India: Bench and Bigotry - the questionable elevation of Victoria Gowri as a judge | Editorial in The Hindu, Feb 9, 2023

Bench and Bigotry - Editorial in The Hindu, February 9, 2023

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/bench-and-bigotry-the-hindu-editorial-on-advocate-victoria-gowris-appointment-as-madras-high-court-judge/article66486035.ece

India: Meghalaya high court judgment violates the provisions of the citizenship law and makes a case for India as a country of Hindus

Lessons in bigotry
The Meghalaya high court judge’s judgment was legally flawed and historically misleading. It violates the provisions of the citizenship law and makes a case for India as a country of, and for, Hindus.

Written by Faizan Mustafa | Published: December 18, 2018

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/sr-sen-meghalaya-high-court-judgsecular-pm-modi-judiciary-lessons-in-bigotry-5498113/

India: BJP has already appointed RSS 'pracharaks' in key positions in educational institutions, it is now attempting to instal RSS pracharaks or people of their thinking in the judiciary

Govt attempting to appoint RSS people in judiciary: Kapil Sibal

Kapil Sibal alleged that while the BJP has already appointed RSS 'pracharaks' in key positions in educational institutions of the country, it is now attempting to instal RSS pracharaks or people of their thinking in the judiciary.

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/govt-attempting-to-appoint-rss-people-in-judiciary-kapil-sibal-5117691/

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

1. Dilip Simeon (PADS)
2. Dipak Dholakia
3. Mukul Dube
4. Battini Rao, Convener, People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (PADS)
5. Subhash Gatade, New Socialist Initiative
6. Manisha Sethi
7. Ovais Sultan Khan
8. Harsh Kapoor (PADS)
9. Varsha Mehta
10. Ram Puniyani, All India Secular Forum
11. Manoranjan Mohanty
12. Ann Ninan Journalist, Noida
13. Suhas Borker, Working Group on Alternative Strategies
14. Javed Anand, Citizens for Justice and Peace Mumbai
15. Neelima Sharma
16. Shamsul Islam
17. Harsh Mander, Aman Biradari, Delhi
18. Jawad Mohammed, Chennai
19. Kareem Sait, Chennai
20. Rameza Kareem
21. Darryl DMonte, Journalist, Mumbai
22. Nandini Sundar
23. Professor D N Jha, Formerly at Delhi University
24. Sumi Krishna, Independent researcher, Bangalore
25. Chitra Joshi, Delhi University
26. John Dayal, New Delhi
27. Badri Raina, Delhi
28. Prakash N. Shah, Editor, Nireekshak, Ahmedabad
29. Anand Patwardhan, Mumbai
30. Sukla Sen, EKTA (Committee for Communal Amity), Mumbai
31. Kishor V Thaker, Ahmedabad
32. Warisha Farasat, Advocate
33. Rabin Chakraborty, Kolkata
34. Salil Biswas, Kolkata
35. Rana P Behal
36. Jyoti Punwani, journalist, mumbai
37. Monisha Behal
38. Suman Keshari
39. Dr. Zaheer Ahmed Sayeed, Chennai
40. Zaffarullah Khan
41. Ritu Dewan, Executive Director, Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai
42. Sagar Rabari, Ahmedabad
43. Prof Pritam Singh, Oxford, UK
44. Kamayani Bali Mahabal, Feminist and Human Rights Activist, Mumbai
45. Rashmi Varma, London
46. Shobha Aggarwal, Advocate & Jt. Secretary, PIL Watch Group, New Delhi
47. Kasim Sait Progressive-Interactions, Chennai
48. Xavier Dias, Ranchi, Jharkhand
49. Dr. Mary Mathai
50. Madhusree Mukerjee, author
51. Jairus Banaji
52. Nisha Biswas, Kolkata
53. Debdatta Chakrabarti, USA
54. Teesta Setalvad
55. Sumanta Banerjee
56. Sanjay Kumar, People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism, New Delhi
57. Mohammad Imran, NRI SAHI, Lucknow, India and NJ, USA
58. Virginia Saldanha, Secretary ICWM
59. Tapan Bose, South Asia Forum for Human Rights New Delhi
60. Ania Loomba, Delhi and Philadelphia
61. Pushpa Achanta, Independent journalist, Bangalore
62. Rohini Hensman, Writer and researcher, Bombay
63. N.D. Pancholi
64. Kumar Prashant Gandhian worker/Thinker Mumbai
65. Kavita Panjabi, Jadavpur University
66. Mahmood Farooqui, Writer, Delhi
67. Khalid Azam, United States
68. Fiaz A. Khan
69. Sujay Basu, Kolkata
70. Divya Gupta, Delhi
71. Ashish Lahiri, Pavlov Institute, Kolkata 

India: How Clean Is the “Clean Chit” to Modi

The Citizen (India) - 10 february 2014

by Harsh Mander

To pave the way for BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani’s national prime ministerial ambitions, the trail of blood which followed his Rath Yatra in 1989 and his signal contribution to the movement to violently pull down the Babri Masjid in 1992 were sought to be substantially erased from public memory by a systematic campaign of his re-invention as a moderate statesman. A similar exercise is feverishly under way to whitewash the hawkish and violent past of the BJP’s new prime ministerial hopeful Narendra Modi. Except for his core Hindu nationalist constituency, he is being reinvented as the messiah of market growth.

But the erasure of Mr Modi’s role in the brutal communal massacre of 2002 in Gujarat is even harder to accomplish. This is partly because until his meteoric rise on the national stage, he was proud rather than apologetic about the carnage which was accomplished during his stewardship. He led a ‘gaurav yatra’ or ‘procession of pride’ in the aftermath of the carnage which swept him to power. In his speeches then and over many years, he often taunted the Muslim people for their large families, and alleged their role in violence, terror and sympathy in Pakistan. He alluded to his own ‘chhapan chhaati’ or chest of 58 inches, suggesting his exceptional manly courage in taming the ‘enemy within’. He resolutely refused to express regret for the carnage, until again when propelled on the national stage, when he awkwardly said that if the car he was riding in (but not driving) ran over even a puppy, he would feel anguished.

Given his own discourse until recently of barely suppressed triumphalism surrounding the carnage of 2002, his transition to secular statesmanship required an exceptionally wilful flight of fancy among those who support him. Leaders of industry like Ratan Tata, the Ambani brothers and Sunil Mittal applaud his leadership for market growth, rejecting the idea that his national ambitions are disqualified by his alleged role in one of the most brutal communal massacres after Independence. They counsel that we should focus on the ‘big picture’ of growth, as though the violent suppression of minorities is a minor blemish. Many European ambassadors are lining up at his door in the hope of participating in Gujarat’s growth story. All of them need a fig-leaf to cover the nakedness of their choices.

This fig-leaf came with the closure report filed by the Supreme Court appointed SIT (Special Investigation Team) which absolved Narendra Modi of any role in the carnage, concluding there was no ‘prosecutable evidence’ against the Chief Minister. These findings were endorsed by the ‘clean-chit’ given the lower court which heard Zakia Jafri’s petition of April 15, 2013 alleging a high-level conspiracy to manipulate the Godhra tragedy to organise and fuel the carnage which followed. The first name among the 59 accused in Zakia Jafri’s petition was of Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Zakia’s lawyer Mihir Desai argued in the court that the political head of the State, the Home Ministry and the administration were in full knowledge of and allowed the ‘build-up of aggressive and communal sentiments, violent mobilisation, including carrying of arms, and a general outpouring against the minority community…’ Relying on documents collected by the SIT itself, Zakia’s petition attempted to establish that there was a conspiracy at the senior-most levels of the state administration not just to generate hatred against Muslims, but also to target Muslim people and their property and religious places and ‘aid and abet this process by acts and omissions of persons liable under law to act otherwise.’

How much does the SIT’s closure report and the lower court’s ‘clean chit’ for Mr Modi really free him from any taint of the Gujarat carnage? At best, these suggest that there is not irrefutable evidence that the Chief Minister actually directed the slaughter of Muslims be allowed to continue, giving free rein to enraged ‘Hindus’ to violently vent their rage. The SIT chose not to give credence to the statements of one serving and one retired police officer. But Manoj Mitta in his carefully researched new book ‘The Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra‘, demonstrates that the SIT treated its influential first accused with kid gloves, never registering an FIR against him, nor pinning him down on a number of questions such as his public statement on 27 Feb 2012 that the train burning in Godhra was a ‘pre-planned inhuman collective violent act of terrorism’, a claim which has not been borne out in the courts, and which fuelled public anger in the acts of mass revenge against Muslims which followed. It likewise did not question him about his claim that he first heard about the Gulbarg apartments massacre in which Ehsan Jafri lost his life at 8 in the evening of 28 Feb 2002, many hours after the slaughter, even though he was closely monitoring the events at the Circuit House Annexe just a few kilometres away from the Gulbarg apartments.

Senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, amicus curie appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate allegations of Narendra Modi’s complicity in the Gujarat riots, also disagreed with the conclusions of the SIT. His opinion reported to the Supreme Court is that ‘the offences which can be made out against Shri Modi, at this prima facie stage’ include ‘promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion and acts prejudicial to (the) maintenance of harmony.’ He believes also that there were grounds not to dismiss the version of suspended police officer Sanjiv Bhatt out of hand by the SIT, that on February 27, 2002, hours after 58 passengers were set on fire in a train near the Godhra station, Mr Modi held a meeting at his residence with senior police officers and told them that Hindus should be allowed to ‘vent their anger.’ He states: ‘I disagree with the conclusion of the SIT that Shri Bhatt should be disbelieved at this stage itself. On the other hand, I am of the view that Shri Bhatt needs to be put through the test of cross-examination, as do the others who deny his presence’.

Mr Ramachandran also points to evidence that two senior ministers were placed in police control rooms on February 28, as the riots raged in Ahmedabad and across the state. The SIT did not find evidence that they interfered with the police’s independent functioning, but ‘There is the possibility that the very presence of these two ministers had a dampening effect on the senior police officials.’ He concludes, ‘While there is no direct material to show how and when the message of the Chief Minister was conveyed to the two ministers, the very presence of political personalities unconnected with the Home Portfolio at the Police Control Rooms is circumstantial evidence of the Chief Minister directing, requesting or allowing them to be present.’

Chief Minister Modi’s appointment of MLA Maya Kodnani as his Minister for Women and Child Welfare after she was charged with leading the mob which brutally killed more than a 100 people, including women and children, in Naroda Patiya, further suggests his active complicity and endorsement of the carnage. Maya Kodnani was subsequently convicted and punished with imprisonment for life for the mass hate crimes.

However, the guilt of Mr Modi in the carnage of 2002 should not hinge in the end on proving beyond doubt that he directed police officers to allow Hindus to ‘vent their anger’, or that his Ministers were obeying his commands by interfering in independent police functioning or leading murderous mobs. The fact that the carnage continued for not just days but weeks should be evidence of the criminal complicity of senior state authorities in the carnage, coupled with his intemperate statements and the parading of bodies of people killed in the train which further inflamed public anger. Similar guilt should be attached to those who allowed other communal carnages to continue, whether on the streets of Delhi in 1984 and Mumbai in 1992-93 or the killing fields of Nellie in 1983 and Bhagalpur in 1989.

The ‘clean chit’ given to Mr Modi is at best a technical clearance in the absence of cast-iron evidence that he actively and explicitly directed the carnage, although even this absolving of his direct guilt is disputed by experts. But there can be no doubt of his grave culpability for inflaming sectarian passions by holding Muslims guilty for an offence without evidence, and for the openly partisan actions of his government which facilitated the continuance of the murderous carnage for many dark days in 2002.

India - 2002 riots: 'Ethnic cleansing, genocide are foreign terms...' says Ahmedabad magistrate

2002 riots: 'Ethnic cleansing, genocide are foreign terms... cannot be considered'
Satish Jha : Ahmedabad, Fri Dec 27 2013

In her petition challenging the clean chit given by a special investigation team to Narendra Modi and others in the Gulberg Society killings, Zakia Jafri had used the expressions "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide". On Thursday, Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate B J Ganatra dismissed both "foreign terms" as not applicable while rejecting Zakia's petition.

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/-ethnic-cleansing-and-genocide-are-foreign-terms...-cannot-be-considered-/1212232/

The Importance of Zakia Jafri’s Protest Petition (Teesta Setalvad)

From: EPW, 25 May 2013

It is not often that the battle against aggressive communalism gets sustained and validated through courts of law. This communalism is not just visible in instances of violence but encompasses the sustained mobilisation that precedes the violence, it includes hate speech and writing, as well as the deliberate debilitation of preventive measures of law and order to prevent such violence and protect the lives and properties of citizens. In the south Asian context, majoritarian communalism, fed in an insidious manner by its minority prototype, has the proclivity to deteriorate into authoritarianism, even fascism. Events, past and present, in Sri Lanka, Pakistan or India are testimony to this. In the cases of all countries of the region, communalists of the majority find ready partners with their mirror-images among the minority. For over four decades now, aggressive communalism has made deep inroads into the pillars of the Indian republic, executive, legislature and even the judiciary.

http://www.sacw.net/article4574.html

The case of Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar . . . Regional leverage, not justice (Edit, Hindustan Times)

[Posting of the below material is not an endorsement for Death Penalty in this case. It is one thing to campaign for all prisoners faced with death penalty, but it become quite another when regional or ethnic considerations propel the opponents.]

Hindustan Times
New Delhi, April 15, 2013

Keep politics out of it

The usual Punjabi joie de vivre associated with Baisakhi was missing a bit this year with the talk veering to terrorism and clemency in the case of Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar. He has been convicted of carrying out a bomb blast at the youth Congress Delhi office in September 1993, killing nine people and leaving another 25 injured.

With this, the thorny issue of the Khalistan insurgency which ultimately claimed Indira Gandhi’s life has once again come to the fore. At the Baisakhi celebrations in several places, stalls were seen selling Rs. 100 T-shirts with Bhullar’s face printed on them.

A regional newspaper circulated a petition to save the 48-year-old Bhullar, a Khalistan Liberation Force terrorist, from the gallows. Rallying his party’s supporters, a Shiromani Akali Dal leader brought up the anti-Sikh carnage of 1984 and demanded for judicial consistency.

The Akali Dal has now brought this microcosm of discontent to the Capital. After the Supreme Court rejected Bhullar’s plea for commutation of his death sentence to a life term, the Punjab CM Parkash Singh Badal has met the prime minister, demanding that Bhullar be given clemency.

Bhullar’s case has now begun to resemble that of Afzal Guru. Though a revival of militancy in Punjab is considered unlikely, fears of fringe extremism and a radicalised youth are adding fuel to reports that Bhullar may eventually be hanged secretly. In such a purportedly tense setting, the Akali Dal’s public campaign for a pardon — the party is considering filing a review petition in the Supreme Court — can only do harm to the letter of the law.

Interestingly, the Punjab ruling party is choosing not to concentrate on Bhullar’s mental stability or his custodial suicide attempts. It seems to be emphasising his ethnic identity more.

Similarly, M Karunanidhi used the case of Bhullar to push for a commutation of death sentences awarded to three convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case. The DMK chief’s sympathies, like those of Mr Badal’s, appear to be governed by a desire for regional leverage, not rational justice. The law, by its definition and construct, remains above parochial sympathies. But by adding their two bit worth, political advocates for convicted persons are not doing justice to anyone, least of all the majesty of the law.

Press release by Citizens for Justice and Peace on the protest petition filed by Mrs Zakia Jafri (15 April 2013)

The text of the press release put out by the Trustees of the Citizens for Justice and Peace on the protest petition filed by Mrs Zakia Jafri

