Between now and March 11 is perhaps the only time when it is possible to talk about the politics of justice for the 1984 anti-Sikh riot victims. At least till March 11, Punjab is in a pleasant state of a very agreeable limbo because the professional politicians are on a forced vacation. They know their exertions would have no consequence or value whatsoever. It is time to ask the question as to how long the professional politician would prevent a 'closure' on this painful episode in the history of the Sikhs, Punjab and India. The immediate provocation for this thought is the newspapers’ report of last Friday (10th). According to a report of The Tribune, the CBI wants Jagdish Tytler to undertake a lie-detection test in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots’ case. After 33 years! What a farce, what travesty of justice, what a mockery of the so-called investigation by a so-called premier investigative agency! That moment in 1984 was a horrific shame. It certainly violated then — and it violates now — our collective sense of fairness and justice that so many innocent people should have lost their lives and honour. On the political front, the Congress party has been electorally punished many times over since 1984. In 2005, a Prime Minister had offered an apology in Parliament. Yet, no ‘closure’ is permitted. If the insistence is that those ‘guilty’ should be punished, then after thirty years, it is fair to ask a question: why have we failed to punish them? The convenient accusation is that the likes of Jagdish Tytler have been able to frustrate and sabotage the processes of justice. But surely, we do know that since 1984, we have had some non-Congress governments, at the centre and in the state. And, in fact, so many commissions of inquiry have been announced and instituted. Yet, none has secured ‘justice’ for the victims. We also do know that periodically, politicians have helped themselves to a few brownie points with the Sikh voters. The great hypocrisy is that everyone knows what the game is all about. Instead of making a sincere effort to locate collective responsibility for a historic wrong, the search for ‘justice’ has been reduced to a political argument — to be brushed up and brandished at election for partisans purposes. No one has ever proposed in concrete terms what kind of ‘justice’ would be a satisfactory outcome and would invite a ‘closure.’ Journalists and historians, too, have got ensnared in the politicians’ game. On the eve of every Lok Sabha election, a few ‘investigative’ journalists come up with ‘new evidence.’ It has suited the politicians — the Akali Dal and other outfits — to keep demanding ‘justice’ for the ‘victims.’ The Akali Dal finds it a good stick to beat the Congress with. But, that is a game others have learnt to play. Newer outfits keep accusing the Akali leaders of failing to get ‘justice’ for the victims. Individual lawyers, the Phoolkas of this world, have made a career — and, now an electoral career — out of this less than honest quest for ‘justice.’ And, the busybodies in North America have given a dangerous twist to this whole ‘injustice’ business. In the process, a grave damage has got inflicted on entire Punjab — including the vast majority in the Sikh community itself. The politics of victimhood has allowed the Akali Dal and its ally, the BJP, to become indifferent to the call of good governance. An obscure journalist shoots to fame because he throws a shoe at the Home Minister of India in the name of the ‘1984 riot victims’. It would be a wonderful comeuppance for the Akalis if that same gentleman is able to cook the Badals’ goose in Lambi. A few days ago, when I was in Deoband (in Saharanpur district of western Uttar Pradesh), I got a chance to meet Haseeb Siddiqui, general manager of the Muslim Fund Trust, a kind of bank for the poor, an institution that practises the Islamic stipulation of not charging interest on loans given. This institution has been at it since 1961 and Janab Haseeb Siddiqui was there at the very start and continues to preside over it even at the age of 78, with an undiminished clarity of purpose. Siddiqui sahib is a city elder. He is associated with many schools, an eye hospital, a library and some training centres. With great pride, he told me that he had only a pen and nothing else when it was decided to set up a banking outfit, based on Islamic tenets, and since then, sheer dedication and faith have helped him steer the expansion and consolidation of this ‘fund trust.’ It is vibrant evidence of the civil society and its potential to fill the gaps left unattended by the state. What I found rather engaging about visiting the Muslim Fund Trust and meeting its general manager was a sense of serenity, an unperturbed sense of direction. Even though he wore traditional attire, there was nothing stereotypical about him. A modern, practical mind at work. A horrific, horrific death has been reported from Sector 9 of Chandigarh. When I came to this city about eighteen months ago, I was told that Sector 9 was the last bastion of civilisation, it was an enclave of superiority and sophistication. It certainly has the reputation of being the most affluent part of City Beautiful. And, now we learn of this horrible death, a violent death, in the sector involving a luxury car and a cast of characters that can only be called ‘raeeszadas.’ It is of course deeply disappointing that the police have been seen dragging their feet because the accused happen to be ‘well connected.’ The police ‘moved’ only because the victim’s family was equally well connected and was able to bring to bear its own clout. This utterly violent death tells us only one thing: something is going horribly wrong in our society. We are becoming too angry, too edgy, too prone to giving offence and equally prone to taking offence. Our popular culture — films, television, pop singers — promotes a roughness in manners and morals. The counterpoise is missing. For an ancient society that takes inordinate pride in its civilisational resilience, the role models are few and far between. The schools are no longer imparting attitudes and values of moral rectitude. Even religious leaders have become petty entrepreneurs, hawking their wares and wisdom in the marketplace. The advertisers are vacuum-cleaning all noble values and healthy sentiments of their meaning by associating them with this or that product. There is a new feel of violence in the air. The Prime Minister is leading the way. Each day, he injects a note of aggression in his words and, what is more, he invites all of us to feel good about it. This daily exhibition of violent words has become the ‘new normal.’ Then, we have the wonderful blessing called the social media. We abuse and invite abuse and feel fully fulfilled being abusive. The anonymity allows us to be uncouth and uncivilised. History bears witness to a simple fact: violence in words invariably leads to violence in deeds, in the streets. I am afraid, soon we shall see violence in our Parliament. LAST week I found myself in Deoband, the seat of the great Darul Uloom. Deoband suddenly brings you face-to-face with the diversity of Indian culture. I was there to try to make some sense of the electoral chemistry being cooked up; it was imperative that I should seek out influential voices in the town. The only problem was that the streets were too narrow for our SUV. Though the weather was fine, walking from one interlocutor to another would have been too time-consuming. Our local host had a solution: we pillion-ride with him on his motor-bike. So, it came about that I found myself having to ride a bike after nearly thirty years. It was a hair-raising experience. Three of us, without helmets; it was nerve-wrecking. All the associations came flooding to mind. Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Bob Dylan crashing his motorbike. For those fleeting minutes I tried to practise what the Zen practitioners call ‘mindfulness.’ Nothing worked. What does work is a bracing drink of hot, piping coffee. Try it.
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Showing posts with label Justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Justice. Show all posts
February 12, 2017
India: A time to seek ‘closure’ of 1984 . . . (Harish Khare)
Between now and March 11 is perhaps the only time when it is possible to talk about the politics of justice for the 1984 anti-Sikh riot victims. At least till March 11, Punjab is in a pleasant state of a very agreeable limbo because the professional politicians are on a forced vacation. They know their exertions would have no consequence or value whatsoever. It is time to ask the question as to how long the professional politician would prevent a 'closure' on this painful episode in the history of the Sikhs, Punjab and India. The immediate provocation for this thought is the newspapers’ report of last Friday (10th). According to a report of The Tribune, the CBI wants Jagdish Tytler to undertake a lie-detection test in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots’ case. After 33 years! What a farce, what travesty of justice, what a mockery of the so-called investigation by a so-called premier investigative agency! That moment in 1984 was a horrific shame. It certainly violated then — and it violates now — our collective sense of fairness and justice that so many innocent people should have lost their lives and honour. On the political front, the Congress party has been electorally punished many times over since 1984. In 2005, a Prime Minister had offered an apology in Parliament. Yet, no ‘closure’ is permitted. If the insistence is that those ‘guilty’ should be punished, then after thirty years, it is fair to ask a question: why have we failed to punish them? The convenient accusation is that the likes of Jagdish Tytler have been able to frustrate and sabotage the processes of justice. But surely, we do know that since 1984, we have had some non-Congress governments, at the centre and in the state. And, in fact, so many commissions of inquiry have been announced and instituted. Yet, none has secured ‘justice’ for the victims. We also do know that periodically, politicians have helped themselves to a few brownie points with the Sikh voters. The great hypocrisy is that everyone knows what the game is all about. Instead of making a sincere effort to locate collective responsibility for a historic wrong, the search for ‘justice’ has been reduced to a political argument — to be brushed up and brandished at election for partisans purposes. No one has ever proposed in concrete terms what kind of ‘justice’ would be a satisfactory outcome and would invite a ‘closure.’ Journalists and historians, too, have got ensnared in the politicians’ game. On the eve of every Lok Sabha election, a few ‘investigative’ journalists come up with ‘new evidence.’ It has suited the politicians — the Akali Dal and other outfits — to keep demanding ‘justice’ for the ‘victims.’ The Akali Dal finds it a good stick to beat the Congress with. But, that is a game others have learnt to play. Newer outfits keep accusing the Akali leaders of failing to get ‘justice’ for the victims. Individual lawyers, the Phoolkas of this world, have made a career — and, now an electoral career — out of this less than honest quest for ‘justice.’ And, the busybodies in North America have given a dangerous twist to this whole ‘injustice’ business. In the process, a grave damage has got inflicted on entire Punjab — including the vast majority in the Sikh community itself. The politics of victimhood has allowed the Akali Dal and its ally, the BJP, to become indifferent to the call of good governance. An obscure journalist shoots to fame because he throws a shoe at the Home Minister of India in the name of the ‘1984 riot victims’. It would be a wonderful comeuppance for the Akalis if that same gentleman is able to cook the Badals’ goose in Lambi. A few days ago, when I was in Deoband (in Saharanpur district of western Uttar Pradesh), I got a chance to meet Haseeb Siddiqui, general manager of the Muslim Fund Trust, a kind of bank for the poor, an institution that practises the Islamic stipulation of not charging interest on loans given. This institution has been at it since 1961 and Janab Haseeb Siddiqui was there at the very start and continues to preside over it even at the age of 78, with an undiminished clarity of purpose. Siddiqui sahib is a city elder. He is associated with many schools, an eye hospital, a library and some training centres. With great pride, he told me that he had only a pen and nothing else when it was decided to set up a banking outfit, based on Islamic tenets, and since then, sheer dedication and faith have helped him steer the expansion and consolidation of this ‘fund trust.’ It is vibrant evidence of the civil society and its potential to fill the gaps left unattended by the state. What I found rather engaging about visiting the Muslim Fund Trust and meeting its general manager was a sense of serenity, an unperturbed sense of direction. Even though he wore traditional attire, there was nothing stereotypical about him. A modern, practical mind at work. A horrific, horrific death has been reported from Sector 9 of Chandigarh. When I came to this city about eighteen months ago, I was told that Sector 9 was the last bastion of civilisation, it was an enclave of superiority and sophistication. It certainly has the reputation of being the most affluent part of City Beautiful. And, now we learn of this horrible death, a violent death, in the sector involving a luxury car and a cast of characters that can only be called ‘raeeszadas.’ It is of course deeply disappointing that the police have been seen dragging their feet because the accused happen to be ‘well connected.’ The police ‘moved’ only because the victim’s family was equally well connected and was able to bring to bear its own clout. This utterly violent death tells us only one thing: something is going horribly wrong in our society. We are becoming too angry, too edgy, too prone to giving offence and equally prone to taking offence. Our popular culture — films, television, pop singers — promotes a roughness in manners and morals. The counterpoise is missing. For an ancient society that takes inordinate pride in its civilisational resilience, the role models are few and far between. The schools are no longer imparting attitudes and values of moral rectitude. Even religious leaders have become petty entrepreneurs, hawking their wares and wisdom in the marketplace. The advertisers are vacuum-cleaning all noble values and healthy sentiments of their meaning by associating them with this or that product. There is a new feel of violence in the air. The Prime Minister is leading the way. Each day, he injects a note of aggression in his words and, what is more, he invites all of us to feel good about it. This daily exhibition of violent words has become the ‘new normal.’ Then, we have the wonderful blessing called the social media. We abuse and invite abuse and feel fully fulfilled being abusive. The anonymity allows us to be uncouth and uncivilised. History bears witness to a simple fact: violence in words invariably leads to violence in deeds, in the streets. I am afraid, soon we shall see violence in our Parliament. LAST week I found myself in Deoband, the seat of the great Darul Uloom. Deoband suddenly brings you face-to-face with the diversity of Indian culture. I was there to try to make some sense of the electoral chemistry being cooked up; it was imperative that I should seek out influential voices in the town. The only problem was that the streets were too narrow for our SUV. Though the weather was fine, walking from one interlocutor to another would have been too time-consuming. Our local host had a solution: we pillion-ride with him on his motor-bike. So, it came about that I found myself having to ride a bike after nearly thirty years. It was a hair-raising experience. Three of us, without helmets; it was nerve-wrecking. All the associations came flooding to mind. Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Bob Dylan crashing his motorbike. For those fleeting minutes I tried to practise what the Zen practitioners call ‘mindfulness.’ Nothing worked. What does work is a bracing drink of hot, piping coffee. Try it.
October 19, 2016
India: Whither Justice for Religious Minorities (Ram Puniyani)
Whither Justice for Religious Minorities
Ram Puniyani
Retired
Justice of Supreme Court Justice Markandey Katju wrote (26 September
2016) to the Supreme Court judges, “You are aware that one Ikhilaq was
brutally lynched by cow vigilantes in Dadri. Instead of severely
punishing the perpetrators of this heinous outrage, the police and local
judge are proceeding against the family of Ikhlaq…Have the police gone
mad?”
Chand
Khan alias Shan Khan spent 11 years in a jail in 2002 Akshardham temple
attack case before he was acquitted without any compensation so far.
Instead he has been booked in a case of cow slaughter. (21 September
2016) There is a book by Mufti Abdul Qayum Abdul Hussain, ‘Eleven Years
behind the bars’ (I am a mufti, I am not terrorist). This book tells
the story of Mufti Sahab being arrested on charges of terrorist
violence, tortured and then was released after spending such a long time
in prison. A Muslim boy called Aamir Khan was in prison for 14 long
years before he was released. He was booked under the charges of
terrorism when he was preparing for his matriculation examination and as
he came out of the dark dungeon he had already lost his father and
found his mother seriously ill. Reading his book, ‘Framed as a
Terrorist’, makes one realize as to what brutal extent the system can go
against an innocent individual.
These
are just few of the glaring samples from vast number of cases of Muslim
youth and men who have faced the situation where their life came to a
halt, careers ruined and families destroyed. One can add a large number
to this list but couple of more examples is in order, Haji Umarji was in
prison for being the mastermind of Godhra train burning and was
released after few years of torture as no evidence of any type was found
against him. In the infamous cases of terror blasts in Makkah Masjid
(Hyderabad), Malegaon, Samjhauta Express and Ajmer blasts large number
of Muslim youth were arrested and later released for lack of any
credible evidence. Most of the investigations showed the sloppy and
motivated investigation done by authorities. It has become a sort of
pattern where the bias of police towards minorities becomes obvious.
The scholars of communal violence in India tell us that the police did
play a neutral role during British period. It was a force which
intervened in a neutral way.
The
biased attitude of police picks up after independence and right from
the first major violence in Jabalpur in 1961, the anti minority attitude
of police can be seen. Even the state machinery and political
leaderships at times have aggravated this attitude by their policies.
Most of the inquiry commission reports, films and documentaries bring
out this fact. The representation of Muslims in the state services is
miniscule, and those Muslims who are in the position of authority have
to go with the flow either by keeping quite or they are given postings
in the areas where they can’t influence the dynamics of communal
violence.
Shrikrishna
Commission report of Mumbai violence showed that many police officers
either looked the other way around or sided with those indulging in
violence. Same was the case in massive anti Sikh violence (Delhi 1984)
and Gujarat violence, to give the few examples. In one case of anti
minority violence in Mahararshtra (Dhule 2013) the police itself took up
the role of perpetrators of mayhem. In a very revealing book
Hashimpura, V.N. Rai ex Director General of police points out that the
police deliberately took away truck load of Muslims and shot them point
blank and threw their bodies in the canal. It was few of the survivors
of the tragedy who told the tale of their harrowing experience.
After
9/11 2001, WTC attack, American media manufactured a phrase ‘Islamic
Terrorism’, which cleverly hides US goal of propping up Al Qaeda for
controlling oil wealth and projects as if Islam-Muslims are the cause of
terrorism in the World. Since then the matters have worsened and not
only the broad social thinking but even the state authorities are
totally taken in by this propaganda. The global Islam phobia has been
cultivated by media and vested interests.
There
is an urgent need to protect the innocent young people and others. So
many commissions set up for police reforms have given the suggestions
for improving the system of policing. We need to sensitize the police
personnel to the issues related to minorities in our country. There are
state and national level police academies training the police personnel.
The curriculum of these academies needs to be modified to incorporate
the reality behind the biases and stereotypes which are prevalent in the
society. The police needs to be aligned to Constitution rather than
being dictated by their sentiments and emotions; they need to understand
the truth behind the prevalent social common sense.
There
are many civil society groups who are struggling to campaign on these
issues, they do take up the cases of many of these being framed by the
authorities or being incarcerated, but their capacity is limited. The
network working for innocents needs to be strengthened all over the
country. Those falsely implicated need to be compensated and the police
officers implicating them need to be punished. Many of the books written
by the falsely accused people need to be made a mandatory
reading in our administrative staff colleges, and academies training the
police and other administrators. The political parties who want to
uphold the secular values have to isolate the communal outfits and
ensure that communal parties don’t come to power. We need a society with
justice and peace. Such gross injustice against the people of
particular religion shows that our justice delivery system is weak. The
culture of any society should be judged by the index as to how justice
is delivered to weaker section of society including the religious
minorities. Let’s hope Justice Katju’s letter is taken seriously!
October 12, 2016
India: Compensation most foul
The Indian Express
Compensation to Muslims in the wake of communal violence has always been an issue with Hindus. (Illustration by: C R Sasikumar)
October 8 will be remembered as the date when India crossed the
Rubicon. Nothing as dramatic as the “surgical strikes” happened on this
day.
