(Indian Express
January 12, 2007)
A random calculus
The riot-affected face state arbitrariness in the matter of ‘compensation’. The National Minorities Commission has done well to investigate these shocking variations in the price of life across states and communities
by Seema Chishti
It is not clear if someone has attempted to second guess what the wind might have to say and get some answers to this version of singer Bob Dylan’s much quoted question — “how many deaths does it take till we know that too many people have died...” But one can say this on good authority: the people of Gujarat, affected by the worst riots in India in recent times, are trying to keep this sad guessing game as engaging as possible — if only just to make sure that the rest of us remain interested in the horror of the violence five years later.
This is not to attempt to go into what happened and who did it — there are worthy men and women and worthier commissions on that job. But we cannot be faulted for wanting to know what happened to the people who didn’t quite die — and have lived on as refugees in their own state and in their own hometowns. Many say they don’t feel safe enough to go back home and start anew. Of course, ‘compensation’ is not only about money. But as that is the only concrete way in which the state can express its sorrow and concern at the loss of life, where do things stand now?
There was the so-called Sikh Riots Package that Sikh survivors were given after much haggling for the agony they suffered during the 1984 riots. The benchmark was what the Delhi High Court decreed in 1996 — Rs 2 lakh plus the interest on it to the day. The courts had got into the very difficult and painful business of working out the price of a human life and arrived at a figure. Admittedly, the most difficult thing to do is to assess the price of life, but as governments and the law must sometimes do so, it may be best to have a thumb rule.
It is in this context that the National Minorities Commission’s bid to get the government to take cognisance of the shocking differentials between the price of life across different man-made horror shows, like the bomb blasts in Mumbai trains and Malegaon in Maharashtra, as opposed to riots like the anti-Sikh pogrom or Mumbai 1992-93 and Gujarat 2002, makes sense. This relative evaluation brings to light how random and arbitrary the method of evaluating lives is at the moment.
In the long run, these differences in amounts and non-payments convince large sections of the people that justice is delivered only to those who are deemed “worthy of it”, the “chosen few”. There can be very little rational justification for the fact that different events or different affected communities, should lead to a different price being put to lives. One may add here that the Samajwadi Party-led regime in UP, while having no written rules, has actually in the past couple of years given the same compensation to the next of kin of those affected. For instance, the families of those killed in the Sankat Mochan temple explosions in Varanasi got the same amount as families of those who died in the Aligarh riots.
In this context, it is shocking how the matter of compensations for Gujarat has been handled. The much touted announcement by Minister of State for Home Sriprakash Jaiswal that the victims of Gujarat riots in 2002, according to the Sikh riots formula, would get Rs 7 lakh each, has encountered a wall of silence from the prime minister’s office and the home ministry. It forced the irrepressible Jaiswal to say “a final decision has not been taken” to an unstarred question in Lok Sabha in the winter session. It is rather odd that the ruling UPA would choose to adopt this course, unless, as some suspect, it is due to a plan to announce the “compensation” at a time that may be more beneficial politically, given that the UP and Gujarat elections both are scheduled in under a year.
As far as the Gujarat government goes, the evidence so far is not encouraging. The ill-fated Best Bakery case was shifted to neighbouring Maharashtra by the Supreme Court — many other riot cases are waiting to hear the highest court in the land pronounce on their plea for a shift out of Gujarat. Meanwhile, the state government has returned Rs 19.01 crore which it had got as part of the Centre’s contribution for the riot-hit shortly after the riots. It now appears that there is talk of returning the returned money to the state.
You might say there is nothing very different here from the bigger picture — the Congress-led government dithering despite making pious noises in the context of the riots there in the past; the BJP-led parties in denial about the situation and conjuring up a “minority appeasement” plea each time there is some straight talk of rights, at least civil rights, for a section of the state’s population. All in all, a no-hope situation for those who think the tide will turn someday and both political formations will get more mature and sensitive on issues that deeply scar a large number of people. But on the contrary, it could get worse — cloudier and stormier — between the two political groups without any real benefits flowing to the electorate in 2007 as the state elections are due in a few months. The only compensation the people will probably get is another war of words over the riots and yet another round of empty promises.