Citizens for Justice and Peace

A cold-blooded and clear-cut conspiracy to manipulate the tragic Godhra incident -- from the moment of the terrible news  -- was planned and executed by Chief Minister Mr Narendra Modi (Accused no 1), in close consultation, especially with then Health Minister Mr Ashok Bhatt (accused no. 2) , Urban development minister, IK Jadeja (accused no 3) and other co-accused cabinet colleagues and especially VHP leader Mr Jaydeep Patel (accused no 21), with whom the CM was first in touch with soon after the tragic Godhra incident. This was aimed at ensuring that the tragedy at Godhra becomes ready fuel for the meticulously planned massacre of innocent Muslims all over Gujarat.
Mrs Zakia Ahsan Jafri today filed her Protest Petition praying for the rejection in toto of the SIT final report dated 8.2.2012, making a cogent case for the charge-sheeting of all 59 accused listed in her complaint dated 8.6.2006, beginning with Mr. Modi the chief minister of Gujarat.
The protest petition that runs into 514 pages also has three volumes of annexures and ten CDs. The Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) with its entire legal team has assisted in this painstaking and voluminous exercise.
The Petitioner strongly argues that the Supreme Court appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) had adequate documents and statements to come to a prima facie finding against all the accused. SIT, however decided to cover up the crimes and has gone out of its way to misguide the Court and give a clean chit to the accused.
Phone call records show Mr Modi (accused no 1, A-1) to have been in close touch with Mr Jaideep Patel (A-21) immediately after information of the Godhra tragedy comes in, even before he meets home department officials and ministers. Thereafter, there is a hasty and publicly conducted post-mortem at Godhra, out in the public against all law and procedure while a crowd of VHP workers was present. Mr Modi is present while this happens.
Thereafter, while passions are being cynically stoked, another sinister decision to hand over the dead bodies of Godhra victims to VHP strongman Mr Jaideep Patel (A-21) is taken at a mini-cabinet meeting presided by Mr Modi in Godhra, at which co-accused ministers are physically present. Mr Jaideep Patel too is present at the meeting. Then Godhra district magistrate, Mrs Jayanti Ravi has clearly stated that Mr Jaideep Patel was present at the meeting.
The Protest Petition goes into great detail, relying on documents from the investigation papers, on how the administration and police were deliberately paralysed and neutralised by the conspiracy hatched by Mr Modi, Co-accused, then Gujarat DGP Mr K Chakravari (A-25), then police commissioner, Ahmedabad, PC Pande (A-29), then additional chief secretary, home, Mr Ashok Narayan (A-28) and other key members of the bureaucracy and police who connived as co conspirators in the conspiracy.
Key field reports from the SIB (state intelligence bureau) from all districts were given to the SIT by January 2010, i.e., full three and a half months before the SIT submitted its first investigation report to the Supreme Court on 12.5.2010. These reports reveal a grim ground level reality: gross provocations and bloodthirsty slogans by VHP workers from 4 p.m. onwards on the afternoon of 27.2.2002 (“Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge”, blood for blood) while Mr Modi had still not left for Godhra.
Phone records of the chief minister’s office (CMO) reveal that he went to the airport to catch a helicopter for Godhra via Meghaninagar where the massacre at Gulberg society the next day was organized. Phone records of the CMO also show that after landing in Ahmedabad from Vadodara by aircraft (where he had travelled by road from Godhra on his return journey) too, Mr Modi and officials of the CMO who accompanied him are located at Meghaninagar late evening (mobile phone call records).
Just a week before the Godhra incident, on  22.2.2002, Mr Modi had won in the Rajkot bye-election by a slender margin (a few thousand votes). The glory of his victory had been dimmed with minority votes going heavily against him. Former CPI leader and later Parliamentarian from the Congress, Ahsan Jafri had been an active campaigner against Mr Modi in the bye-election lived in Gulberg Society, in Meghaninagar.
In a sinister furtherance of the conspiracy, the late night meeting at Mr Modi’s residence effectively neutralised the police and administration from doing its constitutional duty. The Protest Petition states that the credibility of the evidence related to the critical 27.2.2002 meeting must be tested during trial and that it was not the job of the investigating agency to pre-judge the issue, acting like a court overstepping its jurisdiction to protect and save powerful accused.

Evidence from Police Control Room (PCR) records submitted by Mr. PC Pande to the SIT after 15.3.2011 reveal cynical and cold-blooded mobilization of RSS workers and VHP men at the Sola Civil hospital from 4 a.m. onwards on 28.2.2002 in aggressive anticipation for the arrival of the dead bodies. Repeated PCR messages, that the home department under Mr. Modi (A-1, who held the home portfolio) and Mr PC Pande (A-21) were trying to conceal, show that both in Ahmedabad and in several locations all over Gujarat crowds were mobilized to aggressively parade bodies with bloodthirsty sloganeering, inciting mobs to attack innocent Muslims.
The then joint police commissioner, Ahmedabad, Mr Shivanand Jha, also an accused in the complaint (A-38), was jurisdictionally in charge of Sola Civil Hospital in Zone 1. As the messages extracted below show, repeated PCR messages desperately ask for bandobast; they speak of the staff and doctors of the hospital being under threat; of a 5,000-6,000 strong mob accompanying the bodies and finally one message also says that “riots have broken out.”

Yet Mr Modi, the entire Home department and the accused under him and individuals accused including Mr Chakravarti (A-25) and Mr PC Pande (A-29) in collaboration with the SIT have strived hard to conceal this evidence. While such aggressive funeral processions were allowed in Ahmedabad, an equally explosive situation prevailed simultaneously in Khedbrahma, Vadodara, Modasa, Dahod, Anand etc. A cynical government under Mr Modi and his co-accused conspirators has done their level best to conceal this evidence.

The PCR records -- that the SIT was trying hard to conceal -- also reveal that while the Ahmedabad police under Mr PC Pande and the home department  under Mr Modi and then MOS, home Mr Gordhan Zadaphiya (A-5 ) had enough forces to escort a VHP leader known for his inciteful slogans, Acharya Giriraj Kishore, from the airport to the Sola Civil hospital to accompany the processionists, shouting filthy hate speeches and murderous slogans. But they did not have enough forces to send to Naroda Patiya where 96 persons were massacred in broad daylight (charge-sheet figures in the Naroda Patiya case, though more deaths have been recorded) and 69 persons at Gulberg society the same day and around the same time aggressive processions were being allowed. Mr Modi allowing and openly supporting the bandh and neutralising his administration, decided to give the RSS, VHP, BD mobs a free run of the Gujarat streets to massacre innocents.
As bad or worse were the provocations and hate speeches that were cynically allowed and encouraged by Mr. Modi and his administration. PCR messages of Ahmedabad and SIB messages from all over the state are testimony to this incendiary mobilisation.

Warnings Ignored (from SIB and PCR messages)

12:30 pm on the 27th February: An SIB officer through fax no 525 communicated to the headquarters that there were reports that some dead bodies would be brought to Kalupur Hospital station in Ahmedabad city. "So communal violence will occur in the city of Ahmedabad; so take preventive action."

Another SIB message numbered as Out/184/02 again warned about communal incidents if bodies were brought to Ahmedabad. "Communal violence will occur in the city. So take preventive action."  The same message said that karsevaks had given explosive interviews to a TV station at Godhra and had threatened to unleash violence against the Muslims.  

At 1:51 hours and again at 1:59 hours on the 28^th February there were panic messages by wireless police vans positioned at Sola Hospital demanding immediate protection from Special Reserve Police platoons and the presence of DCP Zone 1.

Message at 2:44 hours on 28.2.2002: the motor cavalcade has reached Sola Civil Hospital.

Page No. 5790 of Annexure IV, File XIV reveals that at 04:00 am a mob comprising of 3,000 swayamsevaks, that is the members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), had already gathered at the Civil Sola Hospital.

At 7.14 a.m. the PCR van again informs the Police Control Room that a large mob had assembled at the hospital. (Page 5796 of Annexure IV, File XIV of the documents).

Again, another message three minutes later at 7:17 a.m. (Page 5797 of Annexure IV, File XIV of the documents) says that a mob of 500 people was holding up the traffic.

Ten bodies were taken to Ramol, an area near Naroda and a massive funeral rally of over 5,000-6,000 mourners took the bodies to Hatkeshwar crematorium in the afternoon.

At 11:55 am a PCR message is sent out saying that the Hindu mob had become violent and had set a vehicle on fire and was indulging in arson on the highway.

Message at 11.55 a.m. on 28.2.2002 (Page No. 6162 Annexure IV File XV) saying that “Sayyed Saheb, the Protocol Officer had informed Sola-1 that riots have started at Sola civil hospital at the High Court where the dead bodies were brought.”

Again, there is another message with no indication of time (Page No..6172 of 28.2.2002) that states that the officers and employees of the hospital had been surrounded by a 500 strong mob and they could not come out”. The message also made a demand for more security for the civil hospital at Sola.

Annexure IV File XIV- Message No. 5907 and 5925 at 11:58 a.m. on 28.2.2002 shows that when 10 dead bodies were taken from Ramol Jantanagar to the Hatkeshwar cremation ground, a crowd of 5,000-6,000 persons accompanied this procession.

On the morning of 28.2.2002, a SIB message (on page 258 of Annexure III File XIX, message No. Com/538/28/2/02) says that a funeral procession was allowed to take place at Khedbrahma, a town in Sabarkantha district. The message adds that soon after the funeral procession 2 Muslims on their way to Khedbrahma were stabbed and the situation had become very tense.

The subsequent message at page No. 262 of the same file (Annexure III File XIX) mentions that 150 Bajrang Dal workers were on their way from Ayodhya to Khedbrahma.

