BJP President Amit Shah: the local dada of Sarkhej and the travesty of justice (Mustafa Khan)

by Mustafa Khan

The case of Sohrabuddin Sheikh is essentially political because he was used by the Gujarat police in a racket to collect huge funds by means of extortion. Amit Shah was the king pin in this as the CBI has termed him to be. His murder was used for political end in which Narendra Modi as chief minister succeeded but only on stigmatizing the Muslims as criminals and terrorists for electoral gains. His fight he said was with Mian Musharraf as he called the president from our neighbouring country. It is ironical that the family of Sohrabuddin was for generations supporters of BJP and actively canvassed for the Hindu party, even in 2014 election they campaigned for Narendra Modi’s BJP.

Much publicity of the Gujarat model was in the news for some years. As election 2014 drew nearer it became ruling passion. With all the paraphernalia of astronomical amount of money distributed to the voters and the election campaign there was clearly an attempt to focus on development and eclipse communal agenda of building Ram temple, scrapping Article 270 that gave JK a special status, common civil code, etc. “In a way, this was the difference between the politics of religion in the early 1990s in Uttar Pradesh and what played out on the ground in 2013-14.During the Ayodhya movement, it was clear that the BJP was making an open and determined bid to stir the communal pot. Now the communalization was more insidious. There was no blatant religious issue like the Ram mandir to incite trouble. Instead, a more silent divide was being created on the ground through a sustained whisper campaign that branded Muslims as untrustworthy and anti-national (‘Sab ISI agents hai’).” [1] The election discourse changed greatly as the Hindu party tried to hide (read, to reject and ultimately abrogate) the naked truth of the principles of the foundation of modern India paralleling the showcasing of the Gujarat model as a ploy to get power.

As the communalism was more subtle so was well prepared in advance, sophistry a la RSS. Down the years the RSS had blamed the Muslims and they should be blamed for all evils or blame those who are fair to them, was the whispering refrain. Amit Shah had taken charge of UP election and first step he made was to pray at the Ayodhya make shift Ram temple at the site of Babri mosque. Anyone with some perception of the move would know that the Hindu party BJP would use communalism surreptitiously. This is what it did. When asked why he took advantage of the religious polarization after the riots, Shah was the voluble version of the sophistry: “Dandge humne nahi karvaryen. Dang eek chhoti si ghatna se shru huye. Agar sarkar prompt action leti, toh dange nahi hote. Yet dange sarkar ki vote bank ki politics ki wajah se hue.”(We didn’t start the riots. Riots started with a small incident. If the government had not played vote bank politics but taken prompt action instead, there would have been no riots).” One vote bank is used as a way of taunting to consolidate another vote bank is polarization.

The judgment of Justice Madan Gosavi in acquitting Amit Shah on December 30, 2014 has given him a niche in the pantheon of judges who have built the monument of finished and unfinished cases of genocide and fake encounters that were the hall marks of the first pracharak of RSS to become the chief minister of a state and then the prime minister of India. Hence close attention is essential to details of gory tales of the pogroms and extrajudicial killings under his rule.

Sohrabuddin’s murder in fake encounter was used by the Congress as well as BJP. It gave Sonia Gandhi the handle of the stick to beat BJP while BJP used it in viewing him as a terrorist and agent of ISI whose activities posed a threat to Modi and Gujarat. . Modi had used this tactic in changing the fire accident at the Godhra railway station as the handiwork of ISI and therefore the fake encounter was also explained away in terms of terrorism. The truth is far from this.

“Earlier administration and executing agencies were under political pressure but today I am constrained to believe that the judiciary is also under political pressure.” Rubabuddin remarked in the aftermath of the acquittal of Shah. He also remarked that he wanted SC to make investigation into the death of Justice BH Loya who had presided over the case until his death. The words and grammar of the complaint of the Patel brothers, Dashratbhai and Ramanlalbhai, and the police version are identical though the other two complaints by Patel brothers are different. Even if we take a dispassionate view of Justice Madan Gosavi’s observatioin, why did not the court go through the other complains of the brothers to find out the discrepancies. How could their statement be hearsay? How could numbers of call be dismissed as unsubstantial in the absence of the content? Modi rule was universally notorious in destroying vital evidence so his honour should have this general knowledge of dispensation of justice in Gujarat. “Terrorist activities have increased and are rampant all over the world and if a home minister speaks to police officers of ground level, then it is not unnatural,” observed his lordship. But pat comes the doubt why should the home minister break the established rule of using the chain of command in communication? Sanjiv Bhatt also had a ground officer at the house of Ahsan Jafri and came to know the gory and brutal death of the former member of Parliament. Why did not the courts in India take his wife Jakia Jafri’s statement into consideration or Bhatt’s allegation made in his statement to the SC? It was only the phone call record of MayaKodnani and Babu Bajrangi that the duo is sentenced to long terms in jail. So what is new in Shah that he should be acquitted of all the crimes associated with several fake encounters?

