Hindustan Times, 5 July 2011
by Vinod Sharma
I’m sure this post will get the goat of Narendra Modi’s many admirers who visit the site with alarming regularity. But there’s nothing personal about the comments. The issue needs to be debated for it concerns administration of justice.
We have it now on the authority of a lawyer representing the Gujarat Government before the Nanawati Commission probing the post-Godhra riots of 2002 that the state IB’s telephone records and log entries of movement of officers and their vehicles during the carnage, were routinely destroyed in 2007.
How on earth can that happen in the country’s best administered state? Is good governance all about foreign capital inflows, shining skyscrapers, road connectivity, electricity and water? All these matter but are of little or no meaning when the system is designed to manipulate justice.
The purpose clearly was to discredit the messenger rather than address the message when the lawyer attacked IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt. He said Bhatt knew that records did not exist when he accused Modi of instructing officers to let the Hindus have revenge on Muslims in the aftermath of Godhra.
Bhatt’s case hinges on evidence of his presence at the meeting of top civil servants where Modi allegedly delivered the diktat. And that proof lay in the IB records in question.
Bhatt’s character assassination is reminiscent of saffron attacks on Anju Gupta, another IPS officer who deposed against L K Advani in the Ayodhya case. In a brazenly communal pitch, the BJP questioned the veracity of her deposition by citing her marriage to a Muslim. Its spokesmen insisted on calling her Anju Gupta Rizvi rather than addressing her version of the events.
The then Chief Election Commissioner J M Lyngdoh was similarly scandalized while on a spot visit to the state to ascertain the desirability of assembly polls after the carnage. A newspaper with known sympathies for the sangh parivar ran a headline with the CEC’s full name— James Michael Lyngdoh to promote the canard that his Christian moorings guided his actions in the constitutional office he held.
I’ve no first hand knowledge about Bhatt’s presence or otherwise at the meeting Modi convened. But I know for sure that the state government that set up the commission to probe the mayhem was duty bound to preserve the evidence. That the overall scenario was under the Supreme Court’s watch made it doubly incumbent on the Modi regime to keep the records in safe custody.
For all these reasons, it’s a fit case for a suo motu intervention by the Apex Court that has rightly instituted a SIT to monitor the Centre’s efforts to repatriate black money stashed abroad. The Court took the matter in its hands on seeing the UPA drag feet on the issue. The yard stick cannot be different for Gujarat.
|
