Resources for all concerned with culture of authoritarianism in society, banalisation of communalism, (also chauvinism, parochialism and identity politics) rise of the far right in India (and with occasional information on other countries of South Asia and beyond)
On February 28, 15 years would have passed since a gale of violence engulfed 20 out of the 25 districts of Gujarat. This persisted for several weeks, and in some places for months, as state authorities did little to control it.
More than 1,000 people, the large majority of who were from the minority Muslim community, were killed. Tens of thousands of homes and small business establishments — petty shops, wooden carts, autorickshaws, taxi jeeps, eateries and garages — were set aflame, and cattle and lifetime savings looted. This resulted in the long displacement and enduring pauperisation of more than 200,000 people. More than half of these were actively prevented — by fear, intimidation and social and economic boycott — from ever returning to their homes, resulting in their permanent expulsion from the villages and colonies of their birth.
Less noted, less dramatic, but even more terrifying is what happened in the dozen years and more that followed.
There is the new normalcy of Gujarat, in which Muslims have learnt to live separately, much like Dalits have been forced to exist for centuries. Much was touted, and celebrated, about the “Gujarat model” and the elections that followed were seen as a mandate to nationalise this in all of India. One part of this “Gujarat model” is no doubt connected with privileging a business-friendly administration over investment in the social sectors.
But what is less recognised is that part of the model is the systematic reduction of the country’s religious minorities to second-class citizenship. This is not different from what was accomplished so effectively — and with such little resistance or even notice and commentary from the country’s liberal public opinion — in the aftermath of the riots. This second-class citizenship of Muslims extends also to Christians, Dalits and tribal people in Gujarat as well.
Campaigns for ghar wapsi or (home-coming) of Christian and Muslim converts to Hinduism, suggesting that only the Hindu faith is “home” and persons converted to other faiths need to be brought back; or against beef-eating and “love jihad”; and abusive hate-speeches against Muslims; have generated fear and dread among India’s religious minorities. Especially during various state elections, anti-minority hatred is stoked cynically — examples are the comments on the “pink revolution” and the killing of rhinos to accommodate Bangladeshi Muslims in Assam in 2014, and the charge of discrimination after death to Hindus in the ongoing UP elections.
To suggest that all this targeting of minorities continues unchecked contrary to the government’s wishes is utterly disingenuous. If his Cabinet and party colleagues were actually falling out of line, one public rebuke from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and — in the unlikely event of their persisting with hate rhetoric — dismissal from senior office, could easily put an end to all hate utterances and campaigns. The charging of Left-leaning university students with sedition further refurbishes the BJP’s ideological world-view in which all Left and liberal dissent against the economic and social policies of the government are unpatriotic, because the ruling party, the government, its leader and the nation all converge into one seamless whole.
When an idealistic young doctoral student — who described himself as a Marxist Ambedkarite — Rohith Vemula in the central university in Hyderabad tried to organise film-screening protesting communal violence, and debate the justice of the death penalty to Yakub Memon convicted for the 1993 Bombay blasts, he was called an anti-national by two ministers of the government. This led to his suspension from the university and ultimately his suicide. When Leftist students in JNU organised a meeting to interrogate the justice of the death penalty to Afzal Guru, hanged for complicity in the attack on Parliament, they were charged with sedition, for which they could be jailed for life. Elected BJP leaders dubbed all those who protested this action, including senior leaders of the Left and Congress, as anti-national. Idealistic activists fighting human rights abuses in Chhattisgarh were hounded as Maoists.
Through all the nation-wide debates, when voices were raised against police action targeting dissenting university students, the government maintained its trademark selective silence. In public addresses, however, BJP leaders regularly decried the political opposition, anti-national students, and also NGOs supported by foreign funds. Once again opposition to Modi’s leadership and the ideology of his government was conflated with petty elitism on the one hand, and betrayal of the nation on the other.
Unlike many commentators, I cannot find hope in the straws in the wind of occasional progressive utterances by the government. The enormous chasm between these stray statements and the actual practice of the government and party is not mere “inconsistency”, but dangerous and cynical double-speak that is characteristic of the RSS ever since its founding nearly a century ago. I worry deeply about the prime minister’s deafening silences, as well as the government’s demonising of every kind of opposition to its policies.
I feel an intense unrest and foreboding thinking about how fundamentally the idea of India and its practice is changing so rapidly today and how the politics of hate has so profoundly polarised and divided us.
It was only after he had become chief minister of Gujarat
in October 2001 that Narendra Modi contested an election for the first
time in his life. Yet, Modi was apparently still such a political
lightweight that his victory margin was half that of his Bharatiya
Janata Party colleague who had vacated a “safe seat” for the
by-election. Within a week of this unimpressive electoral debut, the
Godhra tragedy occurred on February 27, 2002, setting off a chain of
events that ultimately propelled him to the office of prime minister.
Following
his “spot assessment of the situation” in which 59 people had been
burnt alive in a train, a press release issued by the Gujarat government
the same evening quoted Modi as saying that Godhra was a “preplanned
inhuman collective violent act of terrorism”. The casualties were mostly
kar sevaks returning in the Sabarmati Express from a controversial Ram
temple campaign launched in Ayodhya by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in
defiance of a Supreme Court order.
Modi’s immediate attribution of
the train burning to a terrorist conspiracy was a politically fraught
move. It turned the tables on Opposition MPs who had repeatedly
disrupted Parliament the previous day demanding action against the
Ayodhya campaign for exacerbating communal tension in the country. The
resolve he apparently displayed in dealing with Godhra, the “original
sin” of the 2002 Gujarat violence, has served to build Modi’s image as a
strong and decisive leader.
A face-saver
But
then, following the scrapping of the terror law by the Manmohan Singh
government in 2004, a statutory committee recommended that it need not
be applied to the Godhra case. The miscreants, it reasoned, had not used
any firearms or explosives and that they had attacked the train from
only one side and allowed passengers and kar sevaks to escape from the
other side. Once the Gujarat High Court endorsed the committee’s
recommendation, a special court set up in the Sabarmati jail in
Ahmedabad began the trial in 2009.
Despite the withdrawal of the
terror charge, the trial court, in its judgment delivered in 2011,
upheld the conspiracy charge. Given the magnitude of the retaliatory
violence in which over 1,000 people had perished, it was a face-saver
for the Modi regime to receive a judicial imprimatur for its claim that
the Godhra carnage was a premeditated crime. The finding was in the face
of all the evidence suggesting that the train burning was the outcome
of a group clash at the railway station located next to a Muslim ghetto.
Overcoming
the odds stacked against the conspiracy charge, the trial court
convicted 31 out of 94 accused persons. Unlike their Hindu counterparts
in the post-Godhra massacre cases, who had generally been granted bail
sooner than later, most of those found innocent in the Godhra case had
languished behind bars for periods ranging up to nine years.
The
acquittal of 63 persons and other aspects of the verdict laid bare,
however unwittingly, the lengths to which the Gujarat police – and
later, even the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team – had gone to uphold Modi’s narrative. The appeals against the trial court judgment are pending before the Gujarat high court.