On this date, the government of Uttar Pradesh decided to award a compensation of Rs 25 lakh to the family of Ravin Sisodia, a resident of Bisara, a village in Dadri. Sisodia died in jail due to multiple organ failure. The doctors and the forensic report concluded that it was a natural death. Sisodia wasn’t in jail for some petty crime. Last year, he was allegedly part of the crowd which dragged a Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, out of his house and killed him. Akhlaq’s death raised indignation across the nation and led to a wave of protests initiated by writers against the state-sponsored intolerance directed at minorities.
Only one death. An insignificant figure when compared with the numbers of Muslims killed in Bhagalpur or Nellie or Gujarat or the Sikhs killed in 1984 in Delhi and elsewhere. But the shock it generated was felt across the nation. The act and its fallout played a major role in the assembly election of Bihar. The death of Akhlaq was a result of the complete failure, not only of the state’s organs, but also of our polity. It was because of the realisation of the enormity of this failure that the UP government gave a huge compensation to the family of Akhlaq.
Compensation to Muslims in the wake of communal violence has always been an issue with Hindus. I would call this compensation envy or compensation complex — which neighbours of the Muslim victims suffer from. We have heard complaints — most recently in Muzaffarnagar — that Muslims are, in fact, beneficiaries of communal violence.
indus feel deprived and they believe that the violence is in fact invited by the Muslims themselves for this compensation. They allege that Muslims burn their houses for state money. It also leads to a hatred for Muslims as they are seen helpless, seeking alms from the state and unable to fend for themselves. They are looked down upon as lesser human beings living off the money of the Hindus, who are the real and major taxpayers.
The compensation for the death of Akhlaq was made an issue by the leaders of the BJP and the villagers. Violent campaigns in the name of cow protection even after this death continued across states which caused humiliation and claimed more Muslim lives. All this led the villagers of Bisara to feel that killing of Akhlaq was a just and pious act. The fiction of the killing of a cow and eating beef turned into fact through a sustained campaign. Within a year, Akhlaq and his family were converted from victims into accused and suspects. They had by their alleged act of killing of a cow, sacred to Hindus, instigated and lead the Hindus to express their anger which led to the death of Akhlaq. The courts have directed the authorities to file a criminal case against the family of Akhlaq.
In the imagination of the villagers of Bisara, Sisodia and others became victims and heroes at the same time. We have seen agitation by the villagers of Bisara demanding their release and withdrawal of cases against them. A similar agitation is going on in Muzaffarnagar. These agitations are led by locals blessed by the RSS and the BJP. The BJP has decided to remove the fig leaf: Its leaders openly address the revenge-seeking crowd and generate a sense of injustice and anger in them.
Sisodia was a taxi driver. Did he actually participate in the killing? It was yet to be decided. But he was an accused. And he died due to an illness awaiting trail. Are such deaths compensated by the state? We know the answer. But the UP government thought otherwise. By giving in to bullying by the kin of the accused — who refused to cremate Sisodia if their demand was not met — the government has created a dangerous precedent. What is also unique in this affair is the arrangement through which this figure has been achieved. The state government pays Rs 10 lakh, 10 lakh will be given by some NGOs and five lakh by Union minister Mahesh Sharma and Sangeet Som, a BJP MLA who is also an accused in the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar. It was a deal brokered by the minister. The state government agreed as it did not want the impression that Hindu deaths didn’t matter to go in an election year. We need to notice that the state government sheepishly allowed its jurisdiction to be violated by the Central minister.
Involvement of NGOs in this compensation package is an innovation. Why was this done?
Did the state government not have sufficient funds? What is the Central minister’s contribution doing here? This single act is a complete capitulation and surrender of its authority by the UP government. It will have grave implications for the principle of division of powers between the states and the Centre. It is also an act that informalises governance.
Muslims in India are quite used to majoritarian violence against them. They are aware of the general reluctance of the authorities and the politicians to ensure justice in such cases. They have also witnessed campaigners of hatred and violence against them reach the highest offices. The only consolation has been that these acts violence are recognised as wrong — the violation of the constitutional promise given to them. October 8 changed that in significant ways. The principle behind state compensation was turned on its head. This was not an act of compassion shown by the state towards one of its citizens. It also negates the crime committed last year and vindicates the stand of the villagers and the BJP.
The government of UP is led by the heir of a man who as the chief minister did not hesitate to order firing on a Hindu mob which threatened to destroy a Muslim place of worship. He only felt bound by the constitutional morality which asked him to preserve the rights of the minorities.
This act reminded one of the letter by Jawaharlal Nehru to Padmaja Naidu from Patna in 1946. He had returned from Bhagalpur, which was in the grip of communal frenzy and Hindus were attacking and killing Muslims. Nehru writes that he was horrified by the madness of the Hindu peasants but what brought some solace to him that the security forces opened fire to stop them. In the firing, some 400 Hindus were killed.
Nehru tells Naidu that he generally abhorred killing but somehow this act seemed to restore a semblance of balance in favour of the victim Muslims. Nehru’s vision was instrumental in shaping our constitutional morality: To stand firmly for the rights of the minorities, undeterred by the threat of the numbers.
Indian state seems to have travelled far from 1946 and 1990. The only question minorities have now, when it would throw away the fig leaf of secularism and show itself as it really is.
Compensation most foul
The UP government’s move to pay relief to the family of an accused in the Dadri lynching turns the principle of justice on its head.
Written by Apoorvanand
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Published:October 12, 2016 12:00 am
Compensation to Muslims in the wake of communal violence has always been an issue with Hindus. (Illustration by: C R Sasikumar)
October 8 will be remembered as the date when India crossed the
Rubicon. Nothing as dramatic as the “surgical strikes” happened on this
day.On this date, the government of Uttar Pradesh decided to award a compensation of Rs 25 lakh to the family of Ravin Sisodia, a resident of Bisara, a village in Dadri. Sisodia died in jail due to multiple organ failure. The doctors and the forensic report concluded that it was a natural death. Sisodia wasn’t in jail for some petty crime. Last year, he was allegedly part of the crowd which dragged a Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, out of his house and killed him. Akhlaq’s death raised indignation across the nation and led to a wave of protests initiated by writers against the state-sponsored intolerance directed at minorities.
Only one death. An insignificant figure when compared with the numbers of Muslims killed in Bhagalpur or Nellie or Gujarat or the Sikhs killed in 1984 in Delhi and elsewhere. But the shock it generated was felt across the nation. The act and its fallout played a major role in the assembly election of Bihar. The death of Akhlaq was a result of the complete failure, not only of the state’s organs, but also of our polity. It was because of the realisation of the enormity of this failure that the UP government gave a huge compensation to the family of Akhlaq.
Compensation to Muslims in the wake of communal violence has always been an issue with Hindus. I would call this compensation envy or compensation complex — which neighbours of the Muslim victims suffer from. We have heard complaints — most recently in Muzaffarnagar — that Muslims are, in fact, beneficiaries of communal violence.
indus feel deprived and they believe that the violence is in fact invited by the Muslims themselves for this compensation. They allege that Muslims burn their houses for state money. It also leads to a hatred for Muslims as they are seen helpless, seeking alms from the state and unable to fend for themselves. They are looked down upon as lesser human beings living off the money of the Hindus, who are the real and major taxpayers.
The compensation for the death of Akhlaq was made an issue by the leaders of the BJP and the villagers. Violent campaigns in the name of cow protection even after this death continued across states which caused humiliation and claimed more Muslim lives. All this led the villagers of Bisara to feel that killing of Akhlaq was a just and pious act. The fiction of the killing of a cow and eating beef turned into fact through a sustained campaign. Within a year, Akhlaq and his family were converted from victims into accused and suspects. They had by their alleged act of killing of a cow, sacred to Hindus, instigated and lead the Hindus to express their anger which led to the death of Akhlaq. The courts have directed the authorities to file a criminal case against the family of Akhlaq.
In the imagination of the villagers of Bisara, Sisodia and others became victims and heroes at the same time. We have seen agitation by the villagers of Bisara demanding their release and withdrawal of cases against them. A similar agitation is going on in Muzaffarnagar. These agitations are led by locals blessed by the RSS and the BJP. The BJP has decided to remove the fig leaf: Its leaders openly address the revenge-seeking crowd and generate a sense of injustice and anger in them.
Sisodia was a taxi driver. Did he actually participate in the killing? It was yet to be decided. But he was an accused. And he died due to an illness awaiting trail. Are such deaths compensated by the state? We know the answer. But the UP government thought otherwise. By giving in to bullying by the kin of the accused — who refused to cremate Sisodia if their demand was not met — the government has created a dangerous precedent. What is also unique in this affair is the arrangement through which this figure has been achieved. The state government pays Rs 10 lakh, 10 lakh will be given by some NGOs and five lakh by Union minister Mahesh Sharma and Sangeet Som, a BJP MLA who is also an accused in the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar. It was a deal brokered by the minister. The state government agreed as it did not want the impression that Hindu deaths didn’t matter to go in an election year. We need to notice that the state government sheepishly allowed its jurisdiction to be violated by the Central minister.
Involvement of NGOs in this compensation package is an innovation. Why was this done?
Did the state government not have sufficient funds? What is the Central minister’s contribution doing here? This single act is a complete capitulation and surrender of its authority by the UP government. It will have grave implications for the principle of division of powers between the states and the Centre. It is also an act that informalises governance.
Muslims in India are quite used to majoritarian violence against them. They are aware of the general reluctance of the authorities and the politicians to ensure justice in such cases. They have also witnessed campaigners of hatred and violence against them reach the highest offices. The only consolation has been that these acts violence are recognised as wrong — the violation of the constitutional promise given to them. October 8 changed that in significant ways. The principle behind state compensation was turned on its head. This was not an act of compassion shown by the state towards one of its citizens. It also negates the crime committed last year and vindicates the stand of the villagers and the BJP.
The government of UP is led by the heir of a man who as the chief minister did not hesitate to order firing on a Hindu mob which threatened to destroy a Muslim place of worship. He only felt bound by the constitutional morality which asked him to preserve the rights of the minorities.
This act reminded one of the letter by Jawaharlal Nehru to Padmaja Naidu from Patna in 1946. He had returned from Bhagalpur, which was in the grip of communal frenzy and Hindus were attacking and killing Muslims. Nehru writes that he was horrified by the madness of the Hindu peasants but what brought some solace to him that the security forces opened fire to stop them. In the firing, some 400 Hindus were killed.
Nehru tells Naidu that he generally abhorred killing but somehow this act seemed to restore a semblance of balance in favour of the victim Muslims. Nehru’s vision was instrumental in shaping our constitutional morality: To stand firmly for the rights of the minorities, undeterred by the threat of the numbers.
Indian state seems to have travelled far from 1946 and 1990. The only question minorities have now, when it would throw away the fig leaf of secularism and show itself as it really is.
The writer teaches Hindi at Delhi University
June 04, 2016
India: Gulbarg not a criminal conspiracy? Call records narrate a different story (Nirjhari Sinha / Truth of Gujarat)
Naroda Patiya
and Gulbarg Society, two places in Ahmedabad where the most dastardly
massacres took place on 28th February, 2002, are just 4 kilometers
apart. Yet, the judgments that have been pronounced in these two cases
are many a miles apart. 14 long years after the mob attack on Gulbarg
Society, the trial court yesterday announced its ruling on the Gulbarg
massacre where 69 people were mercilessly murdered. The special trial
court judge PB Desai convicted 24 persons while acquitting 36 accused.
Many a big names were among those who were acquitted. At the same time,
the special trial court also dropped the conspiracy charge on the
pretext of ‘lack of evidence’. While pawns are often sacrificed at the
altar of justice, the suggestion that the assembly of pawns acted on
their own volition without a guiding strategy is difficult to digest.
Four years ago, on 29th August 2012,
Special judge Jyotsana Yagnik gave out the historic judgment in the
Naroda Patiya massacre where she held 32 people responsible for the
horrific deaths of 97 people including men, women, children. Among the
32 was former Gujarat Minister Mayaben Kodnani (A-37) who was convicted
of the offense under section 302 read with section 120-B of I.P.C. where
in Section 120-B deals with criminal conspiracy. The special judge made
the following observations to justify the punishment of life
imprisonment to Maya Kodnani.
A-37 has been proved to be the kingpin of the entire communal riot and one of the principal conspirators who has actively instigated the rioters and has abetted them to form unlawful assembly to execute the conspiracy hatched under her leadership with other co-conspirators.
The other important conviction in this
case was that of Babu Bajrangi (A-18) who was sentenced to suffer
rigorous imprisonment for remaining period of his natural life. The
special judge made the following observations in the case of Babu
Bajrangi.
A-18 is one of the principal conspirators, active overt actor of the communal riot on that day, leader and instigator for he co-accused as far as Naroda massacre is concerned. Over and above this, he was also an active member of the unlawful assembly in atleast two of the occurrences including the ghastly evening occurrence.
Thus a clear case of criminal conspiracy
was made out in case of Naroda Patiya and the kingpins were identified
along with the foot soldiers. However, for a similar case that happened
just 4 kms away in Gulbarg society, the only prominent conviction is
that of Dr. Atul Vaidya and it was pronounced that there was no criminal
conspiracy. Are these two cases totally unrelated? Were BJP/VHP/Bajrang
Dal leaders involved in rioting in neighbouring areas acting
independently? The phone calls between Dr Atul Vaidya and Babu Bajrangi
narrate a different story. Let’s look at the call records between Atul
Vaidya (9825289048) and Babu Bajrangi (9825020333) from 27th February,
2002, to 1st March, 2002. 27th February is when the S6 coach in Godhra
was burned down causing the unfortunate death of 59 people and 27th to
1st March was the main period in which most of the rioting happened. [. . .]
India: The ghosts of Gulbarg are yet to rest (Shiv Visvanathan on the court ruling in the Gulbarg society case)
The Hindu, June 4, 2016
The echoes at Gulbarg Society
Shiv Visvanathan
The quality of waiting is often so long, so intense that everyone wants the judgment to be an epic, achieving a kind of poetic closure. Unfortunately most judgments lack the power of closure.
Justice often begins with rituals of waiting. Waiting can be slow, painful, eventless as one waits for a judgment. In fact waiting often provides the pathos and drama of justice, while the judgment can be a damp squib. The quality of waiting is often so long, so intense that everyone wants the judgment to be an epic, achieving a kind of poetic closure. Unfortunately most judgments lack the power of closure, they leave behind pathos and ambiguity, forcing the victim to enact the Sisyphean myths of justice again. The tiredness of waiting disappears to be replaced by the tiredness of a repeated struggle. The Gulbarg Society case, along with the Naroda Patiya massacre, was among the most dramatic in the series of investigations the Special Investigation Team constituted by the Supreme Court handled in the Gujarat violence of 2002.
Not like Naroda Patiya
The first announcement of Justice P.B. Desai was seen as a mixed bag. There was both relief and satisfaction but little of the drama that Naroda Patiya provided. In the latter, justice caught up with the big fish, with the likes of the BJP Minister, Maya Kodnani, who orchestrated murder. Gulbarg boasted no big name, no roll call of culpable VIPs. All it had was a BJP councillor Bipin Patel who was declared innocent. “The insufficiency of evidence” must be one of the most fascinating terms in the discourse of law. It conveys the line of taboo, the sense of the limits of investigation marking of a domain where the accused is free. After 14 years, the special sessions court convicted 24 people, while acquitting 36 others.
The first reaction from all sides was guarded. A ritual was over, a judgment declared and made welcome. The judgment is like a text that one must read and reread to evaluate. The first reactions from the Jafri family, from Teesta Setalvad of the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), even from the BJP spokeswoman were muted. Each began with a salute to the law, before they added the personalised reactions. Everyone became collectively aware the judgment was a prelude, more like a headline, indicating number rather than the outline of the quantum of punishment or even the logic of violation. As the full judgment was to be announced on June 6, one felt justice was being presented in pipettes. Even then first reactions had a mixed quality. While announcing the number convicted, the judgment exonerated everyone of any kind of conspiracy. The Gulbarg massacre, the preliminary statements indicated, had no sense of planning or system.
Ms. Setalvad, while thanking the courts, was clear that Gulbarg was planned, a clear act of planned murder to eliminate the housing colony composed mainly of Muslims. She added that the struggle for justice would continue. Zakia Jafri, wife of the former MP who died in the Gulbarg Society massacre, produced the more poignant reaction. She observed that 400 people entered Gulbarg and only 11 were found guilty of murder. It was almost as if for the rest the event was extracurricular. Ms. Jafri’s comment was that the demographics of scale did not fit the judgment. The conviction of 11 persons seemed pinched and puritanical. She also commented tiredly that the judgment offered no closure, that the narratives of struggle had to begin again. Tanvir Jafri, Ehsan Jafri’s son, also commented that it was odd that 11 individuals could have enacted the murder of 69 people. Gulbarg was no fly-by-night slum but a regular residential colony. To say that 11 persons achieved the effect of murder and slaughter did not seem quite convincing. Yet each of the three main protagonists praised the justice system but felt the judgment was mixed, offering neither closure nor peace. It almost seemed like the first chapter, a prelude to a longer narrative everyone was still waiting for. The sixth of June acquired the magic of detail, where a substantial judgment may add resonance to the logic of the sentence.
Behind the politeness, the civility of the responses, one could sense that next to the drama of Naroda Patiya, Gulbarg was a damp squib. It had elements of the positive but these were not issues that the regime could congratulate itself for. The reaction of the BJP spokesperson on television produced that sense of the farcical. Shaina N.C. provided what sociologists called ‘the canned reaction’ combining knee jerk and stereotype which had no sense of context or detail. She indicated an artificial closure by declaring pompously that now the nation can move on. Movement seems more real than closure. Then in an ironic turning of the tables, Shaina N.C. presented Narendra Modi as the victim and Ms. Setalvad as the witch-hunter. The BJP spokesperson lacked the sense of gravitas, of finesse which the victims displayed. There was a dignity to what they said, while the BJP spokesperson sounded like an ATM of politics, with no sense of history, or the pain of waiting. There was a sense that the BJP was vindicated and now politics as usual must go on. Sometimes a vulgarity and indifference to pain and suffering comes in the language of response, and the spectator wondered whether the BJP really cared for the victims.
