[Editorials from The Hindu and The Indian Express are posted below]
The Hindu, August 30, 2012
A stunning verdict
The conviction by a Gujarat court of BJP legislator Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi along with 30 others for their role in the Naroda Patia massacre is the strongest judicial affirmation yet that large-scale communal violence is almost always a product of pre-meditated political planning and calculation. An estimated 95 Muslims, many of them hapless women and children, were hacked to death in Naroda, a minority neighbourhood in Ahmedabad targeted by armed mobs under the indulgent gaze of the Gujarat government in the wake of the February 27, 2002 Godhra train carnage. The verdict is a landmark one. It is for the first time that an Indian court has convicted a sitting MLA — Ms Kodnani was also a minister in the Narendra Modi government from 2007 to 2009 — for mob aggression against members of a religious community. Secondly, the court has not only upheld the charge of criminal conspiracy against the 32 individuals convicted, it has also found one of them guilty of rape and sexual harassment.
The establishment of conspiracy augurs well for the future of communal violence prosecutions, where the judicial trend so far has been to uphold murder but not conspiracy. It is a victory particularly for the Special Investigation Team that was brought into the picture by the Supreme Court following the failure of the State police to properly prosecute the post-Godhra riots cases. For the families of the Naroda victims, who identified the aggressors braving threats and intimidation and who were able to come forward to some extent because of the protection offered by the apex court, there cannot be a greater vindication than the trial court finding evidence of rape and molestation. It has been their plaintive cry that the violence was orchestrated and targeted against women, who were subjected to gang rape and worse before being slaughtered. Violence against women is a pattern established over and over in anti-minority pogroms, and the judgment has done yeoman service in foregrounding this fact. Needless to say, the conviction is a huge setback to the Gujarat Chief Minister personally. The fact that Ms Kodnani led the Naroda killings was common knowledge, yet Mr. Modi made her a minister, even putting her in charge of ‘women and child development’ as if to thumb his nose at the victims. A bigger worry for Mr. Modi ought to be the establishment of conspiracy. The Chief Minister has maintained all along that the “riots” were a spontaneous act by crowds enraged by Godhra. It stretches credulity that Ms Kodnani could enter into a conspiracy with her co-accused without the government getting a whiff of the group’s criminal intentions and conduct, before, during and after the killing.
o o o
The Indian Express
Where law wins out
Aug 30 2012
The arc of history may finally be bending towards justice for the victims of communal violence that gripped Gujarat in 2002. Thirty-two people, including Maya Kodnani, formerly women and child development minister in the Narendra Modi government, and Babu Bajrangi, a Bajrang Dal leader, were convicted by a special court in Gujarat for their roles in the Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad.
This is the first time, after exhaustive investigations, that convictions have touched Gujarat’s powerful. In April, the special court convicted 23 in the Ode case, another flashpoint in the 2002 violence. The Supreme Court has gone to great lengths to insulate the legal process from powerful vested interests — setting up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) in 2008 at the request of Zakia Jafri and the NHRC to examine nine of the most critical cases, and also sending amicus curiae, Raju Ramachandran, to conduct independent investigations. The divergences in those two reports point to the complexity of assigning culpability in these cases. Kodnani, in fact, had been arrested by the SIT in 2009. This is a moment to admire the judicial system that has wrested some resolution for the trauma of Naroda Patiya.
And yet, it must be asked why justice and reparation are still missing for another scar in recent history — the 1984 riots in Delhi, in which Sikhs bore the brunt of the violence as retaliation for Indira Gandhi’s assassination, under the watch of the Congress government. The police and administration were co-opted in similar ways; prominent Congress leaders were implicated in the violence. However, no powerful figure has been convicted yet. While the 1984 riots and the 2002 riots have become rhetorical tit-for-tats between political forces, the fact remains that one is inching towards answers and the other has been treated as a matter best forgotten and transcended. What, also, of the Nellie massacre, which is not even invoked as a political talking point? In 1983, Muslim settlers were killed and injured in an ethnic clash during the Assam agitation — the All Assam Students Union and other activists had whipped up sentiment against “foreign nationals”. But the investigation reached nowhere, legal proceedings were soon dropped, not a single person has faced trial. As the legal process unfolds in Gujarat, bringing at least a partial justice for the events of 2002, it also casts a sidelight on these other sites of violence, still painfully unaddressed.
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