On
the 15th anniversary of the Godhra train burning on Monday, here is a
recap of little-known anomalies in the case that changed the course of
India’s history, the anomalies that betrayed a shockingly cavalier
attitude in the investigation of the alleged terror conspiracy, the
anomalies that put in perspective some of the controversies surrounding the current dispensation at the Centre. Police stand in front of the charred coach of Sabarmati Express. Image: PTI
Contaminating the forensic evidence
Despite
the allegations of arson and terror, the police did not call forensic
experts for a physical examination of the burnt railway coach for two
whole months even as it was freely accessible to the public from day
one. If the arson was the result of a terror conspiracy, as made out by
Modi on day one, it was all the more a reason to give top priority to
forensic evidence. In any case, the police were legally required to
preserve the scene of the crime – especially coach S6 where the bodies
had been found – until the arrival of forensic experts.
Yet, right
from the first day, the police did not stop the public from entering
the coach and exploring the devastation. When a fact-finding team of
the Editors Guild of India visited the Godhra railway station on April
3, 2002, they were
“surprised
to see this prime exhibit standing in the yard unguarded and stray
people entering it at will. Anyone could remove or plant anything in the
carriage, tampering with whatever evidence it has to offer with none
being any the wiser”.
It was only on April 28, 2002
that the police for the first time requested any forensic experts to
make a physical inspection of the coach. That’s how a team from the
Ahmedabad-based Forensic Science Laboratory made their maiden visit to
the spot on May 1, 2002, two months after the mass crime. The outcome of
this belated inspection conducted in such dubious circumstances was a
simulation experiment, which apparently indicated that the coach caught
fire after petrol had been thrown from inside it. After another couple
of months, the Forensic Science Laboratory conducted further tests on
the coach, displaying little concern about the contamination of the
forensic evidence. This was to corroborate the theory floated by then by
the police that the arsonists had entered the coach by cutting the
canvas vestibule and breaking the sliding door. Special
Public Prosecutor JM Panchal addresses media representatives following
the verdict on the 2002 Godhra train incident at the special court
inside the Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad on March 1, 2011. Image:
AFP
Rejected nationalist testimonies
The
testimonies of all the nine Vishwa Hindu Parishad members produced to
advance the Modi line that Godhra Muslims had attacked the train without
any provocation were rejected by the trial court. These nine VHP
members from Godhra were produced by the prosecution as independent
eyewitnesses to parrot a nationalist story: that they had all gone to
the railway station as early as 6 am, armed with garlands and food
packets, to greet the kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya. But when they
were cross-examined by the defence counsel, the VHP witnesses had no
answer as to how they could possibly have planned such a reception given
that the Sabarmati Express was originally due to arrive much earlier,
at 2.55 am. Such an unearthly hour could only have been, as the trial
court said in its verdict,
“for
peaceful sleeping journey, and can never be accepted as a proper time
for welcoming or offering tea-snacks to kar sevaks and thereby to create
disturbance to kar sevaks themselves, as also to other passengers”.
Even
otherwise, the VHP witnesses had no explanation for the timing of their
visit given that they were unaware of the five-hour delay in the
running of the train. Nor was there any corroborative evidence of their
visit. Though they claimed to have garlanded kar sevaks and handed over
food packets, none of the kar sevaks testified to have received any
such treatment at the station. Neither kar sevaks nor other witnesses,
including officials on duty, vouched for the presence of any of those
VHP members.
Another key issue that damaged the credibility of the
VHP witnesses in the eyes of the trial court was their “ignorance” of
the clash between kar sevaks and Muslim hawkers on the platform. They
were clueless about the evidence accepted by the trial court relating to
disputes over payments and the attempts by kar sevaks to make Muslim
hawkers shout Hindu slogans and to molest Muslim women.
Having found every one of the VHP witnesses “unreliable”, the trial court said that it was left with no option
“except
to discard their evidence in totality with regard to their presence at
the time of the incident, at or near the place of occurrence and about
witnessing of the incident as narrated by them”.
As a
corollary, the trial court acquitted over 30 Muslims named by VHP
witnesses as members of the mob that had attacked the train. One such
Muslim who had by then been incarcerated for nine years on the basis of
this trumped up evidence was Mohammad Kalota, who was the president of
the Godhra municipality at the time of the train-burning.
All initial arrests found wrongful
All
the 28 Muslims arrested within 24 hours of the train burning –and
before the eruption of the post-Godhra violence – were found to have
been framed. To the Gujarat police, what was more damaging than the
collapse of all the VHP witnesses was the exoneration of all the 28
Muslims arrested at the outset in the Godhra case. For the charges
against these 28 accused persons had been based mainly on the
testimonies given by policemen themselves.
They happened to be
arrested in two batches: 15 on the first day and 13 the next morning.
The 15 picked up on February 27, 2002 were claimed to have been arrested
“from the spot”, at 9.15 am. Out of the 94 tried in all the Godhra
cases, the evidence against 14 of the 15 arrested on the first day (one
having died before the trial) should, therefore, have been the
strongest. After all, those caught red-handed normally stood the least
chance of getting away with the crime. If the Godhra case deviated from
such a logical pattern, it was because of the sheer implausibility of
the alleged timing and location of those arrests.
In a bid to
reconcile their own contradictory records, the police claimed that after
they had been nabbed on the spot, those 15 Muslims were detained for
three hours in that “very tense” atmosphere at the very place where
rescue operations were going on in the vicinity of the Godhra railway
station. None of the eyewitnesses, including officials, corroborated
this improbable police claim. The trial court concluded that those 15
were more likely to have been picked up from their homes that evening in
the course of a “combing operation”. Similarly, it rejected the
testimonies of the same police witnesses claiming that 13 more arrests
had been made the next morning, at 9.30 am, allegedly because those
persons had been “noticed” in the mob that had attacked the train. The
launch of the Godhra investigation with such 28 false arrests was a
measure of the prejudice likely to have been caused by Modi’s outright
branding of the incident as a terror attack. Image: PTI
‘Framed for embarrassing Modi’?
The
mastermind who had allegedly ordered the burning of coach S6 was
acquitted after eight years of incarceration, leaving a gaping hole in
the conspiracy story. Maulvi Hussain Ibrahim Umarji was an unlikely
person to be involved in the Godhra violence, let alone masterminding
it. For he was the only community leader in Godhra to have been trusted
by the district administration to run a relief camp in the wake of the
2002 anti-Muslim riots. He participated in peace meetings called by the
district collector and apologised on behalf of Muslims for the
train-burning. Still, Umarji was arrested early one morning in February
2003, in a high-security operation, following a confession by a
co-accused.
In his bail application to the Supreme Court, Umarji
alleged that he had been framed for embarrassing Modi during Prime
Minister Vajpayee’s visit to Godhra in April 2002. He had given a
representation to Vajpayee on the alleged persecution of Muslims in
Godhra. When Vajpayee had asked him to elaborate, Umarji pointed to Modi
and said sarcastically that he would not “know better”. However, having
failed to obtain bail from any of the courts, he secured freedom only
on his acquittal, after he had been detained for eight years.
