The Sarpotdar case
Indian Express, July 31 2008
Jyoti Punwani
Mumbai is still to come to terms with the Madhukar Sarpotdar conviction. On July 9, the former Shiv Sena MP was convicted to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of Rs 5,000 for having committed an offence under Sec 153 A, i.e., promoting communal enmity. The offence had been committed during the 1992- 93 riots and the judgment was handed down by one of the two special magistrates’ courts set up in March his year to exclusively try the 1992-93 riot cases.
Madhukar Sarpotdar’s case has been the highest profile case of the Mumbai riots, thanks to the special mention it received in the Srikrishna Commission report. It concerns a procession led by the then Sena MLA in his constituency (where his party boss, Bal Thackeray also lives) addressed by Sarpotdar and other Sena leaders. Two of them (one now with the Congress) were convicted with him. The processionists carried placards and shouted slogans, some of them so vulgar that even hardened policemen refused to repeat them in court. On one of those placards was a slogan which Justice Srikrishna highlighted as illustrative of the Shiv Sena’s vigilantism during the riots. It read: ‘Only in the Shiv Sena’s terror lies the true guarantee of people’s safety.’
Just a fortnight earlier, the worst riots to hit Mumbai had ended, with 263 dead. Incidents of communal violence continued. Yet, the top police officers accompanying the 5,000-strong procession made no attempt to prevent it from being taken out, or to arrest anyone en route or after it was over. Doing so would have escalated communal tension, they told the Commission. The then Police Commissioner had agreed with this assessment.
A mere four days after the procession, communal violence erupted again in Sarpotdar’s constituency. At the height of this second phase of the riots, the army intercepted, during curfew hours, Sarpotdar in his jeep with his licensed revolver, and others, including his son, with unlicensed revolvers, choppers and hockey sticks. The local police convinced the major to hand over the case to them, arrested Sarpotdar three days later, allowed Shiv Sena women to block the highway in protest, and then produced him before the night magistrate who gave him bail immediately so as not to create further tension. Five years later, Sarpotdar was acquitted in this case because the major couldn’t recognise the weapons he had seized.
It is this background one needs to keep in mind to understand the reaction of awe and wonder that has greeted Sarpotdar’s conviction. After the Srikrishna Commission report held the Sena responsible for the second phase of the riots, the general feeling was : if Thackeray can’t be booked, let’s at least get Sarpotdar.
When Vilasrao Deshmukh set up the two courts exclusively for riot cases, he was simply taking the easiest measure to placate Muslims upset at the harsh punishment handed down to the 1993 bomb blast perpetrators, while those indicted for the riots, which had led to the blasts, remained untouched. Among the 120-odd non-descript cases sent to these courts, two had wellknown Sena leaders as accused. Former minister of state for home Gajanan Kirtikar was acquitted in May. Everyone expected Sarpotdar to walk free too.
The trial had already lasted 15 years, with magistrate after magistrate giving adjournments at the behest of the defence. Even after the Congress government took over in 1999, no special PP was appointed; indeed, one resigned after having remained unpaid for more than six months. All seven accused — six from the Sena and one from the BJP —were never present in court together, but warrants were rarely issued and if issued, not served.
Then, the police had done their best to save Sarpotdar. All that they produced in court against him as evidence was the FIR and the Station Diary Entry that had the text of the speeches, placards and slogans. Typically, they had not bothered to record the statement of any independent witness. Sarpotdar’s lawyer Jaiprakash Bagoria, who had got him acquitted in the previous riots case and also got Kirtikar acquitted, had once fought elections on a Sena ticket.
He was confident about the outcome thistime too. Ironically, it was his cross-examination that got his clients convicted. Bagoria did not deny that his clients had given speeches. In his cross, he only contested the content of the speeches. Bagoria submitted a newspaper photograph of the procession which showed no placards. The accompanying text mentioned placards and slogans Magistrate R C Bapat Sarkar, picked out from a civil court to judge cases of rioting, was the kind who scrutinised every word of the evidence before her. Hence, she read not only those excerpts of the speeches highlighted in the FIR but also the long excerpts in the Station Diary Entry, which were far more incendiary. The judgment reproduces these long excerpts to show just how “vituperative and acerbic” the speeches were, the language used leaving no doubt about their intention to promote enmity on grounds of religion.
The conclusive paragraphs of the judgment are worth reproducing only because they remind us that acts committed day in and day out by Hindutva leaders are in fact crimes for which they are never punished. Says the judgment: “All the accused have to begin with, lauded the act of destroying the Babri Masjid as a credit to the Hindus... These kind of speeches were clearly aimed at kindling the Hindu populace into an aggressive stance… Against the backdrop (of the riots) it would be obvious to any prudent person …that such incitement would lead to further aggravation of communal sentiments and violent acts.
The accused were all seasoned politicians and elected representatives with some maturity… In spite of this, it has come on record that they blatantly gave such speeches openly exhorting Hindus to take to the streets instead of discarding their responsibility towards the public of trying to alleviate tension and restore normalcy. Such acts deserve punitive measures in order to send the correct signal to society at large that wrong-doing would be punished.” The judgment is all the more remarkable because the magistrate could easily have taken the easy way out and talked about letting bygones be bygones.
After all, she had an illustrious precedent — the Bombay High Court had done that while exonerating Bal Thackeray for his editorials in Saamna, just two years after the riots. A week before this judgment, Magistrate SS Sharma’s special riots court convicted two Shiv Sainiks for rioting, the first time anyone from the party was found guilty in a 92- 93 riots case. Not in his wildest dreams would Deshmukh, whose appointment had been welcomed in Saamna, and who has shown no inclination in the eight years he’s been CM, of wanting to punish the guilty of the ’92-93 riots, have imagined such an outcome. One more wily politician thwarted by the judiciary.
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