Bombay: Tale of two crimes (riots of Dec 1992-Jan 1993, and the 1993 bomb blasts)

(The Times of India
19 September, 2006)

Tale of two crimes
by Jyoti Punwani


The two stories of crime and punishment that shook Mumbai in recent years could not have been more different.

The irony is that the second was a fall-out of the first, but those who committed the first crime roam free, while those who retaliated have been convicted.

What explains this contrasting response to the two crimes: The Mumbai riots of December 1992-January 1993, and the March 12, 1993 bomb blasts, which were described by police officers in charge of the investigations 'as retaliation to the riots'?

Special public prosecutor in the blasts case, Ujjwal Nikam, dismissed these comparisons, saying that convictions are difficult in riot cases because it's hard to trace the accused. His views are not borne out by facts.

In many cases, victims had told the police the names of the assailants, because the latter were long-time residents of their neighbourhoods.

Some had even supplied the addresses of the rioters. But the police ignored these clues and chose to close many of these cases as 'true but undetected'. More than 60 per cent of the riot cases were thus closed.

In the blasts case, on the other hand, the police could hardly be faulted for apathy. The Centre ordered a special investigation team, under the supervision of then joint commissioner of police M N Singh.

Some of the most respected officers traced down the accused systematically. The anti-terrorism TADA Act was applied to the case from the very beginning, and the police went after the suspects with determination.

Arresting entire families only because they were related to the main accused, stripping the men in front of their daughters and daughters-in-law, religious taunts, molestation and assault — all this became routine.

In one case, NHRC ordered the Maharashtra government to take action against 11 policemen, from senior SP to constable, and pending that, pay interim relief of Rs 5,00,000 to an Alibag family who had been wrongly picked up and tortured.

The NHRC based its order not on the findings of any human rights activist, but on a CID inquiry ordered by the sessions court.

All this was public knowledge, but Sharad Pawar's government (like all governments) put its weight behind its police force.

When these investigations were proceeding full scale, a large part of Mumbai's population was trying to pick up the pieces of lives shattered by the worst riots to have hit the city: 900 dead, 2,036 injured.

Again, it was public knowledge that Dawood Ibrahim had bombed Mumbai to avenge the unprecedented targeting of Muslims in these very riots, by mobs instigated by Bal Thackeray and the RSS, with the police playing no small role.

Pawar, always a grass-roots leader, did not need the Srikrishna Commission report to tell him this five years later.

Yet, no instructions were given to the police to investigate the riot offences thoroughly, no special team formed, no special PP appointed.

It was not as though Pawar and successive governments were not reminded of their duty by citizens who moved court in the belief that the law must apply equally to all.

Whether in Bombay high court or Supreme Court, successive state governments have defended the police's inaction during the riots, by claiming that Thackeray was not guilty at all, or by giving a similar clean chit to policemen and rioters indicted by an inquiry commission headed by a sitting high court judge.

A special task force, headed by the same man who now heads the state's anti-terrorist squad, spent three years reopening just five of 1,358 closed riot cases, and ensured that not a single serving policeman indicted by Justice B N Srikrishna spent even an hour in a lock-up.

Contrast this with the years in jail spent by the blast accused.Perhaps statistics can explain the contrasting ways in which the same state treated the two sets of crimes: 575 Muslims were killed in the riots, and 275 Hindus; in the blasts, all the 257 killed were Hindus.

In the few riot cases that were registered and tried, convictions were not just abysmally low, but only Muslims were convicted (these convictions were set aside by the Supreme Court). Though Hindus were charged, even under TADA, no Hindu has been convicted in any riots case.

The writer is a political commentator.