The
two grounds on which he was accused of plotting to burn the train were
tenuous. One was that, under the guise of running the relief camp for
riot victims, he gave financial aid to those accused of arson. The trial
court pointed out that the allegation pertained to “subsequent help”
and that it was “to some extent hearsay”. The other allegation was that
in a meeting called at his instance on the eve of the crime, one of the
conspirators conveyed a message from Umarji ordering them specifically
to burn coach S6. The prosecution gave no explanation for why he had
allegedly targeted coach S6 and why he was himself not in the meeting
allegedly held in a guest house near the railway station. Worse, as the
trial court said, “Except the bare words alleged to have been told by
co-accused Bilal Haji, [there was] no other supporting evidence against
this accused.”
Thanks to the exoneration of the alleged
mastermind, there was a vital gap in the chain of events. If the meeting
had actually not been called at Umarji’s instance to convey his deadly
message, then what was the alternative explanation for it? Since there
was none, the trial court simply said: “Conspiracy came to be hatched on
the previous day ie 26-2-2002 during the meeting held in Aman Guest
House between the conspirators ...” Flower
petals scattered by the relatives of Godhra riots victims are pictured
at the doorsteps of a train carriage, that was set on fire in 2002,
during the commemoration of the 12th anniversary of Godhra riots at
Godhra in Gujarat February 27, 2014. Image: Reuters
Why no eyewitness to petrol being splashed?
None
of the authorised passengers and kar sevaks traveling in S6
corroborated the prosecution’s claim that the arsonists had broken into
the coach and splashed petrol from 20-litre cans. They testified to have
neither seen nor physically felt any petrol in the overcrowded coach.
Making light of this infirmity in the prosecution’s account, the trial
court said:
“Admittedly,
at the time of the incident (around 8 am), all the doors and windows of
the entire train were closed because of the tense atmosphere and the
passengers were not in a position to see or identify the assailants and
that too, unknown assailants.”
The judgment was
walking a fine line as the issue was not so much of identifying the
assailants. The real gap in evidence, which remained unaddressed, was
that nobody inside the coach had seen or felt anybody break open the
door and splash petrol.
Why impunity for those who halted the train?
The
two Muslims who had allegedly halted the train twice near the Godhra
station as part of the conspiracy to burn it were produced not as
accused persons but, ironically, as prosecution witnesses. And when
Iliyas Mulla and Anwar Kalander had turned hostile during the trial, the
court relied upon their pretrial testimonies recorded before a
magistrate. Had their contention that their testimonies had been
extracted under torture been accepted, another crucial link in the chain
of events constructed by the prosecution would have gone missing. It’s
not unusual though for a retracted testimony to be relied upon. What
remains a mystery is the compulsion of the prosecution to have never
arraigned the two persons who had been ascribed such a pivotal role in
the execution of the alleged plot. Manoj Mitta is the author of The Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra and co-author of When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath.
A local court in Gujarat’s Banaskantha district on Friday acquitted all the 70 accused in the 2002 post-Godhra riots that took place in Seshan Nava village for lack of evidence.
A total of 14 Muslims were killed in the riots that broke out on March 2, 2002 and two persons from the Hindu community were killed in police firing.
Addition Sessions Judge V.K. Pujara acquitted the accused on the ground that the prosecution failed to present sufficient evidence on record to prove their involvement as part of the mob participating in killings.
“The eye-witnesses in the case turned hostile and the total 109 oral witnesses did not give names of the accused and did not support the complainant’s case,” additional public prosecutor D.V. Thakor told The Hindu.
Eight of the accused persons died during the course of the trial. Mr. Thakor said 12 supplementary charge sheets were filed in this case.
According to prosecution’s case, an armed mob of around 5,000 people laid siege to the village on March 2 in the aftermath of the Sabarmati Express train burning. They killed 14 persons of the Baloch Muslim community, including children.
Inscribed In Cold-Hearted Ink
Indians knows it's the rare inquiry commission or SIT that ends up saying or finding something that brings justice. This book drives home that tragic point, mercilessly.
by Siddharth Varadarajan
THE FICTION OF FACT-FINDING: MODI & GODHRA
BY
MANOJ MITTA
HARPERCOLLINS | PAGES: 259 | RS 599
That the upper echelons of the Indian establishment are filled with grand little men of feeble integrity or diminished competence—and sometimes even both qualifications—is one of the country’s best-kept official secrets.
Somewhere deep inside the innards of the system is a shortlist of our ‘Most Reliable Men’. These are names that can be counted upon to deliver via an inquiry commission or an investigative report exactly what the system needs whenever there is a call for justice that cannot be brushed aside with silence, denial, threats or force. On the rare occasion that a crucial job ends up in the hands of someone ‘unreliable’—Justice B.N. Srikrishna confounded the government by indicting politicians and police officers in his report on the 1992-93 Bombay riots—the establishment, which includes leaders from all parties, closes ranks to ensure the findings are never acted upon.
The very fact that our governments and courts regularly set up commissions of inquiry, task forces and special investigation teams itself testifies to the breakdown of governance on an almost routine basis. The fact that these commissions and investigation teams invariably fail to indict the guilty or even tell us the truth suggests something even more disturbing: that more often than not, the violence and lawlessness being probed are the product of players and processes deeply embedded in the system. Those in charge of the ‘fact-finding’ exercise know they cannot be exposed or sanctioned without jeopardising the edifice of a State that rests on pillars of impunity.
So a Justice M.S. Liberhan can take two decades investigating the demolition of the 1992 Babri Masjid only to produce a report of shabby and breathtaking pointlessless. Justice G.T. Nanavati has already spent more than 11 years running his commission of inquiry into the 2002 Gujarat riots and there is no end in sight to his noble exertions. Despite the fact that his terms of reference include probing the role, if any, that Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi might have played, the learned judge has decided there is no need to question or cross-examine him before the commission. Several commissions have looked into the 1984 pogrom against the Sikhs—including one by the same Nanavati who willingly took time off the 2002 probe in order to conduct and finish the 1984 one in double-quick time—but the politicians and policemen who allowed over 3,000 innocent people to be massacred are still beyond the reach of the law.
The Fiction of Fact-Finding is the first book-length analysis I have read that has attempted to subject this sinister modus operandi of the Indian State to detailed judicial forensics. Manoj Mitta, a respected journalist with the Times of India, has made ample use of his own legal background to tell a gripping tale of the manner in which the special investigation team (SIT), set up by the Supreme Court and headed by former CBI chief R.K. Raghavan, to probe the worst incidents of the 2002 Gujarat riots, chose the path of least resistance. Of course, the most celebrated—or controversial—of its findings has been the ‘clean chit’ it gave Modi when it concluded that there were no grounds to proceed against the chief minister. But its closure report contains other important findings or omissions that have a bearing on the role of the police and administration.
Mitta goes deep into one more instance of how the State finds reliable inquirers to write the reports it wants written.