When a fight for justice by victims who rediscover the pain and the power of citizenship is equated to a witch-hunt, where the pain of the Gulbarg victims has no resonance before the inconvenience Mr. Modi was subject to, a sense of doubt enters. There is a smell of the farcical and the pompous. In fact the reaction seems suspect. The way Shaina N.C. speaks you would think it was Ehsan Jafri who was an enemy of the state rather than the prime victim.
Aloneness of the victim
The spectator, the listener watching and absorbing the show on TV starts wondering at the listlessness of the entire show. The whole day, given the centrality of Gulbarg, gave one a sense that an IPL of Justice was coming. Yet the event was slow, painful and ambiguous. It was as if the law was slowly, painfully squeezing out the truth in slow sentences like an old toothpaste. The very slowness added to the other slownesses of history, the long wait for the judgment, the sense that justice is a slow filtering system. Between the long wait and the viscosity of the judgment, there was a feeling that Gulbarg was yet to settle down. The background pictures on television, the scars on the walls of the abandoned houses, the picture of Ehsan Jafri placed on the litter of time gave a sense of the aloneness of the victim. As one of the victims proclaimed, “A photo is all I have left.”
There is an emptiness to Gulbarg Society, echoing the vitality it must have had over a decade ago. Gulbarg becomes a miniature of a genocidal Gujarat. A housing colony with that full domesticity of life is destroyed almost as if normalcy is not yet available to the Muslim as victim. There is a sadness around, which will take time to dispel. Meanwhile one waits for the sixth of June for details, for observations which can make justice more palatable. The drama of waiting and still waiting overwhelms the power of the judgment. The ghosts of Gulbarg are yet to rest.
Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal Law School.
The echoes at Gulbarg Society
Shiv Visvanathan
The quality of waiting is often so long, so intense that everyone wants the judgment to be an epic, achieving a kind of poetic closure. Unfortunately most judgments lack the power of closure.
Justice often begins with rituals of waiting. Waiting can be slow, painful, eventless as one waits for a judgment. In fact waiting often provides the pathos and drama of justice, while the judgment can be a damp squib. The quality of waiting is often so long, so intense that everyone wants the judgment to be an epic, achieving a kind of poetic closure. Unfortunately most judgments lack the power of closure, they leave behind pathos and ambiguity, forcing the victim to enact the Sisyphean myths of justice again. The tiredness of waiting disappears to be replaced by the tiredness of a repeated struggle. The Gulbarg Society case, along with the Naroda Patiya massacre, was among the most dramatic in the series of investigations the Special Investigation Team constituted by the Supreme Court handled in the Gujarat violence of 2002.
Not like Naroda Patiya
The first announcement of Justice P.B. Desai was seen as a mixed bag. There was both relief and satisfaction but little of the drama that Naroda Patiya provided. In the latter, justice caught up with the big fish, with the likes of the BJP Minister, Maya Kodnani, who orchestrated murder. Gulbarg boasted no big name, no roll call of culpable VIPs. All it had was a BJP councillor Bipin Patel who was declared innocent. “The insufficiency of evidence” must be one of the most fascinating terms in the discourse of law. It conveys the line of taboo, the sense of the limits of investigation marking of a domain where the accused is free. After 14 years, the special sessions court convicted 24 people, while acquitting 36 others.
The first reaction from all sides was guarded. A ritual was over, a judgment declared and made welcome. The judgment is like a text that one must read and reread to evaluate. The first reactions from the Jafri family, from Teesta Setalvad of the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), even from the BJP spokeswoman were muted. Each began with a salute to the law, before they added the personalised reactions. Everyone became collectively aware the judgment was a prelude, more like a headline, indicating number rather than the outline of the quantum of punishment or even the logic of violation. As the full judgment was to be announced on June 6, one felt justice was being presented in pipettes. Even then first reactions had a mixed quality. While announcing the number convicted, the judgment exonerated everyone of any kind of conspiracy. The Gulbarg massacre, the preliminary statements indicated, had no sense of planning or system.
Ms. Setalvad, while thanking the courts, was clear that Gulbarg was planned, a clear act of planned murder to eliminate the housing colony composed mainly of Muslims. She added that the struggle for justice would continue. Zakia Jafri, wife of the former MP who died in the Gulbarg Society massacre, produced the more poignant reaction. She observed that 400 people entered Gulbarg and only 11 were found guilty of murder. It was almost as if for the rest the event was extracurricular. Ms. Jafri’s comment was that the demographics of scale did not fit the judgment. The conviction of 11 persons seemed pinched and puritanical. She also commented tiredly that the judgment offered no closure, that the narratives of struggle had to begin again. Tanvir Jafri, Ehsan Jafri’s son, also commented that it was odd that 11 individuals could have enacted the murder of 69 people. Gulbarg was no fly-by-night slum but a regular residential colony. To say that 11 persons achieved the effect of murder and slaughter did not seem quite convincing. Yet each of the three main protagonists praised the justice system but felt the judgment was mixed, offering neither closure nor peace. It almost seemed like the first chapter, a prelude to a longer narrative everyone was still waiting for. The sixth of June acquired the magic of detail, where a substantial judgment may add resonance to the logic of the sentence.
Behind the politeness, the civility of the responses, one could sense that next to the drama of Naroda Patiya, Gulbarg was a damp squib. It had elements of the positive but these were not issues that the regime could congratulate itself for. The reaction of the BJP spokesperson on television produced that sense of the farcical. Shaina N.C. provided what sociologists called ‘the canned reaction’ combining knee jerk and stereotype which had no sense of context or detail. She indicated an artificial closure by declaring pompously that now the nation can move on. Movement seems more real than closure. Then in an ironic turning of the tables, Shaina N.C. presented Narendra Modi as the victim and Ms. Setalvad as the witch-hunter. The BJP spokesperson lacked the sense of gravitas, of finesse which the victims displayed. There was a dignity to what they said, while the BJP spokesperson sounded like an ATM of politics, with no sense of history, or the pain of waiting. There was a sense that the BJP was vindicated and now politics as usual must go on. Sometimes a vulgarity and indifference to pain and suffering comes in the language of response, and the spectator wondered whether the BJP really cared for the victims.
When a fight for justice by victims who rediscover the pain and the power of citizenship is equated to a witch-hunt, where the pain of the Gulbarg victims has no resonance before the inconvenience Mr. Modi was subject to, a sense of doubt enters. There is a smell of the farcical and the pompous. In fact the reaction seems suspect. The way Shaina N.C. speaks you would think it was Ehsan Jafri who was an enemy of the state rather than the prime victim.
Aloneness of the victim
The spectator, the listener watching and absorbing the show on TV starts wondering at the listlessness of the entire show. The whole day, given the centrality of Gulbarg, gave one a sense that an IPL of Justice was coming. Yet the event was slow, painful and ambiguous. It was as if the law was slowly, painfully squeezing out the truth in slow sentences like an old toothpaste. The very slowness added to the other slownesses of history, the long wait for the judgment, the sense that justice is a slow filtering system. Between the long wait and the viscosity of the judgment, there was a feeling that Gulbarg was yet to settle down. The background pictures on television, the scars on the walls of the abandoned houses, the picture of Ehsan Jafri placed on the litter of time gave a sense of the aloneness of the victim. As one of the victims proclaimed, “A photo is all I have left.”
There is an emptiness to Gulbarg Society, echoing the vitality it must have had over a decade ago. Gulbarg becomes a miniature of a genocidal Gujarat. A housing colony with that full domesticity of life is destroyed almost as if normalcy is not yet available to the Muslim as victim. There is a sadness around, which will take time to dispel. Meanwhile one waits for the sixth of June for details, for observations which can make justice more palatable. The drama of waiting and still waiting overwhelms the power of the judgment. The ghosts of Gulbarg are yet to rest.
Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal Law School.
May 31, 2016
India: Fear or forgiveness? Bandukwala dithers. But for many 2002 survivors, the issue is: No justice, no peace (Javed Anand)
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/bandukwala-hindu-muslim-rss-gujarat-2002-riots-blast-2826343/
Fear or forgiveness?
Bandukwala dithers. But for many 2002 survivors, the issue is: No justice, no peace.
Written by Javed Anand
The convictions in the Gujarat 2002 cases are unprecedented in India’s history. The verdicts have sent out multiple signals. Perpetrators will be brought to justice and minorities must rest assured that India is not yet a “Hindu state” and the rule of law reigns.
J. S. Bandukwala’s article in these columns (‘I forgive, I hope’, IE, May 27) is a cry from the heart. Muslims and the RSS cannot afford to go on hating each other, he pleads. Fine sentiments no doubt! But an outpouring of the heart is not much use when the mind is not in sync. Nor does it help when my good friend keeps changing his mind on remorse and forgiveness time and again. This is not the first time Bandukwala has sent his peace pigeons flying. He did not find many takers among Indian Muslims or the RSS earlier and it’s unlikely to be any different this time.
In an interview to a prominent national daily in September 2004, Bandukwala had said, “If they (Hindus of Gujarat) just said the simple word ‘sorry’ (for 2002), we’d come forward and forgive, and the process of reconciliation would begin”. In December 2007, the former professor seemed to change his mind. Remorse or no remorse, Muslims must forgive the perpetrators of 2002, he suggested. All he got in response were equally sharp comments from secular and community activists. Some castigated his comments as “defeatist” while others rebuked him for “demoralising survivors of the communal carnage who were still struggling for justice”.
In February 2011, he took yet another sharp turn. Bandukwala lashed out at Gujarat’s Maulana Vastanvi, who soon after being appointed vice-chancellor of Darul Uloom Deoband, said some nice things about the then chief minister. “I am conscious that rich and ambitious Muslims are desperate that we should close the chapter on the tragedy of 2002, and welcome Modi,” Bandukwala said. “But can we give up without justice and without a word of remorse and sorrow for what happened to thousands of our women and the poor? Rather, I am convinced that there is no other way to prevent future communal killings of Muslims, than to punish the murderers of 2002”.
Now that “the BJP has become the central force in Indian politics”, Bandukwala has switched lane again. “Most Muslims”, according to him, are today “in a state of panic”. So, it’s time to talk forgiveness again, folks. And this time the forgiving is no longer subject to any “remorse from the Other”; it springs simply out of the “fear of the Other”.
While he has been up and down over the question of remorse and forgiveness, for hundreds of Muslim survivors of Gujarat 2002, the issue has been simple: No justice, no peace. For Zakia Jafri and Rupaben Modi (both survivors of the massacre at Gulberg Society) and for thousands of other survivors, there can be no closure unless the perpetrators and the masterminds are brought to justice. It is thanks to their fearless determination, the consistent legal support provided to them by Citizens for Justice and Peace (disclosure: This writer is among the founder members) and other civil society organisations, and the active intervention of the SC that 126 of the perpetrators of the major carnages of 2002 are serving life sentences.
Expected on June 2 is the verdict of the trial court in the Gulberg Society case. Awaiting hearing in the Gujarat HC is the protest petition of Zakia Jafri wherein she has accused top Gujarat politicians (including then CM Narendra Modi), civil servants and police officers of complicity in the crimes.
The convictions in the Gujarat 2002 cases are unprecedented in India’s history. The verdicts have sent out multiple signals. Perpetrators will be brought to justice and minorities must rest assured that India is not yet a “Hindu state” and the rule of law reigns.
Finally, the future of Indian democracy is not contingent on the mutual hate or love between Muslims and the RSS. Muslims for the Sangh Parivar are a convenient means to an end, but their real target is the Constitution of our secular-democratic republic. The founding ideologues of Hindu Rashtra were fascinated by Hitler and Mussolini because they fantasised (still do) about an authoritarian state under a “strong leader” rooted in a people with tightly regimented minds, where every form of dissent is deemed as “anti-national”, “seditious”.
Javed Anand, The writer is general secretary, Muslims for Secular Democracy, and co-editor, ‘Communalism Combat
The writer is gen secy, Muslims for Secular Democracy, and co-editor, ‘Communalism Combat’
Fear or forgiveness?
Bandukwala dithers. But for many 2002 survivors, the issue is: No justice, no peace.
Written by Javed Anand
The convictions in the Gujarat 2002 cases are unprecedented in India’s history. The verdicts have sent out multiple signals. Perpetrators will be brought to justice and minorities must rest assured that India is not yet a “Hindu state” and the rule of law reigns.
J. S. Bandukwala’s article in these columns (‘I forgive, I hope’, IE, May 27) is a cry from the heart. Muslims and the RSS cannot afford to go on hating each other, he pleads. Fine sentiments no doubt! But an outpouring of the heart is not much use when the mind is not in sync. Nor does it help when my good friend keeps changing his mind on remorse and forgiveness time and again. This is not the first time Bandukwala has sent his peace pigeons flying. He did not find many takers among Indian Muslims or the RSS earlier and it’s unlikely to be any different this time.
In an interview to a prominent national daily in September 2004, Bandukwala had said, “If they (Hindus of Gujarat) just said the simple word ‘sorry’ (for 2002), we’d come forward and forgive, and the process of reconciliation would begin”. In December 2007, the former professor seemed to change his mind. Remorse or no remorse, Muslims must forgive the perpetrators of 2002, he suggested. All he got in response were equally sharp comments from secular and community activists. Some castigated his comments as “defeatist” while others rebuked him for “demoralising survivors of the communal carnage who were still struggling for justice”.
In February 2011, he took yet another sharp turn. Bandukwala lashed out at Gujarat’s Maulana Vastanvi, who soon after being appointed vice-chancellor of Darul Uloom Deoband, said some nice things about the then chief minister. “I am conscious that rich and ambitious Muslims are desperate that we should close the chapter on the tragedy of 2002, and welcome Modi,” Bandukwala said. “But can we give up without justice and without a word of remorse and sorrow for what happened to thousands of our women and the poor? Rather, I am convinced that there is no other way to prevent future communal killings of Muslims, than to punish the murderers of 2002”.
Now that “the BJP has become the central force in Indian politics”, Bandukwala has switched lane again. “Most Muslims”, according to him, are today “in a state of panic”. So, it’s time to talk forgiveness again, folks. And this time the forgiving is no longer subject to any “remorse from the Other”; it springs simply out of the “fear of the Other”.
While he has been up and down over the question of remorse and forgiveness, for hundreds of Muslim survivors of Gujarat 2002, the issue has been simple: No justice, no peace. For Zakia Jafri and Rupaben Modi (both survivors of the massacre at Gulberg Society) and for thousands of other survivors, there can be no closure unless the perpetrators and the masterminds are brought to justice. It is thanks to their fearless determination, the consistent legal support provided to them by Citizens for Justice and Peace (disclosure: This writer is among the founder members) and other civil society organisations, and the active intervention of the SC that 126 of the perpetrators of the major carnages of 2002 are serving life sentences.
Expected on June 2 is the verdict of the trial court in the Gulberg Society case. Awaiting hearing in the Gujarat HC is the protest petition of Zakia Jafri wherein she has accused top Gujarat politicians (including then CM Narendra Modi), civil servants and police officers of complicity in the crimes.
The convictions in the Gujarat 2002 cases are unprecedented in India’s history. The verdicts have sent out multiple signals. Perpetrators will be brought to justice and minorities must rest assured that India is not yet a “Hindu state” and the rule of law reigns.
Finally, the future of Indian democracy is not contingent on the mutual hate or love between Muslims and the RSS. Muslims for the Sangh Parivar are a convenient means to an end, but their real target is the Constitution of our secular-democratic republic. The founding ideologues of Hindu Rashtra were fascinated by Hitler and Mussolini because they fantasised (still do) about an authoritarian state under a “strong leader” rooted in a people with tightly regimented minds, where every form of dissent is deemed as “anti-national”, “seditious”.
Javed Anand, The writer is general secretary, Muslims for Secular Democracy, and co-editor, ‘Communalism Combat
The writer is gen secy, Muslims for Secular Democracy, and co-editor, ‘Communalism Combat’
November 18, 2015
India: Long way to justice - 239 kilometre march from Pune to Kolhapur for Dabholkar, Pansare from November 21-24
The Indian Express
Long way to justice- Mega march from Pune to Kolhapur for Dabholkar, Pansare
The march, starting on November 21 from the spot where Dr Dabholkar was shot, is intended to put pressure on the government to speed up the probe
Written by Parthasarathi Biswas
Pune
Dr Narendra Dabholkar was shot in Pune on August 20, 2013.
DEMANDING quick justice and a faster probe into the murders of rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar and communist leader Govind Pansare, members of various grass root organisations and progressive organisations will embark on a 239-kilometre march from Pune to Kohlapur from November 21-24.
Bharat Patankar, leader of the Shramik Mukti Dal, who has been provided police protection recently due to perceived threats to his life, said the march would see more than 10,000 people joining in from various parts of the state.
More than two years have passed since Dr Dabholkar was shot dead in broad day light in Pune and it is going to be a year since Pansare was shot dead outside his home in Kolhapur. The CBI, which has been investigating the murder of Dabholkar, has recently submitted the names of the two alleged suspects in a sealed envelope to the Bombay High Court and the special investigating team (SIT), constituted by the state government, looking into the murder of Pansare has arrested Samir Gaikwad, member of Sanathan Sanstha, a right wing organisation, for his alleged role in the case.
Patankar, who has been active since many years with various grass root level organisations, said that the march would be undertaken across Western Maharashtra to put pressure on the authorities to speed up the investigations. “Since the beginning we have asked the investigating agencies to focus on the right wing organisations like Sanathan Sanstha, but they had not looked into it. We had taken out a massive march in Mumbai this year in April and had followed it up with a similar march to the residence of the chief minister in Nagpur. Within days of the march, the police had made the arrest,” he said. Patankar said, they hoped this march would put pressure on the government to speed up the investigation process.
The march would start from Pune on November 21 from the same place where Dr Dabholkar was shot dead. Before culminating at Kolhapur on November 24, the march would make its ways through Sangli, Satara, stopping at various places for public meeting. “Villagers will provide lunch to the people taking part in the march. We expect more than 10,000 people to join us,” he said. Various left parties and progressive organisations owing allegiance to Ambedkar ideology will be joining the march. Also, family members of Dr Dabholkar and his Anti Superstition Movement would be joining us, said Patankar.
