rights organisations as a test of whether the victims would ever get justice, given the testimony of the eyewitnesses and the strong supportive evidence that surfaced in spite of threats and intimidation.

During the trial, 35 of the 60 witnesses retracted the statements they made, identifying the accused, before an already highly partisan police.

Among those who retracted statements during the trial in Gujarat was Zehraunissa herself. She later told journalists in Mumbai city that she and her mother were threatened with death by members of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

But encouraged by the Mumbai-based Citizens for Justice and Peace, a rights organisation run by prominent people such as the filmmaker Javed Akhtar and advertising whiz Alyque Padamsee, Zehraunissa gained a determination to see the case through.

If the Supreme Court’s dim view of the prosecution has embarrassed the Modi government, there was worse in the refusal of its counsel Harish Salve to appear on its behalf before the Supreme Court against the NHRC on Friday.

Instead, Salve has decided to take up in the Supreme Court the case of Bilkis Yakub Rasool, who complained that she was raped on Mar. 3, 2002 by people known to her and left for dead in Gujarat’s Dahod district.

”I have taken up this case, referred to me by the NHRC, because it represents the failure of the police and the courts in Gujarat,” Salve told IPS over telephone.

The case of Bilkis, who was five months pregnant and whose three-year-old daughter was among 14 of her relations who were killed in the carnage in Dahod, is another example of the near impossibility of gaining justice for the victims of the pogrom.

Bilkis has testified to the NHRC that the police had warned her not to name anybody in a report she filed soon after her ordeal of being raped after watching her relations being murdered.

So far, the BJP, which leads the ruling coalition at the centre, has brushed demands for Modi’s resignation by opposition parties, especially the Congress party, which have taken a cue from the Supreme Court’s unusual suggestion that the state government had better quit.

”The court has not asked for Narendra Modi’s resignation. It just said that if those guilty in the riots cannot be booked, then the government does not have the right to rule the state,” said the BJP’s general secretary Pramod Mahajan.

But even political leaders who have protested against ‘judicial activism’ have praised the apex court’s stern view.

”The directive came because the prosecution was kept deliberately weak and the court cannot be silent on this,” said M K Pandhe, a politburo member of the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI-M), which is aligned with the Congress party against the BJP.

Commented the influential ‘Times of India’ daily in an editorial on Monday: ”It is a reflection of the times we live in that India’s Supreme Court has had to also take on the role of our collective conscience-keeper.”

The editorial said the court’s stand was a reminder that ”democratic governance is not just about protecting your own – as many in our divided polity have increasingly come to believe.”