Another message at page 254 (Annexure III file XIX) – Com/574/2002 sent out at 15.32 p.m. on 28.2.2002 states that one more victim of the tragic train burning at Godhra, Babubhai Harjibhai Patel, resident at Vaghrol, Tal. Vadali in Sabarkantha was brought back and a funeral procession was organised in the town.

Warnings about the deliberate mobilization
At page 365 of Annexure III File XXI( D-166) message No. 73/02 dated 28.2.2002 sent by the ACP(Intelligence) Surat Region to State Intelligence Bureau Headquarters at Gandhinagar, says that between 9-10 a.m. on the morning of 28.2.2002, a meeting was held at Sardar Chowk in Vapi Town where Dinesh Kumar Behri of VHP and Acharya  Brahmbatt of Bajrang Dal , Jawahar Desai of BJP and Vinod Chowdhary of RSS made inflammatory speeches regarding the incident at Godhra and called upon the Hindus to unite.
Another message at page 188 in Annexure III, File XVIII sent at 20:38 hours on the day of the Godhra train burning tragedy, i.e., 27.2.2002, mentions the following: “Dilip Trivedi, the General Secretary of VHP and Joint Secretary Dr. Jaideep Patel and Kaushik Mehta in a Joint Statement issued by them have declared that innocent Ram Bhatt’s have been attacked and hence Gujarat Bandh has been declared. They have also stated that the attack on the Ramsevaks returning from Ayodhya was pre-planned by the Muslims. Innocent ladies were molested and compartments were set on fire and Ramsevaks were burnt alive.”
The joint statement issued by the three senior-most office bearers of Gujarat VHP’s unit was clearly designed to stoke communal passion. A reasonable response would have been an immediate government clampdown on such public utterances and if required putting all these trouble makers under preventive detention.  But no such action was taken. The VHP called for a bandh on the 28^th February and the BJP, the ruling party, openly supported the bandh call. The State, instead of clamping down on the bandh call, gave the VHP leaders and its cadres a free reign and a license to kill. 
At page 345, the message titled Vardhi No. 24 contained in Annexure III File XIX dated 27.2.2002 sent from D.O., Ahmedabad to the Intelligence Office at Virangam (Virangam is in Ahmedabad rural district) stated that 50 to 75 members of the VHP and Bajrang Dal had gathered at Virangam town chali and in the Golwada area and the situation was very tense.
Another message in the same file, i.e., Annexure III, File XVIII (D-160) at Page No. 19 Message No. 531 ifrom SIB Police to KR Singh at 1810 hours on 27.2.2002 said that, “on 27.2.2002 at 4.30 p.m. when the train arrived at the Ahmedabad Railway station, the kar sevaks were armed with ‘dandas’ and shouting murderous slogans ‘khoon ka badla khoon’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’.”
Fax Mes. D-1/  HA/ Jaher Sabha/ Junagadh/ 311/02 dated.27.2.02 at10.12 pm sent by PI, CID, Int. Bhavnagar to IG, Guj. State IB, Gandhi Nagar said that Sadhu Samaj president Gopalnandji gave an agitated speech at Junagadh Kadva chowk, on dt.27.2.02 between19.30 to 21.00 hrs. The message then goes on to name specific local VHP leaders and says that they expressed their condolences to Kar Sevaks and then delivered hate speeches and urged all Hindus to unite and told the audience to chop the hands and legs of our enemies. They said in their speech that the incident that occurred at Godhra in the morning at 7.30a.m., yet there was no reaction from the Hindus which was very unfortunate. “Muslims who live in India with sincerity and patriotism, we don’t have any agitation against them. But we have objections against those who lived in India and favour Pakistan and carried out activities against the country. Anti- national activities are being done in Madrasas. We have objection against it. We do not have any kind of objection against spiritual religious education to the children. Pooja prathna at the temple and pray in the Masjid but Pakistan Zindabad is not right. Above mention ideas were expressed by them.”
Fax Mes. Com/HM/550/ 02 Dt.27.2.02 23:59 Out No.398 from ACP, Int. G’nagar Region to IG, Guj. State IB, Gandhi Nagar says that 50 Karsevaks travelling by a special bus from Ahmedabad reached Modasa centre in village Vadagam at Taluka Dhansura at around 18:30 pm on 27.2.02. “They were received by a mob of 500 people and these kar sevaks addressed the mob and told the people how the compartment of Sabarmati Express was attacked. People present in the mob got excited and at 21:30 p.m. people from around the village gathered and the mob swelled to a huge size. To maintain law and order the force was not sufficient and about 10 paan bidi shops were set on fire. Vehicles like Jeep, Maruti and Ambassador were set on fire. Vehicles and shops seem to belong to Muslims. One Yasinbhai Multani’s shop at Kalol center TaKadi, Bavlu PS village Kalyanpur was burnt down by the mob”.
Throughout February 28, 2002 while fires were set all over Ahmedabad city, PCR records show that repeated calls from different areas to the Fire Brigade drew went answered.
Table of Phone Records 

Call Type	Cell-No (Name)	Duration Secs	Date-Time	Dialed / Received No – Name
Outgoing	9825037439 A P Patel (Accused No 1, Mr Modi)	77	27.2.2002 09:39:38	9825023887 Mr Jaideep Patel VHP General Secretary (Accused No 21)
Outgoing	9825037439 A P Patel (Accused No 1, Mr Modi)	20	27.2.2002 09:41:39	9825023887 Mr Jaideep Patel VHP General Secretary (Accused No 21)

 The Protest Petition prays for the charge sheeting of all the accused, a transfer of the further investigation to an independent agency and an admitting of the Petition.

(Trustees, Citizens for Justice and Peace)

I.M. Kadri                              Taizoon Khorakiwala                  Nandan Maluste      

Cyrus Guzder                        Arvind Krishnaswamy                Javed Akhtar

Alyque Padamsee                  Anil Dharker                             Ghulam Peshimam             

Rahul Bose                            Javed Anand                            Teesta Setalvad

Cedric Prakash

The colour Maps are annexed to Protest Petition

Afzal Guru's Execution to ‘satisfy collective conscience of society’

Editorial, Kashmir Times - 9 Feb 2013

MARGINALIA: Execution to ‘satisfy collective conscience of society’
By Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal

February 9, 2013. Just two days before Kashmir was to observe the 29th anniversary of the hanging of Maqbool Butt and demand his mortal remains buried inside the premises of Tihar jail, it woke up to the gloomy reality of television channels blaring out: Afzal Guru hanged. In the same jail! By 7.30 a.m. all channels had begun revealing that he’d been hanged. The initial reports suggested he’s been hanged at 5.30 a.m. Before 8.00 a.m., they informed that he’d been hanged at 6.30 a.m. Much later, Home Secretary RK Singh, while talking to reporters, informed that Guru had been hanged at 8.00 a.m; the truth revealed before it happened. Singh told that recommendation to hang him had been sent to the President on January 23. The President gave it his assent on January 26. And while this entire mystery about the timing of his death with news flashes appearing before the execution probably took place remains unquestioned, the family and his lawyers are neither informed nor given the time to meet him or take recourse to judicial procedures to make a bid, as per the law, to save him from the gallows. He was entitled to a judicial review of his sentence but all this hush hush manner in which the presidential nod came for his execution and the secret execution point out to the systemic injustice that flourishes at the hands of the state in the world's largest democracy, a land of Gandhi, Tilak and Tagore.
That his family was not given a chance to meet him or that he was not given the last chance to challenge his verdict before the impossible façade of a system that treated him an ‘enemy’ is not the sheer injustice of his death. While capital punishment is morally unjust, Afzal Guru’s crime is far too less to deserve it. Guru’s guilt was never proved; he having been sacrificed only because there was circumstantial evidence against him, not of having killed people and attacked the parliament but of having been party to the conspiracy. In fact, Guru, who never got a lawyer to defend himself, was not even heard. Whatever he forwarded as part of the statement, revealing that he was a surrendered militant and was working at the behest of some officers of the Special Operations Group of Jammu and Kashmir police, was not even admitted by the court while deciding the case. Guru may have been lying through his hat but his statement was never verified or interrogated, not only amounting to injustice against him but also injustice with the public who had a right to know whether indeed their law keepers can manipulate the existence of lesser mortals like Afzal Guru, co-opt them into doing the dirty job of perpetuating violence and then sacrificing them at the altar of what would be construed as justice from a very state-ist point of view.
There are several gaps in the investigations and Guru’s guilt is based primarily on the police version of the story, which has been taken on its face value or his (Guru’s) confessional statement before media, selectively picked up and unquestioned by the court with his later statement not even treated permissible. The verdict itself is dictated more by the zeal to “to satisfy the collective conscience of the society” as observed by the judge rather than the lack of evidence. The judge interestingly also acquitted him of charges under POTA and observed that he did not belong to any terrorist organisation. The verdict says, ““The conviction under section 3 (5) of POTA is also set aside because there is no evidence that he is a member of a terrorist organisation, once the confessional statement is excluded.”
A news channel, earlier this week, began a debate about whether Hindutva terror was a reality or a myth, interestingly on the day after Narendra Modi visited the Delhi University amid heavy security, employed to brutally thwart all protests against him, a part of the story hidden from media glare. All it ended up doing was betraying the corporate-media nexus in backing the latest hero and brand name of the Sangh Parivar, with its conclusion that cases of those indicted in Mecca, Nanded, Samjhauta and Malegaon blasts were weak and there couldn’t be much headway because the evidence wasn’t concrete. There was only circumstantial evidence against Guru and his confession only pertained to the logistical support he offered to perpetrators of the crime without any knowledge of the exact designs. In striking contrast, Aseemanand indicted in Mecca blast, has confessed to having been part of the entire conspiracy and planning. But his confession is treated as weak. What more can one say of the bias of the legal justice system of a country that boasts to have a grand functional democracy. The 18th century Swiss mathematician and physicist, Leonhard Euler, said, “I have come from a country where people are hanged if they talk.” The State has proved the quote true, atleast, perhaps selectively for Kashmiris, in India. Guru, who was sentenced to satisfy the national conscience, we are now told, was hanged at the altar of electoral politics. And the concern thereafter is not whether or not this was mis-carriage of justice but of how post execution, law and order machinery can be handled in Kashmir, where every curfewed heart goes into mourning.
Guru was nailed without questioning either the glaring security lapses or looking for other abettors to the crime or its master-mind. If Afzal Guru is the sole abettor, how did the killers manage to get inside the highly fortified parliament premises, with greatest ease? These are questions that need to be addressed. He was a simple pawn in the game. Whose, we do not even know! Was it not important to know the truth about who attacked the parliament, who masterminded it and who were the people involved, especially the involvement at the official level, without which this attack could not have been executed. Apparently Afzal knew a lot. But his side of the story has been silenced forever. Truth has been sent to the gallows, all for satiating the conscience of some blood-thirsty chauvinists, happy with manufactured consent. All this in India of Gandhi, Tilak, Baghat Singh and Tagore, an India for which thousands laid down their precious lives and millions suffered.

Lawyers attacked — on the streets, in police stations, inside courtrooms

From: Indian Express

Lawyers attacked — on the streets, in police stations, inside courtrooms


by Muzamil Jaleel : New Delhi, Mon Oct 08 2012, 03:51 hrs

A 65-year-old lawyer in Ujjain was beaten inside the courtroom in front of the judge. In Indore, an advocate found out that his junior for three months was actually a policeman. The police in Thiruvananthapuram arrested a 43-year-old lawyer. The common thread in the stories of all these lawyers is that they represent Muslim men accused of being terrorists or members of SIMI. It’s not just the system that has turned their back on them, even the legal defence of a terror suspect is seen as a betrayal of the nation — with lawyers facing hostility and attacks on the streets, in police stations and inside courtrooms.

NOOR MOHAMMAD, UJJAIN

In 2008, Noor Mohammad went to Dhar district in 2008 to represent a few alleged SIMI activists. “The bar association there had passed a resolution saying they would neither allow any lawyer from their bar to represent these suspects nor let anybody come from outside.” He was at the entrance of the court, Mohammad says, when a group of BJP, VHP and Bajrang Dal activists started beating him. “I somehow ran inside the court. I told the magistrate about the attack. He did not say anything. By then, lawyers inside the courtroom started kicking and pushing me. The magistrate did ask them to stop. But they didn’t and the magistrate sahib didn’t take any action.”

Three months later, Mohammad says, he went to Dhar again to pursue the bail application of his clients because the prosecution had not filed government sanction within the stipulated time. “The prosecution submitted the sanction as soon as they saw me and our bail plea was rejected. As I was leaving, a large group of Sangh activists beat me up. They hit me on my head and I fell unconscious... At the hospital, the police offered to take me home to Ujjain under their protection. They said Sangh activists would come and attack me inside the hospital as well,’’ he said. “I went to the police station and wrote a complaint. The police filed an FIR. I don’t know whether anybody was arrested or not. They (police) didn’t tell me anything.”

Because it was impossible for him to go to Dhar, he sought transfer of the case. A year later, the case was transferred to Indore. “When the people who assassinated Indira and Rajiv Gandhi have a right to defend themselves, why not these boys? The police have no evidence against them and they know their concocted stories will fall flat, that’s why they hate to see a defence lawyer,” Noor Mohammad says.

He gives the example of a case regarding an alleged training camp at Unhel in which five men are in jail. “The police arrested these men in September 2008 saying they were running an arms training camp at Unhel. They said it was happening at three in the night. They even claimed to have recovered an air gun allegedly used to give arms training. There was a huge hue and cry because the place where the police had claimed that the camp existed is a field with roads around it and with constant public movement. Realising that the story could not stick for too long, the police came up with another place. They said the training camp was being held in a narrow alley near the mosque. These men were given five-year imprisonment,” Mohammad says.

Then something very “interesting” happened, he adds. The MP government released them after serving half of their term as amnesty for good conduct on Republic Day last year. “The government came under so much pressure from the Sangh Parivar that within days of their release, they (government) issued another circular saying that people arrested for SIMI links were barred from such amnesty. They were re-arrested. We petitioned before the high court. This appeal is pending for the past year and a half years and these five men have almost completed their terms,” the advocate says.

A lawyer in Ujjain since 1973, Noor Mohammad admits “consistent pressure” to stay away from such cases. “Even my family has been asking me to leave these cases. But I know these Muslim boys are being constantly booked in fictitious cases. I am sure if legal processes are followed, not a single case can stand the scrutiny of the courts.”

WAJID ALI, INDORE

Noting that anybody representing those accused of SIMI links is seen with suspicion, 61-year-old Ali tells the story of his junior who turned out to be a policeman. “I had this junior who was working with me for three months. One day, a relative of mine, who is a policeman, came to see me. He told me that my junior is a policeman working in the Crime Branch. I was shocked and angry. Later, I received a phone call from this junior and he admitted that he was sent to keep tabs on me and my clients.” Ali said he didn’t complain to the authorities. “It wouldn’t have served any purpose. I was happy that I found it out,’’ he said.

KUTTICHAL SHAHNAWAS, THIRUVANANTHAPURAM

A 43-year-old Thiruvananthapuram-based lawyer, Shahnawas has represented several Muslim men arrested for alleged SIMI links, including in the Hubli case of 2007. “I had gone to represent them in the Hubli case, where 16 Muslim men were held from different parts of the country for their alleged SIMI and terror links. This is when the police and the government started accusing me of representing anti-national cases,’’ he says. The cases in which he has represented Muslim youngsters before the UAPA tribunal include the Panayikulam one involving an alleged secret meeting of SIMI activists at Panayikulam near Aluva, Kerala (August 15, 2006), and the Vagamon training centre case (a secret training camp near Idukki allegedly held in 2007).

Shahnawas’s troubles began when the newspaper Madhayamam carried a report in January this year, exposing how the Kerala Police had put the email accounts of 258 citizens under surveillance, 250 among them prominent Muslims with no previous criminal record. “These email accounts that were put under surveillance included my account as well. The report led to a political storm,” he says. But instead of investigating the surveillance, the government ordered an inquiry into how the list was leaked. On April 30 this year, he was picked up from his home and remanded in police custody. The police accused Shahnawas of masterminding the “theft” of the surveillance list and leaking it to a senior journalist of Madhyamam.

“It was a strange accusation. My own email accounts were part of the surveillance list. I am a victim of this illegal surveillance. But they arrested me. They didn’t ask the journalist who had written the story,” says Shahnawas. What was even stranger, he says, was that while he was in custody, the police did not mention the email account surveillance case. “They only kept asking me to stay away from cases against Muslim men booked in alleged terror cases,” he says.

Shahnawas got out on bail nine days later. “I told the magistrate everything — that I had been framed because the police didn’t want me to represent my clients. He listened but didn’t say anything.”