Patankar has been accorded police protection following the perceived threats to his life. Other than threatening letters, Patankar said that a meeting which was held in Mumbai to plan the march was attended by a person who is closely associated with a publication of the Right wing organisations. “It was an internal meeting and yet the correspondent sat through it. We had informed the Sangli police and informed them about the letters I received. After this, the police has extended protection to me,” he said,.
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/pune/long-way-to-justice-mega-march-from-pune-to-kolhapur-for-dabholkar-pansare/
Long way to justice- Mega march from Pune to Kolhapur for Dabholkar, Pansare
The march, starting on November 21 from the spot where Dr Dabholkar was shot, is intended to put pressure on the government to speed up the probe
Written by Parthasarathi Biswas
Pune
Dr Narendra Dabholkar was shot in Pune on August 20, 2013.
DEMANDING quick justice and a faster probe into the murders of rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar and communist leader Govind Pansare, members of various grass root organisations and progressive organisations will embark on a 239-kilometre march from Pune to Kohlapur from November 21-24.
Bharat Patankar, leader of the Shramik Mukti Dal, who has been provided police protection recently due to perceived threats to his life, said the march would see more than 10,000 people joining in from various parts of the state.
More than two years have passed since Dr Dabholkar was shot dead in broad day light in Pune and it is going to be a year since Pansare was shot dead outside his home in Kolhapur. The CBI, which has been investigating the murder of Dabholkar, has recently submitted the names of the two alleged suspects in a sealed envelope to the Bombay High Court and the special investigating team (SIT), constituted by the state government, looking into the murder of Pansare has arrested Samir Gaikwad, member of Sanathan Sanstha, a right wing organisation, for his alleged role in the case.
Patankar, who has been active since many years with various grass root level organisations, said that the march would be undertaken across Western Maharashtra to put pressure on the authorities to speed up the investigations. “Since the beginning we have asked the investigating agencies to focus on the right wing organisations like Sanathan Sanstha, but they had not looked into it. We had taken out a massive march in Mumbai this year in April and had followed it up with a similar march to the residence of the chief minister in Nagpur. Within days of the march, the police had made the arrest,” he said. Patankar said, they hoped this march would put pressure on the government to speed up the investigation process.
The march would start from Pune on November 21 from the same place where Dr Dabholkar was shot dead. Before culminating at Kolhapur on November 24, the march would make its ways through Sangli, Satara, stopping at various places for public meeting. “Villagers will provide lunch to the people taking part in the march. We expect more than 10,000 people to join us,” he said. Various left parties and progressive organisations owing allegiance to Ambedkar ideology will be joining the march. Also, family members of Dr Dabholkar and his Anti Superstition Movement would be joining us, said Patankar.
Patankar has been accorded police protection following the perceived threats to his life. Other than threatening letters, Patankar said that a meeting which was held in Mumbai to plan the march was attended by a person who is closely associated with a publication of the Right wing organisations. “It was an internal meeting and yet the correspondent sat through it. We had informed the Sangli police and informed them about the letters I received. After this, the police has extended protection to me,” he said,.
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/pune/long-way-to-justice-mega-march-from-pune-to-kolhapur-for-dabholkar-pansare/
November 17, 2015
India: Away from limelight, a growing grassroots movement is seeking justice for rationalists Dabholkar, Pansare
scroll.in
killings of activists
Away from limelight, a growing grassroots movement is seeking justice for Dabholkar, Pansare
Despite receiving threats, groups have been taking to the streets in Maharashtra to push the government to investigate Hindu extremist groups.
Sumana Ramanan · Today · 09:15 am
Away from limelight, a growing grassroots movement is seeking justice for Dabholkar, Pansare
In parallel to the swelling tide of verbal and symbolic protests from intellectuals and others about the growing climate of intolerance in the country, grassroots groups have been holding rallies in Maharashtra demanding that the government investigate Hindu extremist groups for their possible involvement in the murders of activists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare.
Among the protesters is a united front of a dozen groups, which has held four big protest marches all over the state since Pansare was shot on February 16. The next march will cover a nearly 400-km stretch of western Maharashtra: it will start on November 21 from Pune, 150 km southeast of Mumbai, where Dabholkar was murdered, and end on November 24 in Kolhapur, 240 km further southeast of Pune, where Pansare was assassinated. The organisers expect about 10,000 people to participate.
The front includes organisations such as the Shramik Mukti Dal, political outfits such as the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and Phule-Ambedkarite groups such as the Bahujan Sangharsh and the Satyashodak Jan Andolan.
“This movement began with Pansare’s murder,” said Bharat Patankar, 66, writer and president of the Shramik Mukti Dal, in late October, at the group’s headquarters in Kasegaon village in Maharashtra’s Sangli district. “After Pansare’s cremation on February 21, we held a rally where I publicly said that the government should investigate two organisations: the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and the Sanathan Sanstha.”
Allegations denied
Under pressure to act, the police finally made the first arrest in connection with Pansare’s murder a whole seven months afterwards. On September 16, they arrested Sameer Gaikwad, a member of the radical Hindu group Sanatan Sanstha, from Sangli district, and took him into police custody. At a press conference on November 2 in Belgaum in north Karnataka, however, the Goa-based Sanatan Sanstha denied its members had anything to do with the activists’ murders.
But overall, besides Gaikwad’s arrest, investigators have made little headway in both cases, a fact highlighted by the Bombay High Court on October 28. The court reprimanded the Central Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating Dabholkar’s murder, for the “lacklustre approach of its officers”, according to a report in the Indian Express.
The court acknowledged that the Maharashtra police’s Special Investigation Team, which is looking into Pansare’s murder, had done slightly better, probably referring to Gaikwad’s arrest. But it asked why both sets of investigators had not yet tracked down Sanatan Sanstha activist Rudra Patil, a suspect in Pansare’s murder who is also an accused in a case of a bomb blast that went off in Goa in 2009. “There is no progress at all,” the judge said. The court is hearing petitions filed by the murdered men’s families in which they have asked for court-monitored investigations because they were unhappy with the current probes.
Dabholkar, a writer and the founder-president of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, which works to eradicate superstition, was murdered on August 20, 2013, when he was out on his morning walk in Pune. Then on February 16, Pansare, a writer and member of the CPI, was fired upon in Kolhapur by two men on a motorcycle while he was taking his daily morning walk with his wife. Pansare died from his wounds four days later.
Wave of protests
Then just over two years after Dabholkar was murdered, on August 30, across the border, in Karnataka’s Dharwad district, MM Kalburgi, an iconoclastic academic who was an expert on Kannada vachana literature, was killed by two assailants in his home in the morning by two assailants.
The unprecedented series of daylight murders of progressive activists, the government’s failure to unequivocally condemn the killings and the sluggish pace of the police investigations have, among other incidents, triggered a wave of protests from academics, creative professionals and activists from virtually every field, in the form of both joint and individual statements.
Writers and filmmakers from all over the country have returned their national awards, including the Sahitya Akademi award, specifically to protest against the awarding body’s failure to condemn the killing of Kalburgi, who was a recipient of its honour.
Over the past week, more oblique criticism, in the form of calls for the need for tolerance and debate, has come from business and economic leaders, such as Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan, and NR Narayana Murthy, co-founder of the software giant Infosys.
Street demonstrations
These courageous voices have rightly received the national attention they deserve, but equally important are the grassroots protests in Maharashtra that began earlier and are taking the fight to the scenes of the crimes and making specific demands. Like Dabholkar and Pansare before them, some activists are doing so at considerable personal risk.
Chief among them is Bharat Patankar, the founder and president of the Shramik Mukti Dal, who trained as a gynaecologist before becoming an activist. He has received threatening letters from Hindu extremists for the past two years.
The socio-political Shramik Mukti Dal, which means “Movement for the Freedom of Toilers” and works across 11 districts in Maharashtra, has waged some of the country’s most successful struggles to improve farmers’ access to water in drought-prone areas, to end caste oppression, and to obtain fair compensation to those displaced by large projects. It has about 500 activists, 10,000 families who are members and many more supporters, Patankar estimated.
With the help of socially committed engineers and environmentalists, it led a landmark struggle of villagers and farmers against the excavation of sand from riverbeds and helped in the eventual construction of the Baliraja dam, with the involvement of locals. Besides Patankar, other prominent members include Waharu Sonawane, a leading Adivasi poet, and Patankar’s wife, Gail Omvedt, sociologist, human rights activist and prolific author, who has written several seminal books on the anti-caste movements as well as a biography of BR Ambedkar.
Even before Pansare’s murder, the Dal spearheaded the forging of the front of left organisations with the aim of fighting caste oppression. Late last year, the dozen groups formed the umbrella Samajik Atyachar Pratibandha Chalwal Ani Jati Mukti Andolan (Movement to Prevent Social Atrocities and Struggle for the Annihilation of Caste), the last phrase recalling the title of Ambedkar’s great undelivered speech written in 1936. The front held its first conference on January 25, on the premises of the residence of the great 19th-century caste reformers Jyotiba and Savitrabai Phule in Pune.
When Pansare was murdered, this front was ready to act. Following the rally at Pansare’s funeral, at which Patankar spoke, the front has organised or taken part in three protest marches. On March 11 in Mumbai, a rally began in the Byculla locality and was headed to Mantralaya, the building housing ministers’ offices, but the police stopped it in Azad Maidan, a huge ground in the downtown area. This rally attracted groups from all over Maharashtra, with more than two lakh people taking part, by conservative estimates (see banner image above).
On March 24, in Kolhapur, about 6,000 people participating in a rally were stopped by the police while they attempted to march to the local office of the Sanatan Sanstha.
Speeches before a protest march of a dozen groups in Kolhapur on March 24 that attracted about 6,000 people.
Credit: Kunda Pramila Nilakanth
On April 8, in Nagpur, about 4,000 people protested in front of the chief minister’s residence in that city, which is Maharashtra’s winter capital and is also where the headquarters of the RSS is located.
Following this, grassroots groups have been working locally. Now, after a gap of seven months, the organisations will march together again in the third week of November, starting on the bridge in Pune where Dabholkar was shot dead. Although Patankar wanted the rally to be on foot, by consensus the people will traverse the nearly 400 km from Pune, where the Sanathan Sanstha is also very active, to Kolhapur in various vehicles.
Investigate Hindu groups
The main demand at these rallies has been that the chief minister and the government investigate Hindu extremist groups, especially Sanatan Sanstha, as part of the probes into Dabholkar’s and Pansare’s murders.
Over the years, the government has arrested several left-wing activists on flimsy pretexts, but has done nothing against the Sanatan Sanstha, which is openly advocating violence, Patankar said. Among the left-wing activists who have been arrested is Sachin Mali of the Kabir Kala Manch, a cultural group in Pune. He has been accused of having links with Naxalites and booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
In contrast, nothing has happened to the Sanatan Sanshta’s founder, who is openly urging Hindus to adopt violence. As far back as in October 2005, Jayant Athavale urged readers to become “Hindu Naxalites”. Then in March 2008, Athavale wrote an article with the headline, “Hindus, there is no alternative to copying Naxalites and terrorists”.
“The Indian Penal Code has several provisions that the government can use against this incitement to violence,” Patankar said. “We demand that the chief minister and the government include Athavale, his organisation and the publication in their investigations.”
Patankar’s public demands that the government investigate the Sanatan Sanstha echo Pansare’s repeated calls for the government to investigate Hindu groups such as the Abhinav Bharat for their possible links to terror acts.
Threats continue
For his vocal stand and as a leader of a group with a huge following in parts of rural Maharashtra, Patankar appears to be on the Sanatan Sanstha’s radar. As recently as on October 17, Patankar was tailed by a journalist from the organisation’s Marathi publication, Dainik Sanatan Prabhat.
Patankar and his wife, Gail Omvedt, had come from Kasegaon to Mumbai that day for the monthly meeting of the Satyashodhak Study Circle, organised jointly by the Satyashodhak Resource Centre and the CPI. The study circle aims to explore the work and ideas of Marx, Phule and Ambedkar. A Sanatan Prabhat journalist, Sharad Gogawale, sat through the entire meeting, taking notes in a pad with his publication’s name on it, according to the meeting’s organiser, Kunda Pramila Nilakanth.
A student at the meeting recognised the Sanatan Prabhat journalist, whom she knew from earlier, and alerted Nilakanth. “At the meeting, we also discussed the upcoming rally,” said Nilakanth. “He must have clearly come to gather information because he has never attended the study circle’s meetings before.”
On his Facebook page, Gogawale describes himself as a network engineer at Reliance Communications in Mumbai. His posts attack communists and journalists such as Nikhil Wagle and Rajdeep Sardesai, who have openly opposed communal politics, and about Hindu pride.
On March 16, exactly a month after Pansare was shot, Patankar received an envelope with a copy of the Sanathan Prabhat. To a layperson’s eye, the handwriting on the envelope, which contained the March 7 edition of the publication, matched that of two earlier handwritten letters Patankar had received, suggesting that the source is common. Scroll.in has copies of these letters.
Patankar said the letters had taken on a more ominous tone over the past year. Also, while the anonymous writers had earlier chastised him for being “anti-Brahmin”, the recent letters began to refer to religion, calling him “anti-Hindu”.
“I used to throw away most of the letters,” said Patankar. “But last year, a colleague advised me to keep them.”
More threats
In February, a few days before Pansare was shot, Patankar received a three-page letter in Marathi. In that, the writer accused him of being anti-Brahmin and anti-Hindu, and says that he is going the way of Pansare and Justice BG Kolse Patil, a retired high court judge and progressive activist. The writer described himself as a retired professor of sociology and former head of department at the Government College in Pune/Latur.
But after newspapers reported in March that Patankar had been receiving threatening letters, he received a conciliatory note. This time, the handwriting on the envelope was different from that on the earlier letters, and the message inside was typewritten. “The letter addressed to you was just outburst (sic) of my emotions,” it said, referring to the February letter. “I deeply apologize for the same. It was not at all a threat. It was my big mistake…I am in no way connected to any incident/organization whatsoever.”
This was a feeble attempt to distance the Sanatan Sanstha from the letters following the media reports, said Patankar.
A few days before the protest march in Kolhapur, Patankar scanned and emailed a handwritten letter to Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, saying that the Shramik Mukti Dal suspected that the Sanatan Sanstha was behind Pansare’s murder and that the government should investigate this.
Apart from a reply saying that his letter had been sent to the concerned department, Patankar has received nothing from the government.
killings of activists
Away from limelight, a growing grassroots movement is seeking justice for Dabholkar, Pansare
Despite receiving threats, groups have been taking to the streets in Maharashtra to push the government to investigate Hindu extremist groups.
Sumana Ramanan · Today · 09:15 am
Away from limelight, a growing grassroots movement is seeking justice for Dabholkar, Pansare
In parallel to the swelling tide of verbal and symbolic protests from intellectuals and others about the growing climate of intolerance in the country, grassroots groups have been holding rallies in Maharashtra demanding that the government investigate Hindu extremist groups for their possible involvement in the murders of activists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare.
Among the protesters is a united front of a dozen groups, which has held four big protest marches all over the state since Pansare was shot on February 16. The next march will cover a nearly 400-km stretch of western Maharashtra: it will start on November 21 from Pune, 150 km southeast of Mumbai, where Dabholkar was murdered, and end on November 24 in Kolhapur, 240 km further southeast of Pune, where Pansare was assassinated. The organisers expect about 10,000 people to participate.
The front includes organisations such as the Shramik Mukti Dal, political outfits such as the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and Phule-Ambedkarite groups such as the Bahujan Sangharsh and the Satyashodak Jan Andolan.
“This movement began with Pansare’s murder,” said Bharat Patankar, 66, writer and president of the Shramik Mukti Dal, in late October, at the group’s headquarters in Kasegaon village in Maharashtra’s Sangli district. “After Pansare’s cremation on February 21, we held a rally where I publicly said that the government should investigate two organisations: the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and the Sanathan Sanstha.”
Allegations denied
Under pressure to act, the police finally made the first arrest in connection with Pansare’s murder a whole seven months afterwards. On September 16, they arrested Sameer Gaikwad, a member of the radical Hindu group Sanatan Sanstha, from Sangli district, and took him into police custody. At a press conference on November 2 in Belgaum in north Karnataka, however, the Goa-based Sanatan Sanstha denied its members had anything to do with the activists’ murders.
But overall, besides Gaikwad’s arrest, investigators have made little headway in both cases, a fact highlighted by the Bombay High Court on October 28. The court reprimanded the Central Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating Dabholkar’s murder, for the “lacklustre approach of its officers”, according to a report in the Indian Express.
The court acknowledged that the Maharashtra police’s Special Investigation Team, which is looking into Pansare’s murder, had done slightly better, probably referring to Gaikwad’s arrest. But it asked why both sets of investigators had not yet tracked down Sanatan Sanstha activist Rudra Patil, a suspect in Pansare’s murder who is also an accused in a case of a bomb blast that went off in Goa in 2009. “There is no progress at all,” the judge said. The court is hearing petitions filed by the murdered men’s families in which they have asked for court-monitored investigations because they were unhappy with the current probes.
Dabholkar, a writer and the founder-president of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, which works to eradicate superstition, was murdered on August 20, 2013, when he was out on his morning walk in Pune. Then on February 16, Pansare, a writer and member of the CPI, was fired upon in Kolhapur by two men on a motorcycle while he was taking his daily morning walk with his wife. Pansare died from his wounds four days later.
Wave of protests
Then just over two years after Dabholkar was murdered, on August 30, across the border, in Karnataka’s Dharwad district, MM Kalburgi, an iconoclastic academic who was an expert on Kannada vachana literature, was killed by two assailants in his home in the morning by two assailants.
The unprecedented series of daylight murders of progressive activists, the government’s failure to unequivocally condemn the killings and the sluggish pace of the police investigations have, among other incidents, triggered a wave of protests from academics, creative professionals and activists from virtually every field, in the form of both joint and individual statements.
Writers and filmmakers from all over the country have returned their national awards, including the Sahitya Akademi award, specifically to protest against the awarding body’s failure to condemn the killing of Kalburgi, who was a recipient of its honour.
