(Daily Times, March 02, 2006)
HUM HINDUSTANI: Beyond the Best Bakery verdict
by J Sri Raman
The bestial forces responsible for the Best Bakery and other outrages are hardly short of funds and must be expected to appeal to higher courts. The verdict, however, does strengthen the hands of victims in other major cases of the carnage. Even in her forced betrayal, it needs to be stressed, Zaheera was a victim of the far right
On March 1, 2002, a fascist mob set fire to a bakery in Vadodara (formerly Baroda) burning alive 14 members of a Muslim family that owned and ran it. This was one of the cruellest episodes of the Gujarat carnage that lasted three full months. Some justice has at last been forthcoming for the scorched and surviving victims, but more remains to be done.
Much has been written about the case of the Best Bakery (as the target of the mob fury was named). Even more has been said about the aftermath of the arson. The pogrom in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat was followed by state-aided efforts to protect the criminals and to prolong the process of justice and the agony of the victims. The case was to become a classic illustration of the methodical far-right madness, with hardly a precedent in independent India despite several other horrendous examples of communal violence engineered by the same quarters over the decades.
The subversion of justice began with the adoption and application of different laws for different communities. Soon after the carnage started, Modi brushed up his physics to declare: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” He was thus equating the pogrom, which claimed a toll of over 2,000 human lives, with the Godhra violence projected without waiting for evidence as an offensive of the minority community against the majority, leaving scores dead in an overcrowded train compartment.
Then Union home minister, Lal Krishna Advani, made a fine distinction of the far-right kind, saying that Godhra represented “terrorism” and the Gujarat massacre only “communalism”. Then the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, sighed that the carnage had made the country “hang its head in shame”, but was soon to proclaim that Muslims “were not ready to live in peace with their neighbours” and to ask: “Who started it?” Little wonder that Godhra suspects were arrested under the dreaded and draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) while participants in the pogrom were not.
The due process of law was further distorted when public prosecutors of Gujarat began to conduct themselves virtually as defence counsel. The Supreme Court of India was constrained therefore to take a serious note of this development, in which Advani again saw nothing to deplore. It could not be helped, he argued, if the Bar in any state came to be influenced by an “ideology”.
The victims of Gujarat had even less hope left when witnesses started turning hostile in droves. Intimidation and inducements by upholders of the Advani-approved ideology, aimed at denying witnesses for prosecution, were not even concealed with undue care.
The absence of evidence which witnesses alone could have provided led to the first verdict in the Best Bakery case by a fast-track Vadodara court which set free all 21 accused in the case.
The main witness then was 19-year-old Zaheera Sheikh. The doe-eyed Zaheera became the face of all the far-right’s victims in the “Hindutva laboratory”, into which Modi’s hordes claimed to have turned the home-state of Mahatma Gandhi. It was she who changed the course of the case with a petition that raised questions about the prospect of justice if investigations and the trial continued in Gujarat. The apex court admitted the petition and transferred the case to a fast-track court in Mumbai.
Ironically, it was Zaheera, again, however, who threatened to undo the advance. She, along with her mother and brothers, turned hostile during the Mumbai trial. The far right could hardly contain its jubilation, as she turned hostile as well towards social activist Teesta Setalvad who has been struggling to bring justice to the victims. Fascist tutoring was evident in her charge that Teesta had imprisoned and tortured her.
Zaheera has had the protection of commandos since then, even as unprotected witnesses and brave Teesta kept the case alive. The court has now awarded life terms to nine of the accused, and acquitted. Four are absconding. More significantly, it has cleared Teesta of the charges against her and ordered a trial of Zaheera and others for perjury.
This may not be the legal end of the case. The bestial forces responsible for the Best Bakery and other outrages are hardly short of funds and must be expected to appeal to higher courts. The verdict, however, does strengthen the hands of victims in other major cases of the carnage.
Even in her forced betrayal, it needs to be stressed, Zaheera was a victim of the far right. More important than a punishment for her perjury will be an investigation to ascertain what and who was responsible for her prevarication.
By un-stated but obvious implication the verdict indicts Modi. The Mumbai court may not have talked of a pogrom, but it is now established that a fair trial in this illustrative case was impossible in Gujarat, but could proceed on a fast track elsewhere. In a democracy, politicians are expected to relinquish power for even less diabolical crimes against the constitution.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, however, has rejected the demand for his resignation with predictable contempt. It has, in fact, persuaded its ally, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of Bihar, to announce an inquiry into the Bhagalpur communal riots of 1989 (belatedly equated with the Gujarat pogrom). The brazenness of the move is breathtaking, considering that the Bhagalpur killings were, by all accounts, a result of Advani’s communally incendiary rath yatra (chariot ride) on the Ayodhya issue!
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he has contributed the main essay to “The Media Bomb,” a study of Indian media responses to India’s nuclear-weapon tests of 1998. He is also the author of a sheaf of poems under the title ‘At Gunpoint’
|
