The Indian Express, Dec 17, 2009
The forgotten riots
by Parimal Dabhi
Ahmedabad/ Surat : While Justice Liberhan may have submitted his report 17 years late, an inquiry commission for the 1992 riots that broke out in Surat in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition was terminated in 1997 because it sought several extensions. And while a human rights group challenged the decision in court, this attempt failed to revive the commission.
Though the official death toll in the Surat riots stands at 152, many went missing, and property worth crores was damaged, no one has been held accountable. Lawyer-turned-BJP MLA Atmaram Parmar who defended the accused in the riots admits that there has not even been one conviction in cases of arson, rape and murder that are comparable to the 2002 riots in the state.
Incidentally, Shankersinh Vaghela, who as the chief minister in 1997 ordered the termination of the state inquiry commission, is the lone Congress leader to be indicted by the Liberhan Commission for his role in inciting the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots.
The ill-fated inquiry commission was ordered by Chimanbhai Patel’s Congress government two months after the Surat riots. It was initially headed by Justice (retd) I C Bhatt, but when he was appointed as the Lokayukta in 1995-96, Justice P M Chauhan replaced him.
Incidentally, it was on the issue of the Ayodhya rath yatra that Chimanbhai Patel’s support shifted from the BJP to Congress. Patel, heading the Janata Dal-Gujarat, became the chief minister with the BJP’s support in 1990 but the coalition fell apart on the issue of support to L K Advani’s rath yatra which began from Somnath in Gujarat. By 1992, Chimanbhai Patel emerged as a Congress chief minister after merging the Janata Dal-Gujarat with the party.
Further political ironies were to play out. Vaghela was the state BJP president when the riots broke out in 1992-93, but he went on to engineer a split in the party and toppled the Suresh Mehta-led BJP government in 1995. He then formed the government with the support of the Congress in October 1996. It was in 1997 that he ordered the termination of the inquiry commission, just when the final report was being dictated.
“I am strongly against giving extensions to the inquiry commissions as they become an instrument of getting various allowances only. And so, I ordered the termination of the Chauhan Commission when it did not meet the deadline,” says Vaghela.
While Vaghela’s decision to terminate the commission was challenged in the Gujarat High Court by a human rights group, Jan Sangharsh Manch (JSM), the division bench of the HC dismissed the petition saying that the state government has the power to terminate the inquiry commission. Mukul Sinha of JSM said that the HC decision was challenged in the Supreme Court but it “did not entertain the petition at the relevant time.”
The outcome is that the findings of the commission report may never be known. Justice Chauhan refuses to comment on it and the survivors — especially women and children who were raped and lost their entire families — are reluctant to recall the trauma they went through.
The only candid admission comes surprisingly from BJP MLA, Atmaram Parmar, who defended those accused in the riots’ cases “To the best of my knowledge not a single person had been convicted in any case of 1992 riots.”
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