Over the past week, more oblique criticism, in the form of calls for the need for tolerance and debate, has come from business and economic leaders, such as Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan, and NR Narayana Murthy, co-founder of the software giant Infosys.
Street demonstrations
These courageous voices have rightly received the national attention they deserve, but equally important are the grassroots protests in Maharashtra that began earlier and are taking the fight to the scenes of the crimes and making specific demands. Like Dabholkar and Pansare before them, some activists are doing so at considerable personal risk.
Chief among them is Bharat Patankar, the founder and president of the Shramik Mukti Dal, who trained as a gynaecologist before becoming an activist. He has received threatening letters from Hindu extremists for the past two years.
The socio-political Shramik Mukti Dal, which means “Movement for the Freedom of Toilers” and works across 11 districts in Maharashtra, has waged some of the country’s most successful struggles to improve farmers’ access to water in drought-prone areas, to end caste oppression, and to obtain fair compensation to those displaced by large projects. It has about 500 activists, 10,000 families who are members and many more supporters, Patankar estimated.
With the help of socially committed engineers and environmentalists, it led a landmark struggle of villagers and farmers against the excavation of sand from riverbeds and helped in the eventual construction of the Baliraja dam, with the involvement of locals. Besides Patankar, other prominent members include Waharu Sonawane, a leading Adivasi poet, and Patankar’s wife, Gail Omvedt, sociologist, human rights activist and prolific author, who has written several seminal books on the anti-caste movements as well as a biography of BR Ambedkar.
Even before Pansare’s murder, the Dal spearheaded the forging of the front of left organisations with the aim of fighting caste oppression. Late last year, the dozen groups formed the umbrella Samajik Atyachar Pratibandha Chalwal Ani Jati Mukti Andolan (Movement to Prevent Social Atrocities and Struggle for the Annihilation of Caste), the last phrase recalling the title of Ambedkar’s great undelivered speech written in 1936. The front held its first conference on January 25, on the premises of the residence of the great 19th-century caste reformers Jyotiba and Savitrabai Phule in Pune.
When Pansare was murdered, this front was ready to act. Following the rally at Pansare’s funeral, at which Patankar spoke, the front has organised or taken part in three protest marches. On March 11 in Mumbai, a rally began in the Byculla locality and was headed to Mantralaya, the building housing ministers’ offices, but the police stopped it in Azad Maidan, a huge ground in the downtown area. This rally attracted groups from all over Maharashtra, with more than two lakh people taking part, by conservative estimates (see banner image above).
On March 24, in Kolhapur, about 6,000 people participating in a rally were stopped by the police while they attempted to march to the local office of the Sanatan Sanstha.
Speeches before a protest march of a dozen groups in Kolhapur on March 24 that attracted about 6,000 people.
Credit: Kunda Pramila Nilakanth
On April 8, in Nagpur, about 4,000 people protested in front of the chief minister’s residence in that city, which is Maharashtra’s winter capital and is also where the headquarters of the RSS is located.
Following this, grassroots groups have been working locally. Now, after a gap of seven months, the organisations will march together again in the third week of November, starting on the bridge in Pune where Dabholkar was shot dead. Although Patankar wanted the rally to be on foot, by consensus the people will traverse the nearly 400 km from Pune, where the Sanathan Sanstha is also very active, to Kolhapur in various vehicles.
Investigate Hindu groups
The main demand at these rallies has been that the chief minister and the government investigate Hindu extremist groups, especially Sanatan Sanstha, as part of the probes into Dabholkar’s and Pansare’s murders.
Over the years, the government has arrested several left-wing activists on flimsy pretexts, but has done nothing against the Sanatan Sanstha, which is openly advocating violence, Patankar said. Among the left-wing activists who have been arrested is Sachin Mali of the Kabir Kala Manch, a cultural group in Pune. He has been accused of having links with Naxalites and booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
In contrast, nothing has happened to the Sanatan Sanshta’s founder, who is openly urging Hindus to adopt violence. As far back as in October 2005, Jayant Athavale urged readers to become “Hindu Naxalites”. Then in March 2008, Athavale wrote an article with the headline, “Hindus, there is no alternative to copying Naxalites and terrorists”.
“The Indian Penal Code has several provisions that the government can use against this incitement to violence,” Patankar said. “We demand that the chief minister and the government include Athavale, his organisation and the publication in their investigations.”
Patankar’s public demands that the government investigate the Sanatan Sanstha echo Pansare’s repeated calls for the government to investigate Hindu groups such as the Abhinav Bharat for their possible links to terror acts.
Threats continue
For his vocal stand and as a leader of a group with a huge following in parts of rural Maharashtra, Patankar appears to be on the Sanatan Sanstha’s radar. As recently as on October 17, Patankar was tailed by a journalist from the organisation’s Marathi publication, Dainik Sanatan Prabhat.
Patankar and his wife, Gail Omvedt, had come from Kasegaon to Mumbai that day for the monthly meeting of the Satyashodhak Study Circle, organised jointly by the Satyashodhak Resource Centre and the CPI. The study circle aims to explore the work and ideas of Marx, Phule and Ambedkar. A Sanatan Prabhat journalist, Sharad Gogawale, sat through the entire meeting, taking notes in a pad with his publication’s name on it, according to the meeting’s organiser, Kunda Pramila Nilakanth.
A student at the meeting recognised the Sanatan Prabhat journalist, whom she knew from earlier, and alerted Nilakanth. “At the meeting, we also discussed the upcoming rally,” said Nilakanth. “He must have clearly come to gather information because he has never attended the study circle’s meetings before.”
On his Facebook page, Gogawale describes himself as a network engineer at Reliance Communications in Mumbai. His posts attack communists and journalists such as Nikhil Wagle and Rajdeep Sardesai, who have openly opposed communal politics, and about Hindu pride.
On March 16, exactly a month after Pansare was shot, Patankar received an envelope with a copy of the Sanathan Prabhat. To a layperson’s eye, the handwriting on the envelope, which contained the March 7 edition of the publication, matched that of two earlier handwritten letters Patankar had received, suggesting that the source is common. Scroll.in has copies of these letters.
Patankar said the letters had taken on a more ominous tone over the past year. Also, while the anonymous writers had earlier chastised him for being “anti-Brahmin”, the recent letters began to refer to religion, calling him “anti-Hindu”.
“I used to throw away most of the letters,” said Patankar. “But last year, a colleague advised me to keep them.”
More threats
In February, a few days before Pansare was shot, Patankar received a three-page letter in Marathi. In that, the writer accused him of being anti-Brahmin and anti-Hindu, and says that he is going the way of Pansare and Justice BG Kolse Patil, a retired high court judge and progressive activist. The writer described himself as a retired professor of sociology and former head of department at the Government College in Pune/Latur.
But after newspapers reported in March that Patankar had been receiving threatening letters, he received a conciliatory note. This time, the handwriting on the envelope was different from that on the earlier letters, and the message inside was typewritten. “The letter addressed to you was just outburst (sic) of my emotions,” it said, referring to the February letter. “I deeply apologize for the same. It was not at all a threat. It was my big mistake…I am in no way connected to any incident/organization whatsoever.”
This was a feeble attempt to distance the Sanatan Sanstha from the letters following the media reports, said Patankar.
A few days before the protest march in Kolhapur, Patankar scanned and emailed a handwritten letter to Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, saying that the Shramik Mukti Dal suspected that the Sanatan Sanstha was behind Pansare’s murder and that the government should investigate this.
Apart from a reply saying that his letter had been sent to the concerned department, Patankar has received nothing from the government.
November 03, 2015
India: Families of Murdered Rationalist Writers Come Together to Seek Justice
ndtv.com - November 02, 2015
Families of Murdered Rationalist Writers Come Together to Seek Justice
All India | Press Trust of India | Updated: November 02, 2015 00:02 IST
Writers, filmmakers and intellectuals have been protesting against the death of the rationalist writers citing 'growing intolerance' in the country.
New Delhi: The families of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi, rationalists and intellectuals whose killings have fuelled allegations of growing intolerance in the country, today demanded punishment for those that had carried out attacks against the trio.
"Dr Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and Prof. Kalburgi's family members have all come together to ask for justice for the violence. With the hope that people who killed them should be punished, we are fighting this fight," Megha Pansare, daughter-in-law of Mr Pansare said in New Delhi at a "resistance" (Pratirodh) meet organised by writers, artists, thinkers and rationalists.
While one person has been arrested in connection with Mr Pansare's killing, inquiries are still on with respect to the murders of MM Kalburgi and Narendra Dabholkar.
"We all will go to high court... There should be a court- monitored investigation," Ms Megha said.
"There should be complete investigation of the person who has been arrested in Govind Pansare's murder. The organisation has been named in this regard and the people with the particular ideology who have been behind this should be investigated," she added.
Ms Megha also released the book, 'The Republic of Reason, Words They Could Not Kill', a compilation of selected English translations of the trio's writings brought out by Sahmat.
"Through this book, I think some of their thoughts will become accessible to people beyond the Kannada and Marathi- speaking societies. People will read them and know about their writings and the violence they had to face. They used to create awareness and enlightenment in society about values like freedom of expression, democracy," she said.
The day also marked the birthday of Dr Dabholkar, whose children Mukta and Hamid spoke at the meet through video-conferencing.
Commending the organisers, Ms Megha further added, "Comrade Pansare always said that it is not that rightist forces are very powerful; he used to worry that progressive forces are fragmented. Until these forces come together, we cannot defeat these fundamentalist forces."
She said that after protest events in Karnataka and Delhi, there are plans to organise an event in Maharastra next and efforts are on to mobilise people from small towns in the state like Kolhapur and Sangli.
"We have to fight for justice, all rationalists and progressive forces from small villages to (cities like) Delhi have to come together against violence and raise their voices for rationalism," Ms Megha said.
source url: http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/families-of-murdered-rationalist-writers-come-together-to-seek-justice-1238845
Families of Murdered Rationalist Writers Come Together to Seek Justice
All India | Press Trust of India | Updated: November 02, 2015 00:02 IST
Writers, filmmakers and intellectuals have been protesting against the death of the rationalist writers citing 'growing intolerance' in the country.
New Delhi: The families of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi, rationalists and intellectuals whose killings have fuelled allegations of growing intolerance in the country, today demanded punishment for those that had carried out attacks against the trio.
"Dr Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and Prof. Kalburgi's family members have all come together to ask for justice for the violence. With the hope that people who killed them should be punished, we are fighting this fight," Megha Pansare, daughter-in-law of Mr Pansare said in New Delhi at a "resistance" (Pratirodh) meet organised by writers, artists, thinkers and rationalists.
While one person has been arrested in connection with Mr Pansare's killing, inquiries are still on with respect to the murders of MM Kalburgi and Narendra Dabholkar.
"We all will go to high court... There should be a court- monitored investigation," Ms Megha said.
"There should be complete investigation of the person who has been arrested in Govind Pansare's murder. The organisation has been named in this regard and the people with the particular ideology who have been behind this should be investigated," she added.
Ms Megha also released the book, 'The Republic of Reason, Words They Could Not Kill', a compilation of selected English translations of the trio's writings brought out by Sahmat.
"Through this book, I think some of their thoughts will become accessible to people beyond the Kannada and Marathi- speaking societies. People will read them and know about their writings and the violence they had to face. They used to create awareness and enlightenment in society about values like freedom of expression, democracy," she said.
The day also marked the birthday of Dr Dabholkar, whose children Mukta and Hamid spoke at the meet through video-conferencing.
Commending the organisers, Ms Megha further added, "Comrade Pansare always said that it is not that rightist forces are very powerful; he used to worry that progressive forces are fragmented. Until these forces come together, we cannot defeat these fundamentalist forces."
She said that after protest events in Karnataka and Delhi, there are plans to organise an event in Maharastra next and efforts are on to mobilise people from small towns in the state like Kolhapur and Sangli.
"We have to fight for justice, all rationalists and progressive forces from small villages to (cities like) Delhi have to come together against violence and raise their voices for rationalism," Ms Megha said.
source url: http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/families-of-murdered-rationalist-writers-come-together-to-seek-justice-1238845
May 13, 2015
Open Letter to Gujarat Govt and to Citizens Resist degradation of Indian criminal justice system - Protect Retired Judge Jyotsana Yagnik Against Threats
released on 13 May 2015 at 23.45 hrs
Resist degradation of Indian criminal justice system.
Retired Judge Jyotsana Yagnik threatened; murder convicts out on bail
TEXT OF OPEN LETTER TO GUJARAT GOVT AND TO PUBLIC
The undersigned civil society organizations and concerned citizens have taken serious note of a news report (IE May 11, 2015) about the intimidation of a retired judge, Ms Jyotsana Yagnik, who, in her capacity as special judge had, in August 2012, convicted former Gujarat BJP minister Maya Kodnani, former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi and 30 others in the 2002 massacre of 97 Muslims in Naroda Patiya. Ms Yagnik has received at least 22 threat letters since the verdict, as well as blank phone calls at her home. The 62 year old judge has informed the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team about the threats and phone calls, but instead of strengthening her protection, the government has scaled down her security cover.
The SIT convenor and Additional DIG of Police has denied knowledge of the letters, according to the news-report. Meanwhile convict Maya Kodnani, condemned to life imprisonment as principal conspirator in a massacre, has been out on bail since mid-2014, and convict Babu Bajrangi, sentenced to imprisonment till death is now about to enjoy three months bail for medical treatment.
The Indian criminal justice system is being politically degraded with every passing day. With regard to the violence in Gujarat in 2002, there have been instances of several encounter-accused policemen being re-instated and cases against them being quietly dropped. Meanwhile in Maharashtra, there is no sign that the murderers of Narendra Dabholkar and Gobind Pansare will ever be caught. In Bihar, the acquittals of those accused of massacring Dalits in Shankarbigha and Bathani-tola show that the justice system is incapable or unwilling to punish those who commit mass crimes. Now we have an upright judge being threatened, whilst murder convicts guilty of heinous crimes are out on bail, and suspended policemen obtain re-instatement.
An onslaught on justice is taking place in broad daylight. It is now clear that the Modi-led government finds India’s criminal justice system and independent judiciary to be an obstacle blocking its long-term plans. The incidence of prejudice in the courts is nothing new - the 1984 pogrom inaugurated a new era in the erosion of Indian justice. The NDA government has given impetus to this process. The ideological hooligans of the so-called ’Sangh parivar’ are convinced they are above the law. Corruption does not merely have monetary implications. The erosion of judicial independence taking place before our eyes is also corruption. Building trustworthy public institutions is a prolonged process that takes decades. But they can be destroyed very rapidly, especially when state power is used (covertly or openly), to intimidate judges like Ms Jyotsna Yagnik.
Criminals these days feel free to physically intimidate the judiciary, and the police appear to be treating it as a minor matter. Threatening a judge exemplifies a fascist mentality. Politicised justice breeds hatred and despair among its victims. Those who manipulate justice, on the other hand, are announcing their profound contempt for the very value of justice. They are sending all of us a sinister message – justice is whatever we say it is. Let us remind ourselves, therefore, that if justice becomes a device for strengthening one political group at the expense of others, for eliminating enemies and assisting allies, law will have cast off even the mask of neutrality. If judicial decisions become predictable, this can only mean that the judiciary has been compromised and hooliganism has entered the working of the state at the highest levels. Only an alert public can defeat this kind of politics.
By undermining the citizens’ faith in a fearless judiciary, the elimination of law will threaten the very foundations of the democratic state. All elected representatives should remember that the Constitution is the fundamental statute of the Indian Union, which protects us from violent and tyrannical behaviour by criminals and/or persons in power. If they keep silent in the face of the ongoing sabotage of justice, our MP’s and MLA’s shall be betraying their oath of office. We ask all judicial, police & IAS officials to remember their oath of loyalty to the Indian Constitution.
In light of the above, we demand that the Gujarat government take immediate steps to ensure Ms Jyotsana Yagnik’s safety, and investigate the threats she has received. If any harm comes to this judge, the Gujarat government and its patron at the Centre will be held responsible by public opinion.
We call upon all democratic civil society organizations and concerned individuals to launch a campaign to strengthen the criminal justice system and the autonomy of the judiciary. Instances of the perversion of justice by any party, official or civil, should be highlighted and resisted.
Signatories
TEXT OF OPEN LETTER TO GUJARAT GOVT AND TO PUBLIC
The undersigned civil society organizations and concerned citizens have taken serious note of a news report (IE May 11, 2015) about the intimidation of a retired judge, Ms Jyotsana Yagnik, who, in her capacity as special judge had, in August 2012, convicted former Gujarat BJP minister Maya Kodnani, former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi and 30 others in the 2002 massacre of 97 Muslims in Naroda Patiya. Ms Yagnik has received at least 22 threat letters since the verdict, as well as blank phone calls at her home. The 62 year old judge has informed the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team about the threats and phone calls, but instead of strengthening her protection, the government has scaled down her security cover.
The SIT convenor and Additional DIG of Police has denied knowledge of the letters, according to the news-report. Meanwhile convict Maya Kodnani, condemned to life imprisonment as principal conspirator in a massacre, has been out on bail since mid-2014, and convict Babu Bajrangi, sentenced to imprisonment till death is now about to enjoy three months bail for medical treatment.
The Indian criminal justice system is being politically degraded with every passing day. With regard to the violence in Gujarat in 2002, there have been instances of several encounter-accused policemen being re-instated and cases against them being quietly dropped. Meanwhile in Maharashtra, there is no sign that the murderers of Narendra Dabholkar and Gobind Pansare will ever be caught. In Bihar, the acquittals of those accused of massacring Dalits in Shankarbigha and Bathani-tola show that the justice system is incapable or unwilling to punish those who commit mass crimes. Now we have an upright judge being threatened, whilst murder convicts guilty of heinous crimes are out on bail, and suspended policemen obtain re-instatement.