Crime Branch SP Jolly Cherian, who led the probe, refuted the advocate’s allegation that the police repeatedly asked him to keep away from appearing for Muslims accused in terror cases. “It is totally baseless. Why should police place such a demand before an advocate? It is his right to appear for accused in any case. For us, he was an accused in the email case.’’ Cherian says Shanavas was only assisting other advocates from North India in the terror and SIMI related case. He was one of the advocates involved in such cases. In such a situation, why should police project him as a key figure by making such a demand, Cherian says.

PREM KISHEN SHARMA, JAIPUR

In 2008, the Jaipur High Court Bar passed a resolution against representing any terror suspect. The situation, however, changed when two top lawyers decided to oppose the resolution. Advocate Prem Kishen Sharma, who has been practising since 1958, termed it wrong.

“Everybody has a right to a legal defence and I made it clear that I don’t agree with the boycott,’’ he says. When a top Jaipur advocate, Ajay Jain, agreed to take up a case, it helped. Sharma hasn’t faced any hostility in the court, though. “Many of these younger lawyers have a mob mentality. How can a lawyer question another lawyer’s right to do his professional work?”

Inputs from Shaju Philip in Thiruvananthapuram

(Concluded)

Four women judges keep hope alive for justice in Gujarat

From: Indian Express

Four women judges hold promise of justice for 2002

Parimal Dabhi : Ahmedabad, Mon Feb 27 2012, 04:02 hrs

Tomorrow it will be 10 years since the Sabarmati Express burning at Godhra that set off the Gujarat riots. The train fire and the violence that followed took hundreds of lives. At least 250 were named as accused, and for the thousands who survived, justice has come to mean an arduous trek to courts hoping some of them will be convicted. In five of the nine cases probed by the Special Investigation Team (including the Sabarmati carnage) in which trial is currently on in Gujarat, that trek ends at the door of four women judges who have bravely kept hopes of many afloat, against numerous odds. The only conviction so far has also come in the court of one such judge.

The four:

Swarnlata C Srivastava, Principal Judge, Mehsana District Court

In December 2011, in the first such conviction in a post-Godhra riot case investigated by the SIT, it was judge Srivastava who sentenced 31 landed Patels to life imprisonment for burning alive 33 Muslims in a room in Sardarpura, Mehsana. The order added that the killings were not premeditated.

Now she is presiding over trial in the Dipda Darwaja Massacre case in Visnagar, Mehsana, where 11 Muslims were burnt alive by a mob on February 28, 2002. The accused here include former BJP MLA from Visnagar Prahlad Gosa.

A master of arts, who did a bachelors in law and diploma in labour laws and personnel management, Srivastava was also behind the conviction of six teachers of a primary teachers’ training college in Patan for the gangrape of a Dalit girl on the campus. She sentenced them to life and asked each to pay Rs 10,000 as compensation to the girl.

Before this, she had sentenced IPS officer Shabbir Khandwawala, Gujarat’s first Muslim DGP, to five years for a custodial torture case. Khandwawala’s appeal is pending in the Gujarat High Court, though he is now retired.

Jyotsna Yagnik, Additional Principal Judge, Ahmedabad City Civil and Sessions Court

She presides over Gujarat’s biggest post-Godhra massacre case, Naroda Patiya, where 95 Muslims were killed in a single neighbourhood. Among the accused is ex-MLA Maya Kodnani. Additional Principal Judge Dr Jyotsna Yagnik, 58, has to her credit convictions ranging from the famous Bijal Joshi gangrape and suicide to the ISI conspiracy case.

The Bilal Joshi case involved a 24-year-old girl being gangraped by friends at an Ahmedabad hotel on New Year’s eve in December 2003, who later killed herself. In June 2008, Yagnik convicted sentenced five of the boys to life imprisonment, including Joshi’s boyfriend.

In January 2010, as a judge under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, she had convicted 22 in the infamous “ISI conspiracy case”, clubbing together many incidents blamed on the Pakistani intelligence agency. Underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, Rasool Party and Chhota Shakeel were absconders in this case.

A commerce graduate, Yagnik did her masters in law and was conferred a doctorate for her research on discrimination against women.

A Gujarati, she practised law at the Gujarat High Court and other subordinate courts in Ahmedabad before becoming a judge in December 1999. She has also been principal at Ahmedabad’s I M Nanavati Law College while she is currently a visiting lecturer at Gujarat State Judicial Academy.

Dr Yagnik’s husband is an officer with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited and they have a son.

Gita Gopi, Principal District Judge, Sabarkantha district court

As judge at the family court in Surat, she would try to get fighting couples together using music therapy. Often, she made them write, trying to decipher their personality traits from their handwriting.

Having resorted to such “innovations” previously, Gita Gopi, 45, Principal District Judge at Sabarkantha, was behind another recently when she cross-examined a former London-based British diplomat, Ian Reakes, on Skype over killing of British Muslims on February 28, 2002. It was the first such deposition in the riots case. Another diplomat, Howard Parkinson, is due to depose similarly.

In January this year, she had imposed a fine of Rs 55 lakh on a polluting chemical company in Ahmedabad district.

Originally from Kerala, her family settled in Navsari district of south Gujarat, where Gopi was born. She has a bachelors in commerce and a masters degree in law. A direct recruit of the 2008 batch, she was the only woman to clear the Judicial Services Exam from Gujarat then. She became a judge after a 15-year practice in law and part-time lecturership at the Navsari law college.

When she came to Sabarkantha, the first thing she did was to design a website for the court, another rarity for a district court.

Poonam B Singh, Additional District Judge, Anand District Court

Of the two massacre cases in Ode of Anand district, Singh is trying the one where 23 Muslims were burnt alive in two two-storey buildings by a Hindu mob on March 1, 2002. The case, in which 47 people are being tried, is near a decision.

A commerce graduate, Singh did her bachelors in law from Gujarat University in 1992. She practised in various courts including the Gujarat High Court before becoming a judge in 2003.

Vadodara-based Singh came to preside over this case after the earlier woman judge, S Y Trivedi, was transferred in May 2011 after conducting most of the trial. She subsequently resigned from the judiciary under controversial circumstances.

Is the Raghavan SIT in Undue Haste for a Closure? - Open letter by concrned citizens

sacw.net - 8 February 2012

We, the undersigned members of civil society, were aghast to learn from newspaper reports that RK Raghavan, the head of the Special Investigative Team (SIT), is planning to file a closure report, and has no intention of filing charges against Narendra Modi and his co-conspirators for being allegedly complicit in the horrific massacre in Gujarat in 2002 which resulted in the death of over a thousand innocent citizens and extensive destruction of private and public property.
[. . .]
The proposed closure, if it happens, will add insult to injury for the victims of the massacre and their families and will exacerbate inter-community tensions. People will lose faith in our judicial system. The ability of the powerful to manipulate the course of justice will do serious harm to people’s faith in the system. It is obvious to many of us that an attempt at a massive cover-up is at work. It would be better if Modi answered the charges against him so that the matter is cleared and the issue of the accountability of a chief minister is addressed.

People must speak out against such gross abuse of our judicial system. We owe it to ourselves and to our children. [. . .]
FULL TEXT AT: http://www.sacw.net/article2533.html

EPW special issue on The Ayodhya Verdict

The Economic and Political Weekly, 11 December 2010

THE VERDICT ON AYODHYA

Dissecting the Ayodhya Judgment
by Anupam Gupta

Judged by the opinion of the two judges who constituted the real, as distinguished from the ostensible, majority of the three-member special full bench of the Allahabad High Court, the 30 September 2010 verdict in the Babri masjid title suits qualifi [Full Article]

Secularism and the Indian Judiciary
by P A Sebastian

The judgment of the Allahabad High Court of 30 September 2010 in the Babri masjid-Ram janmabhoomi case has put the final seal on the acts of installation of statues and demolition of the mosque
[Full Article]

Idols in Law
by Gautam Patel

The findings and orders of the special full bench of the Allahabad High Court on the successful Bhagwan Sri Ram suit and the dismissed Wakf Board suit demand close examination
[Full Article]

Issues of Faith
by Kumkum Roy

For those who have chosen to explore the implications of the Allahabad High Court’s verdict on the Ram janmabhoomi-Babri masjid dispute, one of the issues that have been particularly troubling is the question of faith
[Full Article]

Was There a Temple under the Babri Masjid? Reading the Archaeological ‘Evidence’
by Supriya Varma , Jaya Menon

As witnesses to a major part of the excavations carried out by the Archaeological Survey of India at the Ram janmabhoomi-Babri masjid site in Ayodhya in 2003, the authors detail the many irregularities and outdated methods they observed
[Full Article]

Report of the symposium on ’Faith & Fact: Democracy After the Ayodhya Verdict’

by Teesta Setalvad

On December 6/7/8, 2010, Communalism Combat, Sahmat and Social Scientist organised a three day symposium in Delhi on ’Faith & Fact: Democracy After the Ayodhya Verdict’. The deliberations, over 3 days, between academics (historians and archaeologists), jurists and lawyers, activists and journalists were invigorating and challenging.

