From: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol - XLVIII No. 30, July 27, 2013
Nemesis of Narendra Modi?
by Anand Teltumbde
Will the Ishrat Jahan false encounter case thwart Narendra Modi's juggernaut or will it also go nowhere in the labyrinth of the Indian politico-judicial system?
Narendra Modi is already slated for the big job by his party, not an unremarkable feat for a man who ran a tea stall near Ahmedabad bus terminus before he became a full-time pracharak (propagator) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). His rise since then has been meteoric. After becoming the chief minister of Gujarat in 2001 he immediately transformed the state into a Hindutva laboratory by implementing the tacit dictum of his mentors in the RSS to build a Hindu nation by subordinating those whom they perceive as a threat to Hinduism, mainly Muslims and Christians. Within a year a shocking genocide of Muslims was executed as a “Newtonian” reaction to an unfortunate event of fire in a coach of the Sabarmati Express near Godhra station in which 58 people, including 25 women and 15 children, supposedly kar sevaks who were returning from Ayodhya, were burnt to death. He remained unrepentant, using the pogrom against Muslims to build up his image as a Hindutva hero, going on to enact fake encounters of innocent Muslims, painting them as Islamist terrorists who were out to assassinate him. With this image, he won successive elections with increasing margins and became the longest serving chief minister of Gujarat.
Modi has largely succeeded in his goal of consolidating the majority community behind him by “teaching a lesson” to Muslims. He has also almost weathered the legal storm that could incriminate him for the communal carnage with the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) giving him a clean chit. The cases of fake encounters of Sohrabuddin, the murder of his wife Kaiser Bi, his friend Prajapati and many others have also slipped past him. His maintenance of strategic calm in the face of these favourable developments has further brightened his image as a no-nonsense statesman devoted to development of the state and catapulted him to the national centre stage as a possible candidate for the prime ministership. However, a case of an encounter killing, in which a teenaged college student from Mumbra (Ishrat Jahan) along with three others were projected as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) operatives out to kill Modi, appears to hold out some hope for justice. A recent statement of an accused police officer before a magistrate implicates Modi in this case. Whether the blood of this innocent girl from a lower middle class Muslim family will thwart Modi’s juggernaut or will it also go nowhere in the labyrinth of the great Indian politico-judicial system is yet to be seen.
A Fake Encounter
I was a part of the All India Fact-Finding Team that primarily investigated this case and concluded that it was a fake encounter.1 The incident took place on 15 June 2004 and we did the fact-finding on 24 and 27 June at Ahmedabad and Mumbai, respectively. Suddenly after Modi became the chief minister, there was a spate of incidents of “Islamist” attacks in Gujarat. Besides Godhra, there was Akshardham (24 September 2002, 25 dead, 77 injured) and a series of encounters of the alleged Islamist terrorists. On 23 October 2002, Samir Khan Pathan, arrested in connection with a “Modi murder plot” died in an “encounter” while in judicial custody. He was taken out one day and killed on the Usmanpura road in Ahmedabad. There was no evidence of the conspiracy except the alleged confession of Pathan himself. On 13 January 2003, Sadiq Jamal Mehttar was shot down in Naroda, allegedly when he opened fire on cops. According to the Crime Branch, he was a LT operator conspiring to target not only Modi but also L K Advani and Pravin Togadia. All these incidents had more than one similarity: they needed the shooting down of the “conspirators”. The operatives allegedly belonged to terrorist outfits like LT or Jaish and all the encounters remained shrouded in a cloud of doubts. Most of them looked so unreal that they evoked suspicion. The main thrust of our enquiry therefore was to see whether the incident, as narrated by the Gujarat Crime Branch, was real or not.
Our fact-finding report poked many holes in crime branch version on the basis of the facts on the ground. The body of a “terrorist” who was supposed to have come out of the car and fired upon the police lay prostrate on the road divider, with his AK-56 pointing in the opposite direction away from the police, and with his hand on the magazine of his AK-56 in such a position that the gun would not fire. Ishrat was in a sitting position while Javed (the driver) lay on her lap, which belied the police version that they fired on the police. As in any encounter, there were no injuries on the police although the latter claimed that the terrorists had fired 35 rounds from an AK-56 rifle and seven rounds from two pistols. Interestingly, in all the four post-Godhra encounters “the fingers on the trigger” belonged to the same set of people – Tarun Barot, Jai Singh Parmar, I A Sayeed and Kishore Singh Vaghela, all “star” inspectors of the Ahmedabad Crime Branch. Samir Khan Pathan had met his end at the hands of Vaghela; Sadiq Mehttar was killed by Parmar, Sayeed and Vaghela.