An onslaught on justice is taking place in broad daylight. It is now clear that the Modi-led government finds India’s criminal justice system and independent judiciary to be an obstacle blocking its long-term plans. The incidence of prejudice in the courts is nothing new - the 1984 pogrom inaugurated a new era in the erosion of Indian justice. The NDA government has given impetus to this process. The ideological hooligans of the so-called ’Sangh parivar’ are convinced they are above the law. Corruption does not merely have monetary implications. The erosion of judicial independence taking place before our eyes is also corruption. Building trustworthy public institutions is a prolonged process that takes decades. But they can be destroyed very rapidly, especially when state power is used (covertly or openly), to intimidate judges like Ms Jyotsna Yagnik.
Criminals these days feel free to physically intimidate the judiciary, and the police appear to be treating it as a minor matter. Threatening a judge exemplifies a fascist mentality. Politicised justice breeds hatred and despair among its victims. Those who manipulate justice, on the other hand, are announcing their profound contempt for the very value of justice. They are sending all of us a sinister message – justice is whatever we say it is. Let us remind ourselves, therefore, that if justice becomes a device for strengthening one political group at the expense of others, for eliminating enemies and assisting allies, law will have cast off even the mask of neutrality. If judicial decisions become predictable, this can only mean that the judiciary has been compromised and hooliganism has entered the working of the state at the highest levels. Only an alert public can defeat this kind of politics.
By undermining the citizens’ faith in a fearless judiciary, the elimination of law will threaten the very foundations of the democratic state. All elected representatives should remember that the Constitution is the fundamental statute of the Indian Union, which protects us from violent and tyrannical behaviour by criminals and/or persons in power. If they keep silent in the face of the ongoing sabotage of justice, our MP’s and MLA’s shall be betraying their oath of office. We ask all judicial, police & IAS officials to remember their oath of loyalty to the Indian Constitution.
In light of the above, we demand that the Gujarat government take immediate steps to ensure Ms Jyotsana Yagnik’s safety, and investigate the threats she has received. If any harm comes to this judge, the Gujarat government and its patron at the Centre will be held responsible by public opinion.
We call upon all democratic civil society organizations and concerned individuals to launch a campaign to strengthen the criminal justice system and the autonomy of the judiciary. Instances of the perversion of justice by any party, official or civil, should be highlighted and resisted.
Signatories
- Dilip Simeon (PADS)
- Dipak Dholakia
- Mukul Dube
- Battini Rao, Convener, People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (PADS)
- Subhash Gatade, New Socialist Initiative
- Manisha Sethi
- Ovais Sultan Khan
- Harsh Kapoor (PADS)
- Varsha Mehta
- Ram Puniyani, All India Secular Forum
- Manoranjan Mohanty
- Ann Ninan Journalist, Noida
- Suhas Borker, Working Group on Alternative Strategies
- Javed Anand, Citizens for Justice and Peace Mumbai
- Neelima Sharma
- Shamsul Islam
- Harsh Mander, Aman Biradari, Delhi
- Jawad Mohammed, Chennai
- Kareem Sait, Chennai
- Rameza Kareem
- Darryl DMonte, Journalist, Mumbai
- Nandini Sundar
- Professor D N Jha, Formerly at Delhi University
- Sumi Krishna, Independent researcher, Bangalore
- Chitra Joshi, Delhi University
- John Dayal, New Delhi
- Badri Raina, Delhi
- Prakash N. Shah, Editor, Nireekshak, Ahmedabad
- Anand Patwardhan, Mumbai
- Sukla Sen, EKTA (Committee for Communal Amity), Mumbai
- Kishor V Thaker, Ahmedabad
- Warisha Farasat, Advocate
- Rabin Chakraborty, Kolkata
- Salil Biswas, Kolkata
- Rana P Behal
- Jyoti Punwani, journalist, mumbai
- Monisha Behal
- Suman Keshari
- Dr. Zaheer Ahmed Sayeed, Chennai
- Zaffarullah Khan
- Ritu Dewan, Executive Director, Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai
- Sagar Rabari, Ahmedabad
- Prof Pritam Singh, Oxford, UK
- Kamayani Bali Mahabal, Feminist and Human Rights Activist, Mumbai
- Rashmi Varma, London
- Shobha Aggarwal, Advocate & Jt. Secretary, PIL Watch Group, New Delhi
- Kasim Sait Progressive-Interactions, Chennai
- Xavier Dias, Ranchi, Jharkhand
- Dr. Mary Mathai
- Madhusree Mukerjee, author
- Jairus Banaji
- Nisha Biswas, Kolkata
- Debdatta Chakrabarti, USA
- Teesta Setalvad
- Sumanta Banerjee
- Sanjay Kumar, People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism, New Delhi
- Mohammad Imran, NRI SAHI, Lucknow, India and NJ, USA
- Virginia Saldanha, Secretary ICWM
- Tapan Bose, South Asia Forum for Human Rights New Delhi
- Ania Loomba, Delhi and Philadelphia
- Pushpa Achanta, Independent journalist, Bangalore
- Rohini Hensman, Writer and researcher, Bombay
- N.D. Pancholi
- Kumar Prashant Gandhian worker/Thinker Mumbai
- Kavita Panjabi, Jadavpur University
- Mahmood Farooqui, Writer, Delhi
- Khalid Azam, United States
- Fiaz A. Khan
- Sujay Basu, Kolkata
- Divya Gupta, Delhi
- Ashish Lahiri, Pavlov Institute, Kolkata
April 06, 2015
Announcement: Public Meeting on State Violence and the (Im)possibility of Justice: Lessons from Hashimpura (7th April @ Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi)
Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association
and
Jamia Teachers’ Association
Invite you to a Public Meeting on State Violence and the (Im)possibility of Justice: Lessons from Hashimpura
Speakers:
Adv. Rebecca John (lawyer for the victims)
V.N. Rai, Retired IPS
Prof. Purushottam Agrawal, critic and commentator
Ajay Singh, senior journalist
7th April (Tuesday) / 2.30 pm onwards
JTA office, Next to Central Canteen, Main Campus
Jamia Milia Islamia [Delhi]
and
Jamia Teachers’ Association
Invite you to a Public Meeting on State Violence and the (Im)possibility of Justice: Lessons from Hashimpura
Speakers:
Adv. Rebecca John (lawyer for the victims)
V.N. Rai, Retired IPS
Prof. Purushottam Agrawal, critic and commentator
Ajay Singh, senior journalist
7th April (Tuesday) / 2.30 pm onwards
JTA office, Next to Central Canteen, Main Campus
Jamia Milia Islamia [Delhi]
March 23, 2015
India: Justice for Hashimpura - Survivors, Victim families, Lawyers, Leaders of Civil Society and Activists Speak (March 24, 2015, 4-7 pm, ISI, New Delhi)
March 24, 2015
4 to 7pm
Indian Social Institute
10, Lodhi Road Institutional Area
New Delhi
Survivors, Victim families,Lawyers, Leaders of Civil Society and Activists Speak
Justice Rajinder Sachar
Vrinda Grover
Tapan Bose
Uma Chakravarty
Rebecca John
John Dayal
Harsh Mander
Shabnam Hashmi
& others
Justice for Hashimpura Committee
September 13, 2014
India: The Temptations of Peace [expectations for justice of victims of Kandhamal riots in Orissa] - Javed Iqbal
Tehelka.com
The Temptations of Peace
Just as the experiences of living through the 2008 Kandhamal riots vary considerably from person to person, so do their expectations for justice. Text and Photographs by Javed Iqbal
Exorcising ghosts Jagannath Pradhan (right) stood up against the mob in 2008, while Mohesh Nayak lost his brother in the riots
On 25 August 2008, Jagannath Pradhan, a self-identified Adivasi Hindu from Budedipada village in Tiangia panchayat, Odisha, stood in front of the rioting mob and said that if they were going to destroy the houses of his Christian neighbours, they should start with his. In another part of the village, Dasarath Pradhan also stood up against the mob’s diktat, but was eventually killed. Apart from Dasarath, five others — Tirinath Digal, Parikith Nayak, Dibyo Paricha, Bikram Nayak and Father Bernard — were killed in Budedipada village.
Six years later, standing next to Jagannath, Mohesh Nayak remembers hiding in the forests as the mob of 40-50 people went on to kill his brother Bikram in the fields. Manoj Pradhan, who led the mob, was later convicted for the murder, and then elected to the Assembly in 2009 from G Udaygiri on a BJP ticket. He would eventually be released on bail and lose the Assembly election held this year.
At Sulesaru village, Deomali Pradhan is the only member of his Christian family who returns home. The sole reason for coming back is to attend the sessions court at Phulbani and fight for justice. He has renovated only a small part of his house; the rest still provides testament to the violence that tore his community apart.
He recalls how Siddeshwar Pradhan, a man with links to the Sangh Parivar, was killed by the mob, again for the same reason, for protesting against the senseless violence. Siddeshwar’s son Niranjan confirms his father’s saffron links and that the accused, who led the mob, was an RSS member. All the accused were arrested but were later released by the high court on bail.
Deomali also remembers how all 27 families fled Sulesaru when a mob of 60-70 people came to the village on the night of 25 August 2008, two days after the killing of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati and four of his supporters. Maoist rebels allegedly killed him on the order of Sabyasachi Panda, who was recently arrested. Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders blamed Christian missionaries for the murders. Once the Maoists took responsibility, the Sangh Parivar claimed that the Christians had paid the Maoists to commit the killings.
The killings started immediately after Lakshmanananda’s death, as the police and local authorities merely looked on. The official death toll was 38, while unofficial estimates pegged it at 93. There was widespread destruction of churches and houses, with an estimated 50,000 people displaced to the jungles and relief camps.
According to Deomali, his neighbour Potishti Nayak, 65, refused to flee along with her family and perished with the flames that engulfed her house. Another neighbour, Akbar Diggal, was found murdered at Totoma church.
On 27 August, people such as Deomali attended a rally held at Phulbani for communal harmony and justice. The rally drew around 4,000 people. At 10 am, the people stood quietly in two lines in front of a temple, waiting for the organisers to give the signal to start the march.
The Indian Reserve Battalion showed up and positioned themselves around the protesters a few moments before the rally moved on quietly, apart from the sloganeering by a handful of people using a dissonant loudspeaker
The residents of Phulbani took a curious interest, looking out of their windows or coming to their porches to watch the marchers pass by. It took around 10 minutes for the protesters to enter the football stadium and settle down.
The speakers were introduced in Odia by the organisers, starting with CPM leader Subhashini Ali, whose line about the Niyamgiri villagers rejecting Vedanta and choosing their right to live on their own terms, drew the loudest applause from the mostly Kondh crowd. The next big response came when the CPI’s Annie Raja exhorted the police cordon at the rally that if even “four or five of these uniforms” had been present in the villages in 2008, then this rally would not have had to take place today.
Later, lawyer-researcher Saumya Uma released her report, Breaking the Shackles: The Unheard Voices of the Women of Kandhamal. It details testimonies of women who lost family members, who were sexually assaulted, who faced conversions and threats, and had to deal with the legal system among other things.
She spoke in Hindi and her words were translated into Odia for the mostly Kondh and Pano crowd.
“We wish the speakers had spoken in Kui or Odia,” says Mohesh Nayak. “What about justice though? They (the attackers) are put behind bars but they come out after three years or so. It doesn’t matter going to the courts.”
Unlike Nayak, Deomali was more positive. “If we don’t speak up now, this will happen again,” he says. He diligently expressed how he agreed with the statement attacking the absent police, and the promise made by Medha Patkar that the memorandum for justice in Kandhamal be delivered to President Pranab Mukherjee.
However, people from many affected communities could not make it to the rally. For instance, in the resettled village of Nonadigiri, about 50 families who were evicted from Beticola said that it cost each person 100 to undertake the journey and they couldn’t afford it. In the past, vehicles had been organised, but not this time. They are Adivasi Christians who had large landholdings, yet both their homes and fields at Beticola lie empty. They recall communal violence and a fractured community from 1985, and the beating of Pastor Lameshwar Kahar in 1999 by the Bajrang Dal after the church had proposed a medical centre in the village.
“They were afraid that the medical centre would be used to convert people to Christianity,” says Kirtichandra Mallick, who had just returned from a funeral at Beticola to his rehabilitated village of Nonadagiri.
In Beriaguda, another village where the people had been rehabilitated, they pooled in money to attend the rally. Their houses were destroyed in 2008 and they lived for six months in tents before they petitioned the collector and met other local villagers and returned home.
Shashibhusan Pradhan, a self-identified Hindu Adivasi and a Kui leader from nearby Uperadandakiya village, was instrumental in establishing peace in the community. The people of Beriaguda, where two destroyed churches dot the landscape, claim that he led the mob in 2008.
“I told the rioters that we should not destroy any homes now; we should do it later,” says Sashibhushan, also called English Bhushan, due to his propensity to start speaking in English in the middle of his Odia-Kui sentences. “I said it because I knew tempers were high and maybe later they would calm down and nothing would happen. But they attacked me instead.”
Shashibhushan has a Christian wife. He claims proudly that his panchayat recently witnessed an arranged marriage between a Christian and a Hindu family. “Years ago, it was the church who said that Christians should not marry Hindus,” he recalls. “But not today.”
He did not attend the Phulbani rally, but would do so next year, though only if he is allowed to speak from the podium.
Others such as Asith Kumar Singh were not even aware of the rally. The 29-year-old engineer, who worked for five years at Vedanta’s Lanjigarh plant, says that “the Adivasis shut down the plant often but never bothered us workers”. He now works with another mining company.
He remembers the violent days but believes in keeping quiet. “My friends were there in the mob… just hundred metres away,” he says, recalling the incidents on 24 August 2008, a day after the killing of Lakshmanananda.
He recalls how they argued among themselves that they can’t destroy Asith’s house because they had been greeting his mother in the morning for years. So they decided among themselves for a compromise. “They called me repeatedly and said that we will spare your house, but you have to come to us so that we can break your arms and legs,” he says. Fortunately, rioting is a fickle business, and the threat was forgotten. But Asith’s family soon fled Phulbani and has never returned.
Similarly, Namrata, whose badly burnt face became one of the images of the Kandhamal riots, is now living in a small town with her family. She was just 10 years old when she was badly burnt in an explosion. Her elder sister quickly came to her aid and took her to the relief camp in the jungle where their family administered first aid. Her family did not attend the Phulbani rally, and she feels safe in her school, hoping to finish her arts course.
“If the people had not listened to the Bajrang Dal leaders, none of this would have happened,” says Jagannath.
Being orphaned at a young age, tending to his family as a youth, Jagannath says he knows the problems of the people. His father was an animist, and even as he refers to himself as a Hindu, he overtly condemns casteism.
“The water in the pond is all the same,” he says. “Why is it different when you put it in different pots?”
The Temptations of Peace
Just as the experiences of living through the 2008 Kandhamal riots vary considerably from person to person, so do their expectations for justice. Text and Photographs by Javed Iqbal
Exorcising ghosts Jagannath Pradhan (right) stood up against the mob in 2008, while Mohesh Nayak lost his brother in the riots
On 25 August 2008, Jagannath Pradhan, a self-identified Adivasi Hindu from Budedipada village in Tiangia panchayat, Odisha, stood in front of the rioting mob and said that if they were going to destroy the houses of his Christian neighbours, they should start with his. In another part of the village, Dasarath Pradhan also stood up against the mob’s diktat, but was eventually killed. Apart from Dasarath, five others — Tirinath Digal, Parikith Nayak, Dibyo Paricha, Bikram Nayak and Father Bernard — were killed in Budedipada village.
Six years later, standing next to Jagannath, Mohesh Nayak remembers hiding in the forests as the mob of 40-50 people went on to kill his brother Bikram in the fields. Manoj Pradhan, who led the mob, was later convicted for the murder, and then elected to the Assembly in 2009 from G Udaygiri on a BJP ticket. He would eventually be released on bail and lose the Assembly election held this year.
At Sulesaru village, Deomali Pradhan is the only member of his Christian family who returns home. The sole reason for coming back is to attend the sessions court at Phulbani and fight for justice. He has renovated only a small part of his house; the rest still provides testament to the violence that tore his community apart.
He recalls how Siddeshwar Pradhan, a man with links to the Sangh Parivar, was killed by the mob, again for the same reason, for protesting against the senseless violence. Siddeshwar’s son Niranjan confirms his father’s saffron links and that the accused, who led the mob, was an RSS member. All the accused were arrested but were later released by the high court on bail.
Deomali also remembers how all 27 families fled Sulesaru when a mob of 60-70 people came to the village on the night of 25 August 2008, two days after the killing of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati and four of his supporters. Maoist rebels allegedly killed him on the order of Sabyasachi Panda, who was recently arrested. Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders blamed Christian missionaries for the murders. Once the Maoists took responsibility, the Sangh Parivar claimed that the Christians had paid the Maoists to commit the killings.
The killings started immediately after Lakshmanananda’s death, as the police and local authorities merely looked on. The official death toll was 38, while unofficial estimates pegged it at 93. There was widespread destruction of churches and houses, with an estimated 50,000 people displaced to the jungles and relief camps.
According to Deomali, his neighbour Potishti Nayak, 65, refused to flee along with her family and perished with the flames that engulfed her house. Another neighbour, Akbar Diggal, was found murdered at Totoma church.
On 27 August, people such as Deomali attended a rally held at Phulbani for communal harmony and justice. The rally drew around 4,000 people. At 10 am, the people stood quietly in two lines in front of a temple, waiting for the organisers to give the signal to start the march.
The Indian Reserve Battalion showed up and positioned themselves around the protesters a few moments before the rally moved on quietly, apart from the sloganeering by a handful of people using a dissonant loudspeaker
The residents of Phulbani took a curious interest, looking out of their windows or coming to their porches to watch the marchers pass by. It took around 10 minutes for the protesters to enter the football stadium and settle down.
The speakers were introduced in Odia by the organisers, starting with CPM leader Subhashini Ali, whose line about the Niyamgiri villagers rejecting Vedanta and choosing their right to live on their own terms, drew the loudest applause from the mostly Kondh crowd. The next big response came when the CPI’s Annie Raja exhorted the police cordon at the rally that if even “four or five of these uniforms” had been present in the villages in 2008, then this rally would not have had to take place today.
Later, lawyer-researcher Saumya Uma released her report, Breaking the Shackles: The Unheard Voices of the Women of Kandhamal. It details testimonies of women who lost family members, who were sexually assaulted, who faced conversions and threats, and had to deal with the legal system among other things.