Full Text at: http://www.sacw.net/article1761.html

Justice in Ayodhya

The Daily Star, 18 October 2010


by Praful Bidwai

How should India's Supreme Court treat the appeals certain to be filed before it against the Allahabad High Court judgment on the Babri Masjid issue, which dismisses the Sunni Central Waqf Board's title suit and says the site was the birthplace of Lord Ram? Should the Court strive to reconcile the Vishwa Hindu Parishad with the Waqf Board? Or should it overturn the judgment?

Legality and constitutional principles clearly favour the second option, because Muslims were in undisputed possession of the site until 1992. That will also satisfy the one-eighth of India's people who are Muslim and the many secular Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and others unhappy with the verdict. The crucial distinction here is reason, democracy and legality, central to modern citizenship.

The judgment privileges a particular faith, elevates it to law, and baselessly declares that Ram's birthplace lay beneath the mosque's central dome.

It deprives Muslims of their title to the mosque and surrounding land, which they possessed for centuries. It trifurcates the 2.77-acre plot between Ram Lalla (the infant Ram), Nirmohi Akhara, and the Waqf Board. This may appear even-handed. But, as we see below, it only adds to the verdict's injustice.

While some Muslims feel relieved that the VHP hasn't unleashed celebratory violence, most feel reduced to second-class citizens. Many are worried at the BJP's triumphalist description of the verdict as "a new phase in national integration" (read, forced assimilation of minorities into a majoritarian culture) and Mr L.K. Advani's claim that "the situation no longer is faith versus law, it is faith upheld by law."

The VHP wants the Waqf Board to renounce its portion of the land, so that a grand Ram temple can be built, in return for land elsewhere.

This anti-secular premise assumes that the two communities cannot coexist or worship close to each other. Such one-sided "reconciliation" will compel Muslims into giving up what's rightfully theirs.

Many Muslims apprehend that the VHP will demand the possession of hundreds of other mosques, like those in Kashi and Mathura, on similar grounds.

The Supreme Court must address this by reaffirming the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, which prohibits any change in the status of religious places.

However, the Court must go further and unravel the judgment's core. The judgment conflates faith and fact. All three judges regard Ram Lalla a juristic person with the right to property. This should be wholly inadmissible in a modern judicial system.

Two judges (Agarwal and Sharma) are certain a temple existed before the masjid, although not when it was constructed or by whom. Justice Sharma asserts Ram is "everywhere" and his birthplace too is a "juristic person."

Justice Agarwal quotes the Rig-Veda to plead indeterminacy of the facticity of Ram and of Divine Creation -- only to affirm that Ram was born at the Babri site.

While asserting that Ram has existed since time immemorial, the judges ignore a 1988 report of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which found no sign of human habitation in Ayodhya before 2000 BC. They hold that Ram is a historical person -- because Hindus believe so. In fact, they admit and decide a suit filed by Ram, "represented" by a "close friend" and former judge.

All this even goes beyond the BJP's laughably irrational position that whether Ram was born at the site or not is irrelevant; what matters is people's faith that he was.

Justice Sighbatullah Khan takes the December 1949 smuggling in of Hindu idols to the mosque as evidence of Hindu-Muslim "joint possession" and the basis of dividing the property in the crude way typical of village panchayats. He thus legalises a patently illegal act.

The judgment ignores the parties' rights and apportions land based on their relative strength or power. But the law and a modern judiciary must treat all citizens -- irrespective of their strength -- as equal.

The judgment relies on a BJP-commissioned 2003 ASI report, based on excavation at the site -- itself a questionable exercise. Archaeological excavation is done by layers, to identify different periods by the discovery of pottery, etc.

This cannot produce reliable results if the mounds under examination have been dug up -- as happened at the Babri site after 1992.

The 2003 excavation finds were animal bones, burnt-brick powder and lime mortar typical of medieval Islamic construction, and pillars belonging to a much earlier period than 1528.

The judgment accepts the Babri demolition as an accomplished fact, and legitimises it and the following violence. This cannot be excused on the plea that the Court was only deciding a title suit and not the demolition's legality; if the mosque were still standing, the case wouldn't have taken this form. Yet, the judges were deciding petitions filed before the demolition.

This violates all logic and rationality. Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kalyan Singh was dismissed for colluding in the demolition and thus violating the Constitutional tenet of secularism.

The Supreme Court upheld his dismissal in 1994, thus treating the demolition as illegal and unconstitutional. The judgment also violates this principle established by the Court.

The judgment follows the "PN Oak School of History," fashioned by a semi-literate bigot, who believed that India's great Islamic monuments were all Hindu temples -- including the Taj Mahal!

These charlatans believe that Indians in the Vedic Ages had manufactured airplanes and nuclear weapons. This shows how intellectually corrupted and communally compromised India's higher judiciary has become.

The Supreme Court must follow the most rigorous Constitutional-jurisprudential discipline in overturning the judgment and spelling out that the rights of Muslims cannot be allowed to be gutted by equating faith with fact, and privileging one religion.

The Allahabad judgment disempowers India's largest religious minority. This will cause strife and discontent rooted in rightful anger at its illegality and irrationality. India can afford neither communal biases in the judiciary and terrible abuse of law nor large-scale popular disaffection if it is to survive as a democracy.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.

Verdict Is A Victory For Sangh Parivar

(Published earlier in: Mail Today, 13 October 2010)


by Rajesh Ramachandran

THE Ayodhya verdict is the finest feather in the Sangh Parivar’s crown of communal conquests.

The victory of faith over law is how the Allahabad High Court’s verdict in the Ramjanmabhoomi- Babri Masjid title suit is being simplistically interpreted. But it is much more than that. It is essentially the victory of majoritarianism; the triumph of the faith of the vocal, brute majority in the cow belt over all tenets of the law. It is the judicial stamp of approval of the militant mobilisation of the masses in the name of faith, fashioned by a political agenda that reeks of riots.

The verdict has inadvertently legalised and sanctified two acts of illegality of the Parivar: the act of trespass in the intervening night of December 22 and 23, 1949, which is not even investigated and proven, and the destruction of the mosque on December 6, 1992. Worse, the verdict gave away the most important piece of the disputed property, the spot where the central dome of the mosque once stood to an RSS pracharak, Trilokinath Pandey, who claims to represent the deity, Ram Lalla Virajman.

Faith

An article of faith for the cow belt could be a cause for benign humour in beef- eating Kerala or Tamil Nadu. M Karunanidhi, the shrewd chief minister of Tamil Nadu perceived the Sethusamudram dredging project more important to his electorate than the mythical bridge that Ram’s monkey army built across Palk Strait, or else the sensible old man would not have let out a loud chuckle and asked for Ram’s engineering degree to prove the antiquity of the Adam’s bridge between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka.

So even the ‘ faith’, the great mythology of Ram, is not an all pervasive, all encompassing, monolithic, pan Indian phenomenon.

Sure, the genesis of the present title suit between the Nirmohi Akhara and the Sunni Wakf Board can be traced back to a case in 1885. But nobody can contest that the ‘ faith or belief’ of the birth place of Ram was reaffirmed by the Sangh Parivar’s mass movements launched after the Rajiv Gandhi government let the locks of the Masjid be opened in 1986.

Interestingly, the greatest Ramayana of the Hindi- speaking people, Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas, believed to be written after the Babri Masjid was built is silent on the issue of the ‘ belief ’ of a grand Ramjanmabhoomi temple getting razed by Babur’s general Mir Baqi or his soldiers to build the Masjid. Tulsidas never sang about liberating his dear Ram Lalla nor did he sanctify the exact spot where the baby god was born and nursed by queen mother Kausalya.

The ‘ belief’ about the place of Ram’s birth was first asserted when some unknown persons illegally ‘ placed’ the Ram Lalla’s idol under the central dome of the Masjid in December 1949. It cannot be a mere coincidence that the then deputy commissioner KK Nayar who let the act of illegality happen, and refused to remove the idol despite a letter from the then Prime Minister Nehru, after retirement, joined the Jan Sangh and was elected to the Lok Sabha from a Parivar ticket in 1967.