While it is tempting for Modi’s critics to simply dismiss the SIT report as biased or subjective or irrelevant, Mitta has gone down into the weeds, parsing the voluminous—and, it has to be said, shoddy, text—in order to understand its logic and reasoning. His findings are as shocking as they are distressing. Consider the manner in which Modi himself was interrogated by the SIT. The authenticated transcript reveals a static question-and-answer session in which the SIT’s interrogator runs through a list of questions, many of them excellent ones, without ever challenging Modi’s answers, asking a follow-up question or confronting him with evidence from documents and depositions in the SIT’s possession that contradict what the chief minister was saying.
On YouTube, viewers can see ample evidence of Modi’s inability to face up to simple questioning about his role in the violence. One minute into a scheduled interview with the famed Karan Thapar, the chief minister asks for a glass of water. Then he gets up and leaves. On another occasion, awkward questions by Rajdeep Sardesai are met with lengthy, awkward silence.
Compared to the slender pickings our journalists have managed, the SIT’s transcript represents the fullest and most detailed ‘interview’ Modi has given to date on his role during the Gujarat riots. But it is a wasted opportunity, as the manner of the questioning falls far short of what a half-way competent journalist would have managed, not to speak of a seasoned criminal investigator looking into a heinous crime on the basis of a mandate provided by the Supreme Court.
Mitta shows us how Modi is allowed to baldly deny having played any role in the incendiary decision to hand the bodies of the Godhra train fire victims to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad—the very organisation that had called for a Gujarat-wide bandh and unleashed violence across the state on February 28, 2002. This despite documentary evidence that undermined his claim. Another poorly phrased question allowed Modi to conveniently bury the fact that he had called the Godhra incident an act of terrorism, an inflammatory characterisation his government was eventually forced to back away from in the absence of evidence. No attempt was made to properly interrogate Modi for his disturbing anti-Muslim hate speech in Becharaji in September 2002 during his ‘Gaurav Yatra’ when there were Gujarat government files showing that the home department, which he directly controlled, had tried to hide the incriminating transcript from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).
The opening chapter on the Godhra incident also reveals the SIT’s incompetence, with its crack investigators recycling the Gujarat police’s version despite glaring inconsistencies. For example, not a single Hindu passenger on board coach S-6, Mitta reminds us, was willing to corroborate the police claim that members of the Muslim mob had entered their coach by cutting the connecting vestibule and pouring copious amounts of petrol on the floor.
Above all, Mitta convincingly demonstrates how Raghavan and the SIT simply failed to connect the dots between the horrific anti-Muslim violence and its aftermath, especially those which showed concerted efforts at a cover-up by Modi’s administration.
There are no heroes in this clinical dissection of the manner in which a compelling body of evidence on the violence was simply ignored or sidelined. The tale is a particularly cautionary one because the web of official complicity was laid bare by media reports and witness testimony virtually contemporaneously. Institutions like the NHRC and the Supreme Court knew the government of Gujarat could not be relied upon to deliver justice and set up the SIT in order to ensure the guilty would be punished. Sadly, neither the court nor its amicus curiae was able to properly monitor and audit the manner in which Raghavan and the SIT went about their business.
The SIT’s closure report has been accepted by the magistrate’s court but will be challenged in the superior courts. Mitta’s book tells us coldly and precisely why the report is a travesty.
(Siddharth Varadarajan is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, New Delhi. His book on the riots, Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, was published by Penguin in 2002.)
THE FICTION OF FACT-FINDING: MODI & GODHRA BY MANOJ MITTA HARPERCOLLINS | PAGES: 259 | RS. 599
When
Narendra Modi visited the office of the SIT (Special Investigation
Team) in Gandhinagar on March 27, 2010, it was exactly 11 months after
the Supreme Court had directed it to “look into” a criminal complaint.
Modi’s visit in response to an SIT summons was a milestone in
accountability—at least in potential. It was the first time any chief
minister was being questioned by an investigating agency for his alleged
complicity in communal violence. The summons were on the complaint by
Zakia Jafri, the widow of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, who had been
killed in the first of the post-Godhra massacres in 2002.
Jafri’s complaint, which had been referred to it by the Supreme Court
on April 27, 2009, tested the SIT’s independence and integrity more
than any of the nine cases that had been originally assigned to it a
year earlier. Jafri’s complaint called upon it to probe allegations
against 63 influential persons, including Modi himself. The complaint
named Modi as Accused No. 1 for the alleged conspiracy behind the
carnage that had taken place in 14 of Gujarat’s 25 districts. A Supreme
Court bench, headed by Justice Arijit Pasayat, authorised the SIT not
only to “look into” Jafri’s complaint but also to “take steps as
required in law”. The legal steps that needed to be taken immediately
were self-evident. The SIT was required to examine whether the
information contained in Jafri’s complaint amounted to, as Section 154
CrPC put it, “the commission of a cognizable offence”. If so, the SIT
would be obliged, under the same provision, to register a first
information report (FIR), which is a statutory prelude to an actual
investigation. The Gulberg Case
Gulberg Society, a middle-class Muslim colony located in
Chamanpura, a Hindu-dominated locality in eastern Ahmedabad, is attacked
on February 28, 2002, a day after coaches of the Sabarmati Express are
set afire near the Godhra railway station.
Ehsan Jafri, 73, a former Congress MP who lived in the Society,
made numerous SOS calls to police officers and various Congress leaders.
Police claimed the mob went out of
control when Jafri opened fire. He was one of the 69 people killed. Most houses in the
neighbourhood were burnt.
In 2006, Jafri’s widow Zakia sought to register another FIR
against Narendra Modi and 62 other top police and administrative
officials alleging they had aided, abetted and conspired for the riots.
In 2008, the Supreme Court appointed a four-member Special
Investigation Team (SIT) headed by former CBI director R.K. Raghavan to
conduct investigation in these cases.
In September 2011, the SC refused to pass an order on Modi’s
role in the Gulberg Society case and directed concerned magistrate of
Ahmedabad to decide the case; SIT submits its report in February 2012.
In Dec 2013, court rejects Zakia’s petition against SIT’s closure report giving Modi a clean chit in the 2002 riot cases.
The SIT did conduct a probe into Jafri’s complaint but it was done
without fulfilling the precondition of registering an FIR. The elaborate
probe, stretching over 12 months and recording the statements of 163
witnesses, took place under the guise of a “preliminary enquiry”. Then,
even after the conclusion of the so-called preliminary enquiry, the SIT
was disinclined to register any FIR on Jafri’s complaint. In its May 12,
2010 “enquiry report”, the SIT asked the Supreme Court if it could
instead conduct “further investigation” in the existing case of Gulberg
Society, where Jafri was a witness. The SIT’s proposal flew in the face
of Jafri’s complaint, which had sought a broad-based probe into the
conduct of the Modi government, encompassing all the carnage cases,
rather than a narrowly-focused further investigation in any particular
case. Besides, the period covered by Jafri’s complaint was an extended
one as it referred to, for instance, the Supreme Court’s indictment of
the Modi regime in 2004 in the Best Bakery and Bilkis Bano cases.
