The Times of India, 21 March 2010
On Gujarat, SIT itself is on trial
by Manoj Mitta
The Gujarat riot cases are again at the crossroads. The first time, an exasperated Supreme Court took the extreme measure of shifting two high-profile cases, Best Bakery and Bilkis Banu, out of Gujarat. It led to a fair trail and convictions.
Once again we are at the cusp of some out-of-the-box move by the Supreme Court. The court has already stayed the trial into the Gulbarg massacre case involving the murder of 69 people, including Congress MP Ehsan Jafri. The stay has come in the wake of stunning allegations of bias by special public prosecutor R K Shah against the probe agency, the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT), and the special court judge.
Shah has alleged that SIT was sabotaging the case by giving weak support to the prosecution team, and the judge — if Shah is to be believed — was behaving as though he was presiding over a kangaroo court; he was intimidating eye-witnesses and, generally speaking, showing little interest in getting to the truth.
In the circumstances, the Supreme Court — the one institution that has consistently batted for justice for the riot victims — was left with no option but to stay the trial for now. What it will do next is the big question. Will it upbraid SIT and urge it to discharge its duties fairly and diligently? Or will it, acting on a long-pending application, direct a reconstitution of SIT?
SIT’s credibility appears to have sunk to a new low. This is despite it summoning Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi for questioning this Sunday. Modi is one of the worthies in a list of 62 influential persons against whom Zakia Jafri, Ehsan Jafri’s widow, has filed a complaint, which is still to be registered. But this remarkable step of summoning the chief minister has not quite retrieved SIT’s credibility — in fact, the timing of the summons is seen as a desperate effort by SIT to salvage its battered reputation.
Critics point out that SIT could have summoned Modi much earlier if it wanted to. Gulbarg is one of the nine cases
falling under SIT’s jurisdiction. And it could have examined Modi in this case because Rahul Sharma, one of the few Gujarat police officers to have acquitted himself well during the riots, has produced a CD containing cell phone records of BJP leaders and police officers. Besides, eyewitnesses have testified in court that shortly before his murder, Jafri rang Modi for help, only to be abused by him. The sudden summoning of Modi now is, therefore, being viewed with dollops of skepticism.
The larger skepticism about SIT lies in its composition. Apart from the former CBI chief, R K Raghavan, who heads the team, its senior officers are drawn largely from the Gujarat Police, which itself has been seen to have been biased during the riots. The three senior Gujarat officers are Shivanand Jha, Geeta Johri and Ashish Bhatia. One of them, Jha, is named as an accused in Jafri’s complaint.
Special prosecutor Shah has alleged that Bhatia tried to sabotage the prosecution’s case by producing fresh witness statements contradicting the earlier ones. Bhatia’s alleged machinations were exposed when all the eyewitnesses and victims stood by their original testimonies during the trial, disowning the retractions attributed to them. Shah’s damaging revelations about SIT corroborate previous allegations against Bhatia by eyewitnesses and victims in their transfer petition to the Gujarat high court.
Whether it is biased or not, SIT has certainly been horribly inept in its assistance to the prosecution. Prosecutor Shah alleged that statements of witnesses were given to him only when they were in the witness box, giving him no time to study. And the trial court, he alleged, was seeking to shield the Gulbarg massacre accused. Overall, this indicates that Modi’s Gujarat remains as hostile to justice as it was when the original Best Bakery case trial collapsed in Vadodara under the weight of testimonies retracted under duress.
So, if the Supreme Court felt Gujarat was not the right place for securing justice in the Best Bakery and Bilkis Banu cases, it might even feel similarly when it takes up the issue next month about the nine cases with SIT. But more likely, it could reconstitute the team so as to show it means business. It is clear the SIT experiment is in need of serious review.
At the next Supreme Court hearing, Raghavan may also be pressed to justify SIT’s handling of the Godhra train-burning case. Having bought into the Gujarat police’s claim that the killing of 57 passengers was the result of an ISI conspiracy, SIT seems to have acquiesced in the attempt to use trumped-up evidence. This came to light because of a plea filed before the Supreme Court by somebody who has been cited as an eyewitness. The eyewitness, Ilyas Hussain Mulla, claimed that he was not in Godhra that fateful day; he was, in fact, in Palej, 150 km from Godhra. Mulla has said that SIT officials abducted and tortured him again last month to prevent him from speaking the truth at the trial.
Look at it any which way, we haven’t heard the last of the Gujarat riot trials. One minister, Maya Kodnani, might have been arrested. But in the larger context, this seems a case of selective enforcement of law. Much greater rigour would be required to give justice to the riot victims. And heal a festering wound in our society.
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