She spoke in Hindi and her words were translated into Odia for the mostly Kondh and Pano crowd.
“We wish the speakers had spoken in Kui or Odia,” says Mohesh Nayak. “What about justice though? They (the attackers) are put behind bars but they come out after three years or so. It doesn’t matter going to the courts.”
Unlike Nayak, Deomali was more positive. “If we don’t speak up now, this will happen again,” he says. He diligently expressed how he agreed with the statement attacking the absent police, and the promise made by Medha Patkar that the memorandum for justice in Kandhamal be delivered to President Pranab Mukherjee.
However, people from many affected communities could not make it to the rally. For instance, in the resettled village of Nonadigiri, about 50 families who were evicted from Beticola said that it cost each person 100 to undertake the journey and they couldn’t afford it. In the past, vehicles had been organised, but not this time. They are Adivasi Christians who had large landholdings, yet both their homes and fields at Beticola lie empty. They recall communal violence and a fractured community from 1985, and the beating of Pastor Lameshwar Kahar in 1999 by the Bajrang Dal after the church had proposed a medical centre in the village.
“They were afraid that the medical centre would be used to convert people to Christianity,” says Kirtichandra Mallick, who had just returned from a funeral at Beticola to his rehabilitated village of Nonadagiri.
In Beriaguda, another village where the people had been rehabilitated, they pooled in money to attend the rally. Their houses were destroyed in 2008 and they lived for six months in tents before they petitioned the collector and met other local villagers and returned home.
Shashibhusan Pradhan, a self-identified Hindu Adivasi and a Kui leader from nearby Uperadandakiya village, was instrumental in establishing peace in the community. The people of Beriaguda, where two destroyed churches dot the landscape, claim that he led the mob in 2008.
“I told the rioters that we should not destroy any homes now; we should do it later,” says Sashibhushan, also called English Bhushan, due to his propensity to start speaking in English in the middle of his Odia-Kui sentences. “I said it because I knew tempers were high and maybe later they would calm down and nothing would happen. But they attacked me instead.”
Shashibhushan has a Christian wife. He claims proudly that his panchayat recently witnessed an arranged marriage between a Christian and a Hindu family. “Years ago, it was the church who said that Christians should not marry Hindus,” he recalls. “But not today.”
He did not attend the Phulbani rally, but would do so next year, though only if he is allowed to speak from the podium.
Others such as Asith Kumar Singh were not even aware of the rally. The 29-year-old engineer, who worked for five years at Vedanta’s Lanjigarh plant, says that “the Adivasis shut down the plant often but never bothered us workers”. He now works with another mining company.
He remembers the violent days but believes in keeping quiet. “My friends were there in the mob… just hundred metres away,” he says, recalling the incidents on 24 August 2008, a day after the killing of Lakshmanananda.
He recalls how they argued among themselves that they can’t destroy Asith’s house because they had been greeting his mother in the morning for years. So they decided among themselves for a compromise. “They called me repeatedly and said that we will spare your house, but you have to come to us so that we can break your arms and legs,” he says. Fortunately, rioting is a fickle business, and the threat was forgotten. But Asith’s family soon fled Phulbani and has never returned.
Similarly, Namrata, whose badly burnt face became one of the images of the Kandhamal riots, is now living in a small town with her family. She was just 10 years old when she was badly burnt in an explosion. Her elder sister quickly came to her aid and took her to the relief camp in the jungle where their family administered first aid. Her family did not attend the Phulbani rally, and she feels safe in her school, hoping to finish her arts course.
“If the people had not listened to the Bajrang Dal leaders, none of this would have happened,” says Jagannath.
Being orphaned at a young age, tending to his family as a youth, Jagannath says he knows the problems of the people. His father was an animist, and even as he refers to himself as a Hindu, he overtly condemns casteism.
“The water in the pond is all the same,” he says. “Why is it different when you put it in different pots?”
April 13, 2014
India: After the Law - Notes on Gujarat 2002 | Moyukh Chatterjee
Economic and Political Weekly, Vol - XLIX No. 16, April 19, 2014
After the Law: Notes on Gujarat 2002
by Moyukh Chatterjee
The lower courts of Gujarat are rife with narratives of people being denied justice in Gujarat 2002 riot cases. In such an environment only the naïve or self-blinded will equate the failure of "prosecutable evidence" as the last word on justice in Gujarat.
Moyukh Chatterjee (moyukhchatterjee@gmail.com) is a doctoral student at the Department of Anthropology, Emory University, the US.
This article is based on my doctoral fieldwork in lower courts of Ahmedabad between 2010 and 2013. Since 2002, I have conducted 29 months of research tracking the work of NGOs, lawyers, and activists in the aftermath of the Gujarat pogrom.
An Ahmedabad Metropolitan Court recently dismissed Zakia Jafri’s petition challenging the Special Investigation Team’s (SIT) closure report. The verdict has been predictably hailed in television studios as Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s much-awaited acquittal. While Modi tweeted “truth alone triumphs”, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokespersons and the “Modi for PM” juggernaut have led us to believe that this verdict is the final word on justice in Gujarat 2002. As the chest thumping and chants of “we were right all along” die down, we can finally ask: What does this verdict really mean? Can a legal verdict, however historical or ordinary, be the basis of our politics? And in the wake of Delhi 1984, Bombay 1992, Kandhamal 2008, what justifies our expectations of “justice”?
R K Raghavan, the head of the SIT told The Hindu that “I am happy SIT’s stand has been vindicated” (Venkatesan 2013). Broadly, the SIT concluded that there is no “prosecutable evidence” against Narendra Modi and 59 others in the Gulbarg Society massacre, and recommended the closure of the case, which was subsequently challenged by Zakia Jafri in 2013.
The recent verdict in Ahmedabad dismisses Jafri’s petition on largely the same grounds as the SIT: there is no prosecutable evidence (Express News Service 2013). However the legal battle will not end with this verdict. Zakia Jafri’s legal team will appeal this decision, and the case will continue. However, while we await the final decision, it seems to me that there is much more at stake than a question of law. While the Congress and the BJP, along with mainstream media make this a referendum about one politician, let us understand this verdict beyond the vilification or celebration of Modi.
What we must guard against is the unspoken strategy of the perpetrators and champions of Gujarat 2002 – to conflate and ultimately collapse the distinction between the ethical and the legal in the aftermath of mass violence. Ironically, it was Atal Behari Vajpayee who introduced an ethical dimension to Modi’s responsibility, by asking him to follow rajdharma on national television. The issue of justice and responsibility in the aftermath of pogroms like Gujarat 2002 or Delhi 1984 raise questions about Indian democracy and legality that cannot be wished away by focusing on Modi’s individual culpability. The continuing judicial blindness to mass violence in India warns us that we cannot let our political and ethical choices be determined by legal decisions alone.
Beyond Modi
One way to expand on our understanding of justice in Gujarat 2002 beyond Modi is to look outside high profile cases like Gulbarg Society and focus instead on ordinary courts and everyday proceedings. It is important to contextualise the recent verdict and the SIT’s closure report as part of a larger map of impunity in the aftermath of mass violence in Gujarat 2002. While the media, academics, and activists largely focus on the most heinous and sensational cases – like Best Bakery and Gulbarg Society – an ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2013 revealed how lower courts in Gujarat routinely acquit perpetrators involved in 2002-related crimes.
Local and national media often skip over these ordinary trials where prosecution witnesses turn hostile en masse, police investigation presents evidence with glaring inconsistencies and contradictions for the defense to exploit during the trial, and in the end the judge mechanically “applies the law” only to dismiss survivors’ testimony and acquit the accused.
While this is not true for every case, anyone spending even half a day attending “ordinary” trials of 2002-related cases in the lower courts will not be surprised that the SIT found “no prosecutable evidence” against the accused in the Gulbarg Society case. Since 2002, I have engaged with Survivors, lawyers and activists in Ahmedabad to understand this everyday process of impunity – how does it work and how does it force us to think beyond Gujarat?
My findings suggest that the political-juridical structure of impunity in contemporary India does not stop at the Gujarat border, nor can it be understood as a sudden and spectacular breakdown of law and order; it is instead a continuation of politics-as-usual.
The Paradox of Gujarat 2002
On a blazing hot summer afternoon in Ahmedabad, I listened to a conversation between a human rights worker and a criminal lawyer on the legal aftermath of Gujarat 2002. “But is there any hope of justice in Gujarat?” asked the activist. Without batting an eyelid, the lawyer replied, “Look, all criminal offences are formally against the state, but if the state is a party to the crimes, then where do the complainants turn?” This pithy summary by the lawyer conceals several paradoxes.
The National Human Rights Commission’s (NHRC) suo motu investigation as early as 1 March 2002 reported violence continuing “in varying degrees for over two months”. Even as late as 24 April 2002 the NHRC said that the victims were facing difficulties in recording FIRs with the police. Similarly, the Concerned Citizens Tribunal’s landmark two-volume publication of “Crimes against Humanity”, and subsequent Supreme Court decisions to reopen nearly 2,000 criminal cases summarily closed by the Gujarat police and transfer two major trials (Best Bakery and Bilkis Bano) outside Gujarat show that the paradox of justice in Gujarat is a public secret: the production and destruction of evidence is indistinguishable in the context of state-sanctioned mass violence. In the light of these independent commissions and the collective testimony of survivors, only the naïve or self-blinded will equate the failure of “prosecutable evidence” as the last word on justice in Gujarat.
In the background, lower courts in Gujarat have been acquitting hundreds of “riot” cases. I attended these performances of impunity during my doctoral fieldwork in 2010-11. Sitting in the last row of different lower courts for over a year, I watched an elaborate farce being performed in the court: voluminous files were dutifully opened, read and closed; the public prosecutor marked attendance on each court date even if the accused never showed up; the judge gave the survivor an opportunity to tell her story (sometimes after eight years); the accused stood sheepishly in one corner; policemen took off their hat before entering the witness stand and parroted meaningless words – and in the end, after a decade of adjournments and delay, the judge dismissed survivors’ testimony as inconsistent and unreliable.
A Case of Impunity – Wahidabano
Wahidabano, a middle-aged Muslim woman and her friend stepped out of their house during a brief break after five days of curfew in Ahmedabad. They needed medicines from a nearby dispensary, barely a five-minute walk from their house. While coming back from the dispensary, close, but still outside the gate of their Muslim neighbourhood, two Hindu men from a nearby tailor shop attacked them. “Why are Muslim women roaming around? Let’s finish them…” said one of them holding Wahidabano down, while the other stabbed her twice in the back on 4 March 2002.
Eight years later, I walked Wahidabano home after yet another wasted day in court – her case was adjourned because one of the two accused did not show up. We quietly passed the tailor shop where she was attacked. With the help of a good defense lawyer, the accused managed to lessen the charges against them, and stalled the trial by not showing up in court. If one showed up, but then the other would stop coming for the next six months.
After Wahidabano was stabbed, her husband took her to a private hospital, and later went to the local police station to file a complaint. The police refused to register a complaint and threatened to break his legs if he came again. He tried again, this time with the help of a Muslim army officer patrolling the neighbourhood. When the army officer reprimanded the police for refusing to register a complaint, they replied, “We have orders from above”. They eventually forced the police to accept their complaint, but after a decade the trial is still going on.
I accompanied Wahidabano to the Ahmedabad Metropolitan Court in September 2010. The man who knifed her did not come (his lawyer was present), but the other accused came to court. The “courtroom” was a large room with an elevated table and chair for the judge and five rows of cheap plastic chairs arranged in front of him. In one corner of the room, heaps of rotting and dusty files lay next to an abandoned table and chair. On the other side, a large metal cabinet was filled with legal manuals. The judge’s chair sat at the head of the room like a prop in a play: a high-backed plush red-leather chair. His desk was neatly decorated with small piles of Gujarati and English editions of the Indian Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code.
Wahidabano stood in a corner for her turn to come. I stood with a paralegal outside. The lawyer kept coming to check with us whether our case had been announced. Suddenly, the clerk announced Wahidabano’s name and somewhere from the deep hollow of the room she walked up a few steps to appear before the judge. Next, the clerk shouted two names, but only one man stood up from his seat. The defense lawyer handed the judge a sheet of paper, and the judge adjourned the court to meet again next month. Three years later, nothing had changed. When I last checked in February 2013, the case was still being adjourned because the knife used to stab Wahidabano has not been transferred to it from another court.
The Case of Amalibhai
Or take Amalibhai’s case. In 2002, three Hindu boys stabbed Amalibhai, a Muslim factory worker, when he returned home from the relief camp to get his bicycle. Eight years later, I saw three visibly poor boys laughing and joking outside the court. Some hours later, we entered the courtroom and sat in front of the judge. Unrepentant and surly, the boys sat in the front row. One of them kept checking to see if their lawyer had come to court.
As soon as the clerk announced our case number, the judge deferred the matter to accommodate a more urgent matter. Meanwhile, the defence lawyer approached Amalibhai’s lawyer to offer “compromise” money. He even approached the judge and whispered a few words as soon as the clerk placed a heap of case papers on the desk of the judge. On cue, the judge began a short speech on the value of compromise (samjhauta).
He said it is better if Amalibhai “reconciles” with the accused. Of course, he went on to say
it is my duty to conduct the trial and give a judgment. But then someone will appeal and it will go to the High Court, and then after another appeal it will go to the Supreme Court. All this will mean unnecessary running around for you, so isn’t it better that you simply live together with the accused?
Then he conferred with both lawyers and adjourned the court and “gave” Amalibhai a month to decide to make up his mind.
Outside the court Amalibhai and I chatted over a cup of tea. The judge’s speech presupposed that punishment was unlikely and presented a narrative of how the legal process would only defer a wasteful and overwhelming process. Between sips of hot sweet tea, Amalibhai said, “What do you expect from the judge? He’s a Hindu, he’s their judge.”
Hunting Witness and Evidence
Case after case presented structural contradictions: “Why did the survivor not go to the police station opposite her house to lodge a FIR?” (Because the policemen in charge of the police station told the mob in front of her house to burn the residents alive). How can the survivor identify the accused in court if he was attacked by a mob?” (So the survivor can either remain and be killed or survive and be an unreliable witness?) “Why is the survivor presenting the names of the accused after so many years?” (Because the police refused to write the names of the accused in 2002) – these are the stage directions of the farce being performed in Gujarat. Most survivors cannot say in court what is written in brackets here, and if they say it, then the judge points out the witnesses are “inconsistent” and “unreliable”.
Of course, there have been landmark convictions as well: Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi, and the Bilkis Bano sexual violence case. But I pose a different question: How many people must be butchered, violated, abused and humiliated before the evidence against perpetrators becomes prosecutable? And these would never be possible without the courage and perseverance of non-governmental organisations and human rights activists. Unfortunately, convictions are exceptions in the aftermath of Gujarat 2002 and similar events of mass violence in India; only a few trials held in the glare of the television camera or involving heinous crimes that symbolise the horror of the event (like Naroda Patiya) lead to convictions. Apart from these rare media trials, or Supreme Court monitored cases, the criminal justice system in India only serves to humiliate the survivor of mass violence in India.
Scholars of violence, especially massacres, pogroms and genocide, show that part of the evidence of such events is that there is no evidence (Pandey 2006; Brass 2011). This is not merely a clever turn of phrase; it is well known that the judicial aftermath of Gujarat is entangled in allegations like the destruction of records, manipulation of trials through public prosecutors, mass police refusal to record FIRs, and even the presence of politicians in the police control room.
So let us not reduce the problem of accountability in the aftermath of mass violence to an alleged meeting in a chief minister’s house during which he allegedly ordered the police to look away. Mass public violence against a community can be rendered invisible only with the complicity of ordinary people, state officials, and in some cases, even survivors. This raises questions beyond law and evidence: What encourages people to look away and refuse to feel the pain and humiliation of people who are, in the end, their neighbours?
This public sentiment underneath majoritarian violence does not take away from what I find to be an even more fundamental truth about Gujarat 2002. Over the last decade, I heard countless stories of Muslim survivors – men, women and children who lived to tell the tale. And almost always they have survived because some unnamed Hindu hid them in his house while the mob hunted for them outside; Hindu women who dressed Muslim friends in “saris” and brought them home; or an anonymous neighbour brought them hot meals while they spent a night hiding in the field – this too is the story of Gujarat 2002.
The Legal and the Ethical
In an EPW article two years ago, Christophe Jaffrelot meticulously outlined the judicial aftermath of Gujarat 2002 to make the important point that
the failure of the rule of law – whose magnitude will have to be qualified since proceedings are still underway – lie in the grip that Hindu nationalism (as an ideology and a political movement) holds over the state machinery (including the judicial system) in Gujarat and the central authority’s relative powerlessness (both at the executive and judicial level) to counteract it (Jaffrelot 2012).
But this diagnosis of the “failure of law” keeps intact the distinction between the Hindu nationalist movement and the “the state”.
What if this separation between (rational) state and (communal) society is untenable in contemporary Gujarat? Recent studies of the Gujarat pogrom show that everyday political mediations, including citizens’ access to basic services is inseparable from the networks and agents that instigate and organise riots. For instance, Ward Berenschot argues that “Gujarat’s communal violence can be seen as an outcome of the particular way in which the state has come to be embedded in Gujarat’s society” (2011).
In the light of my fieldwork which included visiting victims’ homes, talking to ordinary people, and attending dozens of low-profile trials, I believe that Gujarat 2002 was not in fact a breakdown of law and order but a hybrid initiative led by militant Hindu nationalist organisations, nurtured by state officials, and normalised by the general public.
Modi’s politics of Gujarati pride and asmita has allowed him to further entangle his own culpability with Gujarat’s honour. Is it surprising that Gujarat’s honour flows from legal impunity, not justice? I have attempted to follow two separate but related issues in this essay: the structural (or legal) follows the activist and civil society argument that Indian law, jurists, and courts are not equipped to deal with mass violence of the kind witnessed in Delhi 1984, Gujarat 2002, and Kandhamal 2008. But the other question is ethical – what do we do when the law repeats rather than addresses communal violence?