A farce concluded Modi addresses the media after his SIT appearance
Despite the mismatch between the restricted scope of the Gulberg
Society case and the wide ambit of Jafri’s complaint, a Supreme Court
bench, headed by Justice D.K. Jain, gave the go-ahead to the SIT’s
proposal. This could be because the permission for further investigation
sought by the SIT was only into allegations against a junior minister,
Gordhan Zadafia, and two police officers, M.K. Tandon and P.B. Gondia.
Later on, though, the Supreme Court extended the purview of the further
investigation to the alleged complicity of Modi himself. This
long-drawn-out but unusual exercise culminated on February 8, 2012 in a
“final report” to a magisterial court in Ahmedabad exonerating Modi and
the rest of the accused persons of any of the criminal culpability
alleged by Jafri’s complaint.
It could have been a milestone in accountability: a CM being investigated for his complicity in communal riots.
Such
a conclusion was predestined, if not predetermined, for a variety of
reasons. Not least of those reasons was the manner in which the SIT’s
closure report relied implicitly on Modi’s testimony. This was despite
the fact that Modi’s statement had been perfunctorily recorded outside
the framework of the CrPC. The only time he appeared before the SIT was
when Jafri’s complaint was still in the phase of preliminary enquiry.
His statement could therefore not be recorded under Section 161 CrPC,
the provision normally invoked to question any person “supposed to be
acquainted with the facts and circumstances of the case”. Had he been
summoned during the “further investigation” too, Modi would have been
legally obliged to speak the truth under Section 161 CrPC. The
provision stipulates that the person questioned “shall be bound to
answer truly all questions”, subject to the universally recognised right
against self-incrimination. That Modi was not put under such a legal
obligation “to answer truly all questions” was a curious omission. The
SIT refrained from summoning Modi even as it recorded fresh statements
under Section 161 of several other persons named as accused in Jafri’s
complaint. This led to the anomaly of the SIT’s final report to the
magistrate relying on the testimony given by Modi during the preliminary
enquiry, which was outside the scheme of the CrPC.
When Modi’s testimony was recorded, the questioning was done by SIT
member A.K. Malhotra, a retired CBI officer. What began on March 27,
2010 went on for as long as nine hours over two sessions, with the
second spilling over into the wee hours of the following day. The length
of the interrogation was, however, out of proportion to its intensity.
Although as many as 71 questions
were addressed to him, the transcript, bearing Modi’s signature on
every page, shows that Malhotra studiously refrained from challenging
any of his replies, however controversial. At no point did Malhotra make
the slightest effort to pin Modi down on any gaps and contradictions in
his testimony. Although the questions, culled from Jafri’s complaint,
were extensive, the SIT refrained from asking a single follow-up
question. It seemed as if Malhotra’s brief was more to place Modi’s
defence on record rather than to ferret out any inconsistency or
admission of wrongdoing. Malhotra’s approach of sticking to his question
script, irrespective of the answers elicited by it, helped Modi get off
the hook on more than one issue. Both parties made the most of the
absence of the Section 161 obligation: with Modi, it was not to “answer
truly” and with the SIT, it was not to put “all questions”.
Take the reluctance displayed by the SIT in March 2010 to corner Modi
on the terror conspiracy allegation made by him within hours of the
Godhra incident. The SIT’s reluctance was obvious because a year earlier
the Gujarat High Court had upheld a statutory review committee’s
recommendation that terror charges could not apply to the Godhra case.
Among the reasons pointed out by the review committee headed by a
retired high court judge were that the miscreants involved in the Godhra
arson had not used any firearms or explosives, that they had attacked
coach S-6 from only one side and that they had allowed passengers of the
overcrowded coach to escape from the other side. These reasons were
found convincing enough for the high court to declare in February 2009
that “the incident in question is shocking but every shocking incident
cannot be covered by a definition of a statute which defines terror”.
By asking if it could further investigate the Gulberg case, the SIT restricted the broader scope of Zakia Jafri’s complaint.
The
high court ruling exposed Modi’s attempt to magnify the Godhra arson as
a terror attack. This in turn was integral to probing Jafri’s charge
that Modi was himself involved in the conspiracy behind the post-Godhra
violence. Without bringing up the word ‘terror’, Malhotra did ask Modi
about the basis of his allegation. But he was allowed to get away with
the claim that he had never made any such allegation. In fact, Malhotra
helped Modi get away with the denial by putting the question in a
misplaced context. While interrogating him in a chronological sequence,
Malhotra asked Modi about his Godhra allegation in the course of
questions about his statement in the Gujarat assembly early in the
afternoon on February 27. This was misplaced as the allegation had
actually come later in the day from Godhra. Here’s how the charade
played out during the recording of Modi’s testimony:
Malhotra: Did you declare the Godhra incident as
pre-planned and that Pakistani/ISI hands were behind the Godhra
incident? If so, on what basis? Modi: I did not utter any such words in the
assembly. Of course, the media had put some questions to me about it,
but I had told [them] that nothing could be said until the investigation
was completed.
In other words, Modi admitted that on the conspiracy question, his
initial reaction on the fateful day was that he would rather not comment
till the police had unravelled the crime. It was a tacit
acknowledgement that, as head of the state government, he could
ill-afford the luxury of baseless speculation lest it provoke a law and
order crisis. A logical follow-up to that could have been: how could he
then abandon all caution the same evening and make the terror allegation
without waiting for the police investigation to be completed? The SIT
never put any such question to Modi; not even after he had made no bones
about the dramatic change in his attitude to pre-judging the case
during his visit to Godhra the same day. The closest Malhotra came to
doing so while dealing with the Godhra visit was when he asked Modi a
general question about his media interaction in that town.
Malhotra: Did you meet mediapersons at Godhra? Modi: While I was at Collectorate,
Godhra, a lot of mediapersons had assembled there. I briefed them about
the incident and informed them that the culprits would not be spared and
that a compensation of Rs 2 lakh per victim would be paid. I also
appealed to [the] public through them for maintenance of peace. I also
informed the media that on the basis of facts narrated to me by
the persons present on the spot as well as injured persons, the incident
appeared to be a serious and preplanned conspiracy. (emphasis added)
It was thus left to Modi to reconstruct on his own the allegation he
had made in Godhra. The SIT did not challenge his attempt to make out
that he had talked merely of conspiracy and not of terror. Modi could
have been confronted with, if nothing else, the official press release
issued on the evening of February 27. On the strength of his “spot
assessment of the situation”, it quoted Modi as saying that the Godhra
incident was a “preplanned inhuman collective violent act of terrorism”.
The torrent of adjectives showed that he had described Godhra quite
definitively as a terrorist conspiracy.
Such certitude was, however, missing eight years later when he was
being questioned by the SIT. Modi claimed that all he had instead said
on the day of the arson was that it was an ordinary criminal conspiracy
(“serious and preplanned”), that too in a qualified manner (“appeared to
be”). The sanitised account he presented to the SIT was apparently
intended to convey that on the evening of February 27, 2002, he had
shown due restraint in the face of extreme provocation.