Sanjiv Bhatt, the deputy Intelligence officer of SBI says he had excellent rapport with Modi and knew Amit Shah. No investigation agency has joined the dots to know the activities of Modi and Shah to have insight on their relationship. Saying that Shah came in contact with Modi his senior in RSS in early eighties is not enough. Shah is from Sarkhej and he was known as the local dada of Sarkhej. The Hindi word dada means a gangster well known for his criminal behavior. He is the one who can take law in his hand. He is associated with law of the jungle rather than the constitutional laws of the republic of India. Rajdeep Sardesai had a bitter experience in 2002 when Shah’s supporters pushed and kicked him in his presence. Later Shah told him “You should also be careful.”[2] During the same assembly election of 2002 Modi had warned the media persons of the fate of Daniel Pearl if they wanted to cover the pogroms.

Sarkhej itself had acquired notoriety. Hardcore cadres of RSS and Bajrang Dal were trained there to destroy the Babri mosque. Modi had arranged the launch of the rathyatra of LK Advani from Somnath which resulted in horrendous murder and mayhem of Muslims and destruction of their houses and business. What did the silent and cunning and resourcesful Vaishnave Vania orthodox Hindu, Shah, do has not been probed. The 2014 election was preceded by the pogroms of Muslims in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli. That was the product of Shah exhorting the Jats to take revenge upon the Muslims of western UP. The FIR in the matter says that the fracas was the result of a traffic dispute. But in the age of breaking news not enough attention was focused and it was made out to be a Muslim youth teasing a Jat girl and it resulted in the death of three. The mahapanchayat of Jats considered it a dishonor to the Jats and so they exacted terrible revenge. Modi and Shah thus divided the society on the basis of religion to get votes. More than fifty Muslims died and seventy thousands became internally displaced and hundreds injured. The plight continued as the situation in the refugee camps worsened with cold weather and then rain. This kind of division in society brought such rich result that all the parliamentary seats of the region went to BJP and those who had stoked the conflagration were awarded with ministerial posts in the central ministry.

Thus what was a harmonious and self content society of Jats and Muslims became the cauldron of communal hatred and violence instead of what it was a sugar bowl.

On the day Modi won the election the 6 Muslims accused in Akshardham temple attack were acquitted because there was no evidence of any crime that they had committed and yet they languished in jail for twelve years! The police of Gujarat had arrested them so casually that they offered the innocent Muslims to tell them in which of the three cases they would prefer to be arrested, Godhra train burning, Haren Pandya murder or Akshardahm temple attack. For this the blame goes to Shah and Modi equally.

Haren Pandya case is even more dramatic. He was involved in a movement to raze a mosque when Keshubhai Patel was chief minister. The police repaired the mosque and brought the two communities together amicably. When Modi took over the reins of the state he divided the society vertically. His police blamed the Muslims for the killing of Pandya. The police invented the mastermind to be a petty criminal of Hyderabad. They said that Asghar Ali had killed Pandya. First they had asked Sohrabuddin to kill him. But he refused; they, Sohrabuddin and the police, brought Asghar Ali from Hyderabad to do the job. He refused. Then they used Sohrabuddin’s friend Tulsiram Prajapati for the crime. The public truly believed what the police dished out to them as breaking news. At that time Sanjiv Bhatt was the superintendent of police of Sabamati jail.

One day Asghar Ali met Bhatt and requested him to draft a letter to the court that he was innocent and the case should be reinvestigated. Details of the context corroborate proof. He did not know English and wanted Bhatt’s help in drafting the letter. It was in this situation he narrated the facts and added that he had returned to Hyderabad and then came to know that Tulsiram had carried out the murder.

Bhatt was startled by what Asghar had told him in jail. So he rang up Amit Shah and told him what he had heard. Shah was very much disturbed by the disclosure. He told Bhatt not to tell anyone. But Bhatt wrote a letter to Shah and formally informing him of the serious matter. In his letter Bhatt wrote about the involvement of Sohrabuddin and some police officers in the murder of Sohrabuddin and wife. Then happened what turned out to be the most convincing proof of the motive of the murder. CBI arrested Abhay Chaudasma and Amit Shah in 2010. It was this that prompted Modi and Shah to put pressure on Bhatt to withdraw his report.[2]

Thereupon Shah tried to force Bhatt to destroy all the evidence including the letter. Bhatt refused and was transferred out of prison to another post. Later he found out: The Machiavellian design that Modi and his police prepared was that Asghar and many other Muslims were terrorists and they wanted to kill Modi for the holocaust of 2002. RB Sreekumar was at odds with his assistant Bhatt and remarked in this case that Pandya was not in the hit list of the terrorists. But how could Sreekumar forget that the RK marble merchants of Rajasthan wanted to liquidate Sohrabuddin and that it may be that it was a pretext to wipe the trail that led to the murder in which Sohrabuddin was used. But Sreekumar found it puzzling that the hawkers in the locale of murder of Pandya were removed a day before the murder. After the murder they reappeared on the road. The case has never been reopened and reinvestigated. Who is behind this impass if not Modi and Shah?

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[1] Rajdeep Sardesai. 2014: The Election that Changed India. Penguin 2014 p 161

[2] http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-haren-pandya-murder-amit-shah-asked-me-to-destroy-evidence-alleges-sanjiv-bhatt-1592688

[3] http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/tulsiram-prajapati-killed-haren-pandya-sanjiv-bhatt/1/149590.html