In this context, our common sense world turns upside down, and the language of “proof” and “evidence” becomes the language of the perpetrator. The recent dismissal of Jafri’s case reflects our lack of both a language and institution to address the consequences of impunity in the aftermath of mass violence. The “Gujarat model” has an important lesson: We cannot derive our ethical concepts from legal judgments (De la Durantaye 2009).
In Conclusion
It is not surprising that Modi and his supporters would like us to confuse the ethical and the legal – our courts are unequipped to handle events like 1984 and 2002, and can at best castigate or express frustration at their own limits or bemoan the infrastructure of impunity, of which, ironically, they are an inextricable part. But the political and ethical question cannot be derived from the legal, and must be thought of independently. Legal impunity raises uncomfortable questions with no ready-made one-size-fits-all answers. How do we deal with a popularly elected anti-minority regime? What does Gujarat 2002 say about the quality of India’s democracy? But with the elections upon us, like the judges in Gujarat, we must make a decision.
References
Berenschot, Ward (2011): Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State (New York: Columbia University Press).
Brass, Paul R (2011): The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle: University of Washington Press).
De la Durantaye, Leland (2009): Giorgio Agamben a Critical Introduction (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press), p 253. [Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben says the confusion between the ethical and the legal is a common mistake while thinking of the Holocaust and the concentration camp.]
Express News Service (2013): “Clean Chit to Modi: Magistrate Relied on SIT Lawyer Arguments”, The Indian Express, 28 December, available at http://indianexpress.com/article/news-archive/web/clean-chit-to-modi-mag..., accessed on 6 March 2014.
Jaffrelot, Christophe (2012): “Gujarat 2002: What Justice for the Victims”, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 47, No 8, p 77, 25 February, available at http://www.epw.in/special-articles/gujarat-2002-what-justice-victims.html, accessed on 6 March 2014.
Pandey, Gyanendra (2006): Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press).
Venkatesan, J (2013): “SIT Stand Vindicated: Raghavan”, The Hindu, 27 December, available at http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/sit-stand-vindicated-raghavan/arti..., accessed on 6 March 2014.
After the Law: Notes on Gujarat 2002
by Moyukh Chatterjee
The lower courts of Gujarat are rife with narratives of people being denied justice in Gujarat 2002 riot cases. In such an environment only the naïve or self-blinded will equate the failure of "prosecutable evidence" as the last word on justice in Gujarat.
Moyukh Chatterjee (moyukhchatterjee@gmail.com) is a doctoral student at the Department of Anthropology, Emory University, the US.
This article is based on my doctoral fieldwork in lower courts of Ahmedabad between 2010 and 2013. Since 2002, I have conducted 29 months of research tracking the work of NGOs, lawyers, and activists in the aftermath of the Gujarat pogrom.
An Ahmedabad Metropolitan Court recently dismissed Zakia Jafri’s petition challenging the Special Investigation Team’s (SIT) closure report. The verdict has been predictably hailed in television studios as Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s much-awaited acquittal. While Modi tweeted “truth alone triumphs”, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokespersons and the “Modi for PM” juggernaut have led us to believe that this verdict is the final word on justice in Gujarat 2002. As the chest thumping and chants of “we were right all along” die down, we can finally ask: What does this verdict really mean? Can a legal verdict, however historical or ordinary, be the basis of our politics? And in the wake of Delhi 1984, Bombay 1992, Kandhamal 2008, what justifies our expectations of “justice”?
R K Raghavan, the head of the SIT told The Hindu that “I am happy SIT’s stand has been vindicated” (Venkatesan 2013). Broadly, the SIT concluded that there is no “prosecutable evidence” against Narendra Modi and 59 others in the Gulbarg Society massacre, and recommended the closure of the case, which was subsequently challenged by Zakia Jafri in 2013.
The recent verdict in Ahmedabad dismisses Jafri’s petition on largely the same grounds as the SIT: there is no prosecutable evidence (Express News Service 2013). However the legal battle will not end with this verdict. Zakia Jafri’s legal team will appeal this decision, and the case will continue. However, while we await the final decision, it seems to me that there is much more at stake than a question of law. While the Congress and the BJP, along with mainstream media make this a referendum about one politician, let us understand this verdict beyond the vilification or celebration of Modi.
What we must guard against is the unspoken strategy of the perpetrators and champions of Gujarat 2002 – to conflate and ultimately collapse the distinction between the ethical and the legal in the aftermath of mass violence. Ironically, it was Atal Behari Vajpayee who introduced an ethical dimension to Modi’s responsibility, by asking him to follow rajdharma on national television. The issue of justice and responsibility in the aftermath of pogroms like Gujarat 2002 or Delhi 1984 raise questions about Indian democracy and legality that cannot be wished away by focusing on Modi’s individual culpability. The continuing judicial blindness to mass violence in India warns us that we cannot let our political and ethical choices be determined by legal decisions alone.
Beyond Modi
One way to expand on our understanding of justice in Gujarat 2002 beyond Modi is to look outside high profile cases like Gulbarg Society and focus instead on ordinary courts and everyday proceedings. It is important to contextualise the recent verdict and the SIT’s closure report as part of a larger map of impunity in the aftermath of mass violence in Gujarat 2002. While the media, academics, and activists largely focus on the most heinous and sensational cases – like Best Bakery and Gulbarg Society – an ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2013 revealed how lower courts in Gujarat routinely acquit perpetrators involved in 2002-related crimes.
Local and national media often skip over these ordinary trials where prosecution witnesses turn hostile en masse, police investigation presents evidence with glaring inconsistencies and contradictions for the defense to exploit during the trial, and in the end the judge mechanically “applies the law” only to dismiss survivors’ testimony and acquit the accused.
While this is not true for every case, anyone spending even half a day attending “ordinary” trials of 2002-related cases in the lower courts will not be surprised that the SIT found “no prosecutable evidence” against the accused in the Gulbarg Society case. Since 2002, I have engaged with Survivors, lawyers and activists in Ahmedabad to understand this everyday process of impunity – how does it work and how does it force us to think beyond Gujarat?
My findings suggest that the political-juridical structure of impunity in contemporary India does not stop at the Gujarat border, nor can it be understood as a sudden and spectacular breakdown of law and order; it is instead a continuation of politics-as-usual.
The Paradox of Gujarat 2002
On a blazing hot summer afternoon in Ahmedabad, I listened to a conversation between a human rights worker and a criminal lawyer on the legal aftermath of Gujarat 2002. “But is there any hope of justice in Gujarat?” asked the activist. Without batting an eyelid, the lawyer replied, “Look, all criminal offences are formally against the state, but if the state is a party to the crimes, then where do the complainants turn?” This pithy summary by the lawyer conceals several paradoxes.
The National Human Rights Commission’s (NHRC) suo motu investigation as early as 1 March 2002 reported violence continuing “in varying degrees for over two months”. Even as late as 24 April 2002 the NHRC said that the victims were facing difficulties in recording FIRs with the police. Similarly, the Concerned Citizens Tribunal’s landmark two-volume publication of “Crimes against Humanity”, and subsequent Supreme Court decisions to reopen nearly 2,000 criminal cases summarily closed by the Gujarat police and transfer two major trials (Best Bakery and Bilkis Bano) outside Gujarat show that the paradox of justice in Gujarat is a public secret: the production and destruction of evidence is indistinguishable in the context of state-sanctioned mass violence. In the light of these independent commissions and the collective testimony of survivors, only the naïve or self-blinded will equate the failure of “prosecutable evidence” as the last word on justice in Gujarat.
In the background, lower courts in Gujarat have been acquitting hundreds of “riot” cases. I attended these performances of impunity during my doctoral fieldwork in 2010-11. Sitting in the last row of different lower courts for over a year, I watched an elaborate farce being performed in the court: voluminous files were dutifully opened, read and closed; the public prosecutor marked attendance on each court date even if the accused never showed up; the judge gave the survivor an opportunity to tell her story (sometimes after eight years); the accused stood sheepishly in one corner; policemen took off their hat before entering the witness stand and parroted meaningless words – and in the end, after a decade of adjournments and delay, the judge dismissed survivors’ testimony as inconsistent and unreliable.
A Case of Impunity – Wahidabano
Wahidabano, a middle-aged Muslim woman and her friend stepped out of their house during a brief break after five days of curfew in Ahmedabad. They needed medicines from a nearby dispensary, barely a five-minute walk from their house. While coming back from the dispensary, close, but still outside the gate of their Muslim neighbourhood, two Hindu men from a nearby tailor shop attacked them. “Why are Muslim women roaming around? Let’s finish them…” said one of them holding Wahidabano down, while the other stabbed her twice in the back on 4 March 2002.
Eight years later, I walked Wahidabano home after yet another wasted day in court – her case was adjourned because one of the two accused did not show up. We quietly passed the tailor shop where she was attacked. With the help of a good defense lawyer, the accused managed to lessen the charges against them, and stalled the trial by not showing up in court. If one showed up, but then the other would stop coming for the next six months.
After Wahidabano was stabbed, her husband took her to a private hospital, and later went to the local police station to file a complaint. The police refused to register a complaint and threatened to break his legs if he came again. He tried again, this time with the help of a Muslim army officer patrolling the neighbourhood. When the army officer reprimanded the police for refusing to register a complaint, they replied, “We have orders from above”. They eventually forced the police to accept their complaint, but after a decade the trial is still going on.
I accompanied Wahidabano to the Ahmedabad Metropolitan Court in September 2010. The man who knifed her did not come (his lawyer was present), but the other accused came to court. The “courtroom” was a large room with an elevated table and chair for the judge and five rows of cheap plastic chairs arranged in front of him. In one corner of the room, heaps of rotting and dusty files lay next to an abandoned table and chair. On the other side, a large metal cabinet was filled with legal manuals. The judge’s chair sat at the head of the room like a prop in a play: a high-backed plush red-leather chair. His desk was neatly decorated with small piles of Gujarati and English editions of the Indian Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code.
Wahidabano stood in a corner for her turn to come. I stood with a paralegal outside. The lawyer kept coming to check with us whether our case had been announced. Suddenly, the clerk announced Wahidabano’s name and somewhere from the deep hollow of the room she walked up a few steps to appear before the judge. Next, the clerk shouted two names, but only one man stood up from his seat. The defense lawyer handed the judge a sheet of paper, and the judge adjourned the court to meet again next month. Three years later, nothing had changed. When I last checked in February 2013, the case was still being adjourned because the knife used to stab Wahidabano has not been transferred to it from another court.
The Case of Amalibhai
Or take Amalibhai’s case. In 2002, three Hindu boys stabbed Amalibhai, a Muslim factory worker, when he returned home from the relief camp to get his bicycle. Eight years later, I saw three visibly poor boys laughing and joking outside the court. Some hours later, we entered the courtroom and sat in front of the judge. Unrepentant and surly, the boys sat in the front row. One of them kept checking to see if their lawyer had come to court.
As soon as the clerk announced our case number, the judge deferred the matter to accommodate a more urgent matter. Meanwhile, the defence lawyer approached Amalibhai’s lawyer to offer “compromise” money. He even approached the judge and whispered a few words as soon as the clerk placed a heap of case papers on the desk of the judge. On cue, the judge began a short speech on the value of compromise (samjhauta).
He said it is better if Amalibhai “reconciles” with the accused. Of course, he went on to say
it is my duty to conduct the trial and give a judgment. But then someone will appeal and it will go to the High Court, and then after another appeal it will go to the Supreme Court. All this will mean unnecessary running around for you, so isn’t it better that you simply live together with the accused?
Then he conferred with both lawyers and adjourned the court and “gave” Amalibhai a month to decide to make up his mind.
Outside the court Amalibhai and I chatted over a cup of tea. The judge’s speech presupposed that punishment was unlikely and presented a narrative of how the legal process would only defer a wasteful and overwhelming process. Between sips of hot sweet tea, Amalibhai said, “What do you expect from the judge? He’s a Hindu, he’s their judge.”
Hunting Witness and Evidence
Case after case presented structural contradictions: “Why did the survivor not go to the police station opposite her house to lodge a FIR?” (Because the policemen in charge of the police station told the mob in front of her house to burn the residents alive). How can the survivor identify the accused in court if he was attacked by a mob?” (So the survivor can either remain and be killed or survive and be an unreliable witness?) “Why is the survivor presenting the names of the accused after so many years?” (Because the police refused to write the names of the accused in 2002) – these are the stage directions of the farce being performed in Gujarat. Most survivors cannot say in court what is written in brackets here, and if they say it, then the judge points out the witnesses are “inconsistent” and “unreliable”.
Of course, there have been landmark convictions as well: Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi, and the Bilkis Bano sexual violence case. But I pose a different question: How many people must be butchered, violated, abused and humiliated before the evidence against perpetrators becomes prosecutable? And these would never be possible without the courage and perseverance of non-governmental organisations and human rights activists. Unfortunately, convictions are exceptions in the aftermath of Gujarat 2002 and similar events of mass violence in India; only a few trials held in the glare of the television camera or involving heinous crimes that symbolise the horror of the event (like Naroda Patiya) lead to convictions. Apart from these rare media trials, or Supreme Court monitored cases, the criminal justice system in India only serves to humiliate the survivor of mass violence in India.
Scholars of violence, especially massacres, pogroms and genocide, show that part of the evidence of such events is that there is no evidence (Pandey 2006; Brass 2011). This is not merely a clever turn of phrase; it is well known that the judicial aftermath of Gujarat is entangled in allegations like the destruction of records, manipulation of trials through public prosecutors, mass police refusal to record FIRs, and even the presence of politicians in the police control room.
So let us not reduce the problem of accountability in the aftermath of mass violence to an alleged meeting in a chief minister’s house during which he allegedly ordered the police to look away. Mass public violence against a community can be rendered invisible only with the complicity of ordinary people, state officials, and in some cases, even survivors. This raises questions beyond law and evidence: What encourages people to look away and refuse to feel the pain and humiliation of people who are, in the end, their neighbours?
This public sentiment underneath majoritarian violence does not take away from what I find to be an even more fundamental truth about Gujarat 2002. Over the last decade, I heard countless stories of Muslim survivors – men, women and children who lived to tell the tale. And almost always they have survived because some unnamed Hindu hid them in his house while the mob hunted for them outside; Hindu women who dressed Muslim friends in “saris” and brought them home; or an anonymous neighbour brought them hot meals while they spent a night hiding in the field – this too is the story of Gujarat 2002.
The Legal and the Ethical
In an EPW article two years ago, Christophe Jaffrelot meticulously outlined the judicial aftermath of Gujarat 2002 to make the important point that
the failure of the rule of law – whose magnitude will have to be qualified since proceedings are still underway – lie in the grip that Hindu nationalism (as an ideology and a political movement) holds over the state machinery (including the judicial system) in Gujarat and the central authority’s relative powerlessness (both at the executive and judicial level) to counteract it (Jaffrelot 2012).
But this diagnosis of the “failure of law” keeps intact the distinction between the Hindu nationalist movement and the “the state”.
What if this separation between (rational) state and (communal) society is untenable in contemporary Gujarat? Recent studies of the Gujarat pogrom show that everyday political mediations, including citizens’ access to basic services is inseparable from the networks and agents that instigate and organise riots. For instance, Ward Berenschot argues that “Gujarat’s communal violence can be seen as an outcome of the particular way in which the state has come to be embedded in Gujarat’s society” (2011).
In the light of my fieldwork which included visiting victims’ homes, talking to ordinary people, and attending dozens of low-profile trials, I believe that Gujarat 2002 was not in fact a breakdown of law and order but a hybrid initiative led by militant Hindu nationalist organisations, nurtured by state officials, and normalised by the general public.
Modi’s politics of Gujarati pride and asmita has allowed him to further entangle his own culpability with Gujarat’s honour. Is it surprising that Gujarat’s honour flows from legal impunity, not justice? I have attempted to follow two separate but related issues in this essay: the structural (or legal) follows the activist and civil society argument that Indian law, jurists, and courts are not equipped to deal with mass violence of the kind witnessed in Delhi 1984, Gujarat 2002, and Kandhamal 2008. But the other question is ethical – what do we do when the law repeats rather than addresses communal violence?
In this context, our common sense world turns upside down, and the language of “proof” and “evidence” becomes the language of the perpetrator. The recent dismissal of Jafri’s case reflects our lack of both a language and institution to address the consequences of impunity in the aftermath of mass violence. The “Gujarat model” has an important lesson: We cannot derive our ethical concepts from legal judgments (De la Durantaye 2009).
In Conclusion
It is not surprising that Modi and his supporters would like us to confuse the ethical and the legal – our courts are unequipped to handle events like 1984 and 2002, and can at best castigate or express frustration at their own limits or bemoan the infrastructure of impunity, of which, ironically, they are an inextricable part. But the political and ethical question cannot be derived from the legal, and must be thought of independently. Legal impunity raises uncomfortable questions with no ready-made one-size-fits-all answers. How do we deal with a popularly elected anti-minority regime? What does Gujarat 2002 say about the quality of India’s democracy? But with the elections upon us, like the judges in Gujarat, we must make a decision.
References
Berenschot, Ward (2011): Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State (New York: Columbia University Press).
Brass, Paul R (2011): The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle: University of Washington Press).
De la Durantaye, Leland (2009): Giorgio Agamben a Critical Introduction (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press), p 253. [Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben says the confusion between the ethical and the legal is a common mistake while thinking of the Holocaust and the concentration camp.]
Express News Service (2013): “Clean Chit to Modi: Magistrate Relied on SIT Lawyer Arguments”, The Indian Express, 28 December, available at http://indianexpress.com/article/news-archive/web/clean-chit-to-modi-mag..., accessed on 6 March 2014.
Jaffrelot, Christophe (2012): “Gujarat 2002: What Justice for the Victims”, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 47, No 8, p 77, 25 February, available at http://www.epw.in/special-articles/gujarat-2002-what-justice-victims.html, accessed on 6 March 2014.
Pandey, Gyanendra (2006): Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press).
Venkatesan, J (2013): “SIT Stand Vindicated: Raghavan”, The Hindu, 27 December, available at http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/sit-stand-vindicated-raghavan/arti..., accessed on 6 March 2014.
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