’84 riots At least Rajiv could say he was mourning his mum
In the vastly changed circumstances of 2010, Modi was wary of
recalling his terror rhetoric. It was a different world in 2002 when he
had reacted so stridently to the train arson. He was then tapping into
the heightened fear of jehadi terror around the world in the wake of the
attacks on the WTC twin towers in New York and Parliament House in New
Delhi. Both those major terror incidents had taken place just a few
months prior to the Godhra incident. In fact, Godhra happened when
George Bush’s war on terror was raging on Pakistan’s western border as a
result of 9/11, and tens of thousands of Indian troops had been
deployed on its eastern border as a result of the Parliament attack.
Modi’s attempt to pass off Godhra as another terror strike in such a
charged environment still took a leap in logic. This is because the
Godhra arson did not have any of the obvious features of terror such as
RDX explosives, AK-47 rifles, or hijacked aircraft. Besides, none of the
police documents generated that day in Godhra, including the FIR and
the case diary, contained the slightest hint of terrorism.
Had Modi been probed under Sec 161 CrPC, he would have been bound to answer truly. But he was called for a preliminary inquiry.
The
SIT’s failure to pin him down on the terror issue pales in comparison
to its disregard of Modi’s prevarication on the post-Godhra massacres.
Though his responsibility to control the attacks on Muslims was more
direct, the SIT’s questions turned out to be as evasive as his replies.
One glaring issue was Modi’s delayed response to the prolonged siege at
Ahmedabad’s Gulberg Society, the site of the first post-Godhra massacre.
Unlike his terror allegation, this problem of delayed response though
was not peculiar to Modi. It is a thread that runs through most of the
flare-ups of communal violence in India, whether in remote villages or
right inside big cities. The delay could stretch to hours, as it did in
Ahmedabad in 2002, or more than a day, as it did in Delhi in 1984. The
delay in responding proportionately is typically the gap in governance
that creates room for mass crimes. The Supreme Court’s intervention on
Jafri’s complaint provided the first-ever opportunity for an
investigating agency to get to the bottom of this recurring factor in
communal violence. The SIT, however, frittered away this unprecedented
opportunity. The SIT was wary of questioning him on his failure to
respond to the violence at Gulberg Society, although he had been in its
vicinity for over two hours on February 28. In his testimony, Modi made
out that he had no clue to any of the violence at Gulberg Society,
including Ehsan Jafri’s murder, till he was told about it five hours
later by the police. This is how the testimony was actually recorded:
Malhotra: Did you receive any information about
an attack by a mob on Gulberg Society? If so, when and through whom?
What action did you take in the matter? Modi: To the best of my knowledge, I was
informed in the law and order review meeting held in the night about the
attack on Gulberg Society in Meghaninagar area and Naroda Patiya.
What was listed as Question No. 31 in Modi’s testimony actually had
three parts to it. The first was whether Modi had received any
information about the mob attack on Gulberg Society. Modi’s answer was
yes. The second part was when and through whom had he received the
information. Predictably, Modi indicated that he had been informed about
the massacre by the police. The surprise, however, lay in the time he
claimed to have been “informed” about the massacre. Modi said that it
was at the law and order meeting “held in the night”. In a different
context, while enumerating all the measures Modi had taken on February
28, the SIT’s 2012 report disclosed on page 256 that this law and order
meeting had taken place in Gandhinagar at 8.30 pm. So, linking the two
discrete pieces of information recorded by the SIT, my book for the
first time establishes the precise time at which Modi claims to have
been informed about the Gulberg Society massacre. It was 8.30 pm, a
claim that strains credulity given the magnitude of the massacre which,
according to the SIT’s own findings, was executed right in Ahmedabad by
3.45 pm. By then, Gulberg Society had been, as the SIT report put it on
page 494, “set ablaze and lot of lives including that of Late Ehsan
Jafri had been lost”.
Modi said he had no clue about the violence at Gulberg Society till 8.30 pm when by 3.45 pm many lives had already been lost...
Modi’s
claim to have learnt about the massacre only at the 8.30 pm meeting
threw up a glaring and unexplained time lag. But the SIT neither
contested his claim during the interrogation nor discussed the
implications of his claim in its report. It tacitly accepted Modi’s
claim that he had no real-time information on the prolonged Gulberg
Society siege and massacre, stretching over eight hours. And even after
Joint Commissioner M.K. Tandon was said to have intervened in the
Gulberg Society massacre around 4 pm, Modi remained out of the loop for
nearly five hours, till the news was apparently broken to him at the
8.30 pm meeting. As a corollary, insofar as the SIT was concerned, the
third part of its Question No. 31, asking what action Modi had taken in
the matter, was rendered inconsequential. Since he somehow remained in
the dark during all those crucial hours when he could have made a
difference, there was no question of holding Modi to account for the
Gulberg Society massacre, or so went the SIT’s line of reasoning.
In reality, Modi’s claim to have been ignorant about the Gulberg
Society massacre seems inconsistent with his own larger claim to have
been tracking the post-Godhra violence as it unfolded. This
contradiction was apparently lost on the SIT. It accepted Modi’s plea
of ignorance even as it meticulously listed out a series of meetings
Modi had held in the days following the Godhra incident, all focused on
the task of controlling violence against Muslims.
Police Lines (Clockwise
from above) SIT chief R.K. Raghavan, then director-general of police K.
Chakravarthi and then Ahmedabad police commissioner P.C. Pande.
In the sequence of events reconstructed by the SIT, one such meeting
was held by Modi in Gandhinagar at 1 pm on February 28, when things were
coming to a boil in Gulberg Society. Joint Commissioner Tandon had
already made a brief visit to Gulberg Society around 11.30 am, when he
ordered the “striking force” accompanying him to burst teargas shells to
disperse “a mob of around 1,000 Hindu rioters”. Further, at 12.20 pm,
the police control room received a message from the Meghaninagar police
station asking for reinforcements as the mob, which had regrouped at
Gulberg Society and grown to 10,000-strong, was indulging in
stone-pelting and arson.
How could none of these details about the escalating crisis in
Gulberg Society have been brought to Modi’s notice in the law and order
review meeting he had at 1 pm? Modi’s claim to have been unaware of the
Naroda Patiya violence as well, at the end of that meeting, is even more
puzzling. This is because by then, at 12.30 pm, the police had, for the
first time in the context of the post-Godhra massacres, imposed a
curfew in the jurisdiction of the Naroda police station. Even if it
proved to be ineffective, the very imposition of the curfew signified
that the administration had taken cognizance of the gravity of the
situation.
...he
had held a law and order meet at 1 pm, then at 4 pm, followed by a
press conference, and an appeal for peace on DD at 6 pm.
Modi’s
general claim of ignorance sounds all the more dubious as some of his
engagements on February 28 were at a venue barely three kilometres from
Gulberg Society: the Circuit House Annexe in Ahmedabad’s Shahibaug. He
held a law and order review meeting at this venue at 4 pm, by when the
massacre had been carried out at Gulberg Society and Tandon had just
returned to the spot. While Modi’s meeting was going on just a few
kilometres away, Tandon finally ordered firing, leading to casualties
among the rioters at Gulberg Society. Tandon was also engaged in the
process of evacuating some 150 survivors, including women and children,
from this Muslim pocket. Further, he directed Inspector K.G. Erda to
“complete the inquest promptly and send the dead bodies to hospital for
post-mortem examination”.