In the “encounter” before the rath yatra in June 2003, where the police had alleged a conspiracy to kill the Gujarat law minister and a member of legislative assembly, two persons, Ganesh Khunte and Mahendra Jadhav, were gunned down by Tarun Barot, Sayeed and Mahendra Parmar besides Mavani, and Goswami. These stars had performed in this encounter too. Taking cognisance of the contradictions in the Crime Branch version, information given by people, suspicions expressed by the media, and the general context of the case, we concluded that the encounter was a fake one. We had also anticipated what turned out to be the fact that the four deceased could have already been in police custody and were taken to the desolate place in the dead of night to be encountered.
The normal process in law was not followed in the matter of investigation, which was carried out by the same officials who led the encounter. While the entire episode was based on the “assumed” intent of the deceased, the conduct of police who actually caused the deaths was ignored as no case was filed against them. We had demanded that a case for murder (IPC Section 302) be registered as per the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) guidelines of 1996 against the cops involved in the encounter and their immediate suspension pending an independent judicial enquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court judge. We also called for a thorough enquiry by some independent agency into all the earlier encounter killings by the Gujarat police which claimed there was a conspiracy to assassinate Narendra Modi, and that this investigation must be under the aegis of the NHRC to establish the truth and the identity of those killed, and that the enquiry report be made public.
A Pernicious Phenomenon
The Modi phenomenon is far more pernicious than the charge of having engineered the genocide of Muslims in 2002, levied against him by the secularist camp. Casualties on the minority side are always disproportionately high. In this context a dictum holds that no riot takes place without the backing of some political outfit and no riot will last for more than a few hours without the complicity of the state. In a recent article in Outlook (5 March 2012), an analysis of 58 major communal riots in 47 places since 1967 shows that communal riots have taken place everywhere, in all regions, under every party rule, and arguably with similar intensity as in 2002. Therefore, demonising Modi for one riot in 2002 alone may not hold much water. Contrarily, it provides the fodder for the Modi-camp to argue that doing so, despite the SIT absolving him of the charge of complicity, is unjustified. Evidence to the contrary that Gujarat has witnessed an entire riot-free post-2002 decade, that in successive elections in Gujarat the Muslim vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has increased, and that increasing numbers of Muslims have been elected on BJP tickets in local body elections, all these go in the party’s favour.
It is not communalism, but the manner in which incidents were projected after Modi became the chief minister. Starting from the Godhra incident and the manner in which he let loose Hindutva goons on hapless Muslims, the way in which he thwarted the state machinery from acting, his defiance and use of the incident to his advantage to cynically allowing a series of fake encounters to build his image as the “Hindu Hriday Samrat”, forced the Gujarati Muslims to strike a truce with him in exchange of a riot-free future. Further, the creation of the euphoria around development in the state by offering all kinds of freebies to investors and endearing himself to the capitalists, the manner in which he unleashed a propaganda blitzkrieg with Gobbelesque lies to establish himself as a leader extraordinaire, all these measures place him in the class of Hitler and Mussolini. Modi belongs to a scarce breed of politicians with an acute understanding of the polity, ruthless strategic acumen and rare personal charisma. It is precisely this chemistry that portends danger of fascist rule if he gets to the top slot. The neo-liberal state in India has already been tending towards fascism. But it occasionally uses fig leafs of constitutional propriety. With Modi at the helm, this may not be necessary.
Truly, there is hardly any option left for ordinary people in the prevailing system than to meekly bear the tragedy that might unfold. The burgeoning middle class is still mesmerised by the glitter of the neo-liberal world despite the fact that its shiny layers are fast peeling off, baring its ugly reality. In such circumstances, even a slim hope could be consequential. It is hoped that the Ishrat case may thwart Modi’s fascist march.
Note
1“One More Encounter for Modi’s Sake?” at http://www.pucl.org/Topics/Religion-communalism/2004/ahmedabad-encounter...
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