Yet, for the next few hours, Modi was not given the slightest hint of
the first big massacre in the wake of Godhra—or so went the official
narrative, accepted without demur by the SIT. This, despite the SIT’s
own acknowledegment of a flurry of messages within the police
establishment during the Gulberg Society violence. At 2.05 pm, Tandon
asked for more reinforcements from the control room stating explicitly
that, from the information received by him, Jafri and his neighbours had
been “surrounded by the mob”. This was followed by another urgent
message at 2.14 pm, this one by the officer on the spot, Erda, saying
that the mob was “about to set fire to the entire society”. At 2.45 pm,
Erda told the control room that the mob had surrounded not just the
Muslims but also the police.
Besides such a chilling countdown to the massacre, the SIT report
referred to a message from the highest police officer of the state, K.
Chakravarthi, indicating that he was very much privy to the first major
instance of post-Godhra violence playing out in Gulberg Society. The SIT
also reported that it was on the instructions of the Ahmedabad police
commissioner, P.C. Pande, sent at 3.16 pm, that another senior officer,
P.B. Gondia, had reached Gulberg Society at 4.05 pm, shortly after
Tandon’s arrival.
Lone flame A survivor lights a candle on the sixth anniversary
Thus, there was an unexplained disconnect between what the police
brass were admittedly aware of and what Modi claimed to have learnt or
not learnt from them in the course of that fateful day. Shortly after
his law and order review meeting in the Circuit House Annexe, Modi held a
press conference at the same venue from 4.30 pm to 5.45 pm, when he
announced his decision to call the army. Though it was prompted by the
deteriorating situation in Ahmedabad, the decision to call the army had
nothing to do with Gulberg Society, the biggest massacre till then, as
he was apparently yet to hear about it. Before leaving the Circuit House
Annexe, Modi gave Doordarshan around 6 pm a recording of a customary
“appeal for peace”. It was on returning to his Gandhinagar home that
Modi held the 8.30 pm meeting where he claimed to have finally heard
about the mass crimes in Gulberg Society.
If,
as he claims, he was kept out of the loop till 8.30 pm, Modi himself
rather than the SIT should have held police brass to account.
How
could the earlier meetings, focused as they were on the escalating
violence, have missed out on Gulberg Society? The best argument that
could perhaps be advanced in Modi’s favour was that even journalists at
his 4.30 pm press conference seemed to have been oblivious to Gulberg
Society. For nobody at the press conference had pointedly asked him
about the first big massacre, which had just taken place a little
distance away. This does suggest that, as violence was breaking out
across the state, journalists were as yet unaware of the enormity of the
violence at Gulberg Society, including the brutality with which a
former MP had been murdered there. But it is implausible to assume such
ignorance on the part of someone wearing the hats of the chief minister
and home minister of Gujarat. Besides being briefed at the meetings held
by him through the day, Modi would have been regularly receiving
‘sit-reps’ (situation reports) from the state police control room and
the state intelligence bureau on the law and order crisis. If there was
any truth to his claim to have been out of the loop till 8.30 pm, then
the police brass should have been held to account by Modi himself, let
alone the SIT. After all, the issue was not just their lapses in
dealing with the violence; he should have been even more affronted by
their failure to alert him, during the meetings and in their ‘sit-reps’,
about what was till then the worst instance of violence. At stake were
not just the lives of innocent Muslims but his own self-styled image as a
decisive and impartial administrator.
Since he had taken no action against the police in all the years
before the SIT probe, it should have been all the more a reason for the
SIT to question Modi on the wide gap in his narrative between the time
of the mass killings and the time he had come to know about them. Such a
gap was harder to accept in his case than that of, say, Prime Minister
Rajiv Gandhi, for the corresponding situation in the 1984 carnage. While
Modi was admittedly immersed in the challenge of combating the
post-Godhra violence, Rajiv Gandhi had the fig leaf that he was himself
in mourning during the massacres of Sikhs and that he was most of the
time standing next to the body of his assassinated mother Indira Gandhi
lying in state in Teen Murti Bhavan. For that matter, even Prime
Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao had the excuse that the Constitution did not
permit him in 1992 to take any pre-emptive action to save the Babri
Masjid from being demolished by kar sevaks allegedly in collusion with
the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh.
The unexplained incongruities in Modi’s account would have lent
credence to Zakia Jafri’s allegation that he was complicit in the
massacres of Muslims. So, playing it safe, the SIT refrained from
confronting Modi with any of the obvious follow-up questions. This
charade bore a lesson in fact-finding. The integrity of fact-finding
hinged on a deceptively simple factor: the nature of the questions that
have been put or not put. Despite the monitoring by the Supreme Court,
the SIT got away with dodgy manoeuvres during the interrogation. This
ensured that Modi never had to account for key issues such as the basis
of his terror allegation on Godhra and his claim to have been unaware of
the Gulberg Society massacre even as he was apparently grappling with
the post-Godhra violence. It took so little to cover up the truth behind
the 2002 carnage.
Modi should have been summoned afresh in 2011. Instead the SIT settled for one of his aides, OSD Sanjay Bhavsar.
This
fiction of fact-finding is a far cry from a stirring example of
governance set early in the history of India’s experiment with
secularism. When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated within six months of
Independence, any irresponsible remark at that sensitive moment from
those in authority could have revived the communal bloodbath seen at the
time of the subcontinent’s partition. When independent India’s first
governor-general, Lord Mountbatten, arrived at Birla House within
minutes of the assassination on January 30, 1948, he heard someone in
the crowd shouting that it was a Muslim who had murdered Gandhi.
Mountbatten showed the presence of mind to scotch the rumour even
before he learnt the identity of the killer. “You fool, everyone knows
it was a Hindu,” he shot back, in a bid to gain time for the
administration to control the situation. All India Radio (AIR) deferred
the announcement of Gandhi’s death by over half an hour till the police
confirmed that the assassin was indeed a Hindu. The decision to convey
both details together helped avert attacks on Muslims. This was how the
national broadcaster broke the news at 6 pm: “Mahatma Gandhi was
assassinated in New Delhi at twenty minutes past five this afternoon.
His assassin was a Hindu.” Barring stray attacks on Maharashtrian
Brahmins, the country remained peaceful.
Clockwise from top Raju
Ramachandran, amicus curiae in the Jafri plea; Justice D.K. Jain, who
gave SIT go-ahead for further probe in Gulberg Society and Justice
Arijit Pasayat, who authorised SIT to look into the Zakia complaint
By not holding Modi to the kind of standards of governance that had
been set way back in 1948, the SIT belied the faith that had been
reposed in it by the Supreme Court. But then, the Supreme Court too is
to blame for the resultant impunity. Given the reputation for
independence built by the Supreme Court over the years, how did its
monitoring of the probe in this critical case turn out to be such a
letdown?
A key element of the monitoring was the mechanism of the amicus
curiae, a senior lawyer appointed by the Supreme Court to provide
independent advice to it. While the amicus curiae for nine cases
originally entrusted to the SIT was senior advocate Harish Salve, the
one for Jafri’s complaint was senior advocate Raju Ramachandran. From
what has been disclosed of the monitoring, the voluminous reports,
testimonies and documents presented by the SIT on Jafri’s complaint were
scrutinised not so much by the three judges on the bench as by
Ramachandran. Much as he played this critical role with due
independence, Ramachandran, it would appear, could have done with
greater thoroughness. For someone who had been a law officer for the
Vajpayee government, Ramachandran displayed remarkable independence as
amicus curiae, in standing up to the SIT’s resolve to exonerate Modi of
all charges. At the same time, his scrutiny seemed to have been hampered
by the fact that he never really stepped out of the frame set by the
SIT. Ramachandran’s literal interpretation of his brief might have
enhanced the credibility of his reports but, in the process, he seemed
to have overlooked some material evidence.
Modi had called Godhra a terror act on Feb 27 evening. By asking him if he’d said it at noon in the assembly, he could deny it.
Take his failure to notice the farcical nature of the SIT’s questions to Modi. Neither of his reports,
which were the bedrock of the Supreme Court monitoring, made any
comment on those questions. Whatever had been held back or played down
by the SIT, in effect, escaped the Supreme Court monitoring,
irrespective of its relevance to the subject of the probe. As a
consequence of this rather blinkered approach, Ramachandran missed the
import of Modi putting the imprimatur of his office on the vhp’s terror
allegation. In his interim report in January 2011, Ramachandran said
that Modi’s alleged interference with policing warranted “further
investigation” under the CrPC, going beyond the preliminary enquiry done
by the SIT. This followed the further investigation that the SIT had
already conducted with the Supreme Court’s permission against minister
Gordhan Zadafia and police officers M.K. Tandon and P.B. Gondia. The
further investigation against these three had happened before
Ramachandran’s appointment in November 2010 and had led to the
conclusion that the evidence was insufficient to prosecute any of them.
Whatever the odds stacked against it, the fresh line of investigation
proposed by Ramachandran opened up the possibility of the SIT probe
substantiating the allegation of a high-level political conspiracy
behind the post-Godhra violence. This was especially because of his
forthright observation that the further investigation should “examine
the role of Shri Modi immediately after the Godhra incident to find out
if there is any culpability to the extent that a message was conveyed
that the state machinery would not step in to prevent the communal
riots”. Moreover, one of the reasons cited by Ramachandran’s interim
report for the proposed probe into the meeting was the evidence of
Modi’s own lackadaisical response the following day to the violence
against Muslims. “There is nothing to show that the CM intervened on
28.02.2002 when the riots were taking place. The movement of Shri Modi
and the instructions given by him on 28.02.2002 would have been decisive
to prove that he had taken all steps for the protection of the
minorities, but this evidence is not there. Neither the CM nor his
personal officials have stated what he did on 28.02.2002. Neither the
top police nor bureaucrats have spoken about any decisive action by the
CM.”
Sabarmati’s burning A terror attack it certainly wasn’t
Thus, the recommendation for further investigation into Modi’s
February 27 meeting was reinforced by the incisive observation that he
had not taken “any decisive action” the next day to control the
post-Godhra violence. Subsequent to Ramachandran’s note, the Supreme
Court directed the SIT on March 15, 2011 to give its response, adding
that it could “if necessary carry out further investigation in light of
the observations made in the said note”. The SIT did carry out further
investigation, this time against Modi. There was a conspicuous departure
though from the earlier round of further investigation. The two
officers subjected to it, Tandon and Gondia, were interrogated afresh.
But when it came to the further investigation against Modi, the SIT made
no effort to question him on any of the issues raised by Ramachandran.
In fact, Ramachandran’s observations should have impelled the SIT to
issue fresh summons to Modi in 2011, making up for its omissions in the
interrogation conducted the previous year. In reality, the SIT balked at
calling Modi afresh even as it recorded the statements of as many as 48
witnesses in connection with the allegations against him. For questions
that Modi alone could have answered, the SIT settled for one of his
aides, officer on special duty Sanjay Bhavsar. Had Ramachandran not
overlooked the oddities in Modi’s testimony, he could have built the
case on grounds that were more substantial and irrefutable. Had he made
an issue of the inflammatory terror allegation aired by Modi within
hours of the arson, the SIT would have found itself on the defensive,
having toed the Gujarat police line in the Godhra case. That he missed
this point was clearly an opportunity loss for fact-finding. Making
matters worse was Ramachandran’s silence in his final report on a
critical issue he had himself raised in his interim report: the absence
of “any decisive action” by Modi on February 28, 2002 when Ahmedabad had
been ravaged by violence against Muslims. This was the closest
Ramachandran had come to questioning Modi’s controversial suggestion
that even as he was engaged in saving Muslims, he was oblivious the
whole day to the two big massacres of Ahmedabad. All that the SIT came
up with in defence of Modi was a list of the meetings he had held and
the decisions he had taken, although they had apparently made little
difference on the ground. In fact, on the basis of details provided by
Bhavsar, the SIT added that it had taken over five days for Modi to
visit Gulberg Society and other riot-hit areas in Ahmedabad because he
had been “awfully busy”. Though none of this could have been passed off
as “decisive action” by him on the first day of the post-Godhra
violence, Ramachandran gave in to the SIT’s explanation. He said: “As
far as the SIT’s conclusion with regard to the steps taken by Shri Modi
to control the riots in Ahmedabad is concerned, the same may be
accepted, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.”
Ramachandran’s failure to notice the “evidence to the contrary” in
Modi’s interrogation was a major reason why the Supreme Court’s
monitoring of the investigation proved to be illusory. This was despite
the fact that unlike its choice of SIT members, the Supreme Court’s
selection of Ramachandran as amicus curiae was beyond reproach.
Bhavsar said it took Modi five days to visit Gulberg Society and other riot-hit areas in the city as he had been ‘awfully busy’.
The
BJP thought it fit to declare Modi as its prime ministerial candidate
in September 2013, days after Jafri’s counsel had ended their arguments
against the SIT’s closure report before magistrate B.J. Ganatra. The
chance taken by the BJP was vindicated by Ganatra’s dismissal of Jafri’s
protest petition, through a 440-page order delivered on December 26,
2013. Based as it was on the facts framed by the SIT, the order
upholding Modi’s exoneration said nothing about the questions that had
remained unasked by the SIT and unanswered by the Gujarat government. So
it missed out on the unexplained incongruity of Modi’s claim that he
was unaware of the Gulberg Society massacre for almost five hours.
Rejecting Jafri’s conspiracy allegation against Modi, the magistrate’s
order said that he “showed alacrity in requisitioning the army and took
necessary steps to control the situation”. Thus, Modi’s decision to call
in the army at the 4 pm meeting he had held minutes after the Gulberg
Society massacre was passed off as an instance of his “alacrity”. In
order to arrive at the conclusion that Modi had displayed “alacrity”,
the fact-finding process studiously ignored his claim to have been
unaware of the Gulberg Society massacre till his 8.30 meeting. The moral
of the story is clear. When the right questions are not put, there will
be neither the right evidence nor the right conclusions.