In 1989, the year in which the Rajiv Gandhi government allowed the Shilanayas or the foundation stone laying ceremony for the rebuilding of the Ram temple at the Babri Masjid site, Deoki Nandan Agarwal, a retired judge of the Allahabad High Court impleaded in the case claiming to be the Ram Lalla’s ‘ sakha’ or close friend.

Crime

The court admitted his plea despite Agarwal being a Vishwa Hindu Parishad vice president. Since then representatives of Ram Lalla have been Parivar activists and the courts never found anything odd with it.

Shockingly, the court neither ordered the removal of the idol that was ‘ placed’ in 1949 in a place of worship of the Muslims not did it find anything amiss in letting an organization that aims to politicize the dispute be a party to the title suit.

Soon LK Advani did what Tulsidas did not do. He revved up his Toyota Rath in 1990 from Somnath to Samastipur to avenge the medieval hurt of the mythical hero by propagating the ‘ faith or belief’ of the birth of Ram exactly under the central dome of the Babri Masjid. As the Rath Yatra crossed the Hindi heartland empowering the BJP in state after state, the nation’s heart bled. The campaign to restore Hindu national pride by subjugating a group of fellow citizens unfortunately found an echo among the north Indian Hindu masses, who in turn voted for the BJP. When the Hindutva mob finally brought down the Babri Masjid in 1992 there were riots all over. The serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993 began a new era of communal violence that continues even today. Why even the Gujarat riots of 2002 that took a toll of about 1500 Muslims could be traced to the perceived attack on karsevakas returning from Ayodhya.

The verdict did not spare a moment’s thought to all these criminal actions that happened over the Masjid, while the court was still deciding the title suit.

Obiter dicta , Latin for casual remarks or observations, are the privilege of the courts that are allowed to digress and talk about almost everything under the sun. But the Allahabad High Court did not even make a casual indictment of the Parivar or the people who permanently altered the shape and structure of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The three- way split of the land was made possible only because of the demolition of the Masjid, yet, the court did not find anything wrong with the act of demolition.

Maturity

After Jinnah’s murderous Direct Action day of August 16, 1946 most of the postpartition riots in the country were organised, according to various commissions of enquiry, by Hindutva elements. So, no wonder the nation heaved a collective sigh of relief after the verdict. The majority opinion mobilised by the Sangh Parivar had won.

But it defies reason why many observers defined the Muslim reaction to the verdict as ‘ mature’. The sad resignation of a minority community to the loss of a piece of land where a mosque once stood cannot be termed maturity. Sure, the community is mature enough to know that it hurts to agitate and that any movement for the Masjid now will only politically benefit the Parivar. Yet, it hurts to accept that the majoritarian faith and not the law has prevailed.

One mosque won or lost is not important, but the faith in judiciary is. The Supreme Court should restore the nation’s faith in law and not in the folklores of a community propagated by a political party that has used it specifically to gain power. The Supreme Court should also review the propriety of the Parivar representing Ram. If at all anyone deserves to be called a ‘ sakha’ or true and close friend of Ram, it was the man who was brutally murdered by Nathuram Godse, a former RSS activist. And he would not have approved of this verdict.

See clearly, take off communal blinkers

by Dileep Padgaonkar (The Times of India, Oct 10, 2010)

The Ayodhya verdict is a done deed. Three courses of action are now open to the stake-holders. They can challenge it in the apex court, or accept it in its entirety without ado, or use it as a basis for a settlement that requires no more legal intervention. The first course holds the promise, however distant or forlorn, of setting to rest the serious doubts the verdict raises. The nation needs to know -- without ifs and buts -- whether the belief and faith of any section of the citizenry merits a place in our jurisprudence.

This is all the more urgent because in the thousands of pages of the verdict there is, from all accounts, not even a passing mention of the vandalism witnessed in Ayodhya in December 1992. No reference to the death and destruction it left in its trail. No appeal to the perpetrators of that heinous act to express remorse. No call for atonement. And not a word of empathy for the victims of the violence.

The main advantage of the second course -- accept the verdict and hasten to implement its operative part -- is that it allows the stakeholders to take their future steps on a legal footing. With the area under dispute equally divided between the three parties, each is at liberty to erect a structure of its choice on the portion that now rightfully belongs to it. Its right to do so cannot be questioned on any ground -- legal or moral, political or ideological.

However, any attempt in this direction is fraught with risk. The very people who hailed the verdict as the epitome of judicial wisdom, statesmanship, foresight and robust pragmatism are eager to emasculate its substance. They aren`t content with the trifurcation of the land. At the core of their appeal to permanently settle the dispute in a spirit of give-and-take — the third course of future action — lies a demand with an ominous ring to it: Muslims must be magnanimous enough to renounce the area that belongs to them to pave the way for the construction of a massive Ram temple. For this singular gesture of generosity, they will be richly compensated with a large tract of land miles away from the proposed temple to build a mosque. Kept at a safe distance from each other, they can live in peace and harmony for all time to come.

Underlying this approach is the conviction that Hindus and Muslims cannot worship in adjacent areas. Oddly enough, even liberals who have not been contaminated by the communal virus seem to endorse it. They too subscribe to the thesis that Muslims would be serving the larger good should they agree to voluntarily leave Ayodhya bag and baggage.

The votaries of this sort of `reconciliation` would vastly strengthen their case if they advocated, in the same breath, ways and means to expel all demons of communalism from our body politic. Perpetrators of the December 1992 vandalism must apologize to the nation for that dastardly act; undertake not to raise any Ayodhya-like issue in future; cease to regard minorities as fallen or de-frocked Hindus who need to return to the parent faith; end all talk of appeasement and desist from foisting their notions of `cultural nationalism` on a resurgent nation that swears by another credo: the geek will inherit the earth.

This is admittedly a tall order. The `sober` and `mature` reactions of the Sangh Parivar to the Ayodhya verdict did not prevent L K Advani from claiming that it vindicated his `rath yatra` of 1989. The BJP patriarch thought it fit to gloat over that blood-soaked journey. In comparison, the reaction of Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, seemed to echo, partially to be sure, the sentiments of pseudo-secularists! He reached out to the Muslim community without a trace of triumph.

Such an attitude provides the Muslims with a small window of opportunity to strike a deal, no matter how irksome, that is in keeping with their immediate and long-term goals: to enjoy, like other citizens, security of life and limb, a future free of want and fear for their children, liberty to practice their faith and protect their culture without let or hindrance and, no less important, to lead a life of dignity. That appears to be the driving force of several initiatives now underway in Ayodhya, Lucknow and Delhi to get this contentious issue out of the way once and for all.

Significant in this regard is the rebuff that the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Kalyan Singh have received from Muslims and Hindus alike for seeking to exploit the Ayodhya verdict to revive their political fortunes. A similar fate awaits hot-heads in both communities. Therefore, any effort that seeks to curb forces of religious extremism and terrorism deserves to be given a chance to succeed — whether it is undertaken, simultaneously or otherwise, at the level of the Supreme Court or in talks between the contending parties.

Voltaire, a foe of clerics, once observed: God is always for the big battalions. India, where the divine is seen to dwell even in a dolt, a rake and a harlot, doesn`t buy that majoritarian flim-flam.


Read more: See clearly, take off communal blinkers - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/all-that-matters/See-clearly-take-off-communal-blinkers/articleshow/6721635.cms#ixzz124VHmkQr

Vegetarianism, tolerance and discrimination

Hindu, 26 May 2008

Tarunabh Khaitan

Where the executive is making intolerant orders and the courts are routinely upholding them, it is imperative that Parliament acts.

tolerate .v 1. allow the existence or occurrence of (something that one dislikes or disagrees with) without interference (Concise Oxford English Dictionary)

One of the central tenets of the Indian constitution is an injunction on the state to refrain from discriminating on the grounds of religion and caste. Recently, however, the judiciary has failed to recognise enforced vegetarianism as indirect discrimination, which although neutral on the face of it, has disproportionate impact on people belonging to particular religions and castes.

The recent decision of the Hon. Supreme Court in Hinsa Virodhak Sangh v. Mirzapur Moti Kuresh Jamat delivered on March 14, 2008 is a case in point. Under constitutional challenge was an order by the Gujarat government banning the selling of meat for nine days during a Jain festival. The court agreed that the right to eat what one wants to eat is a matter of personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. Yet, surprisingly, it upheld the ban saying it was a justified restriction on this right. There are several aspects of this judgment that are deeply disturbing.
On tolerance

Most of the judgment is a commendable and sincere lecture on the idea of tolerance. To quote the Court, “since India is a country of great diversity, it is absolutely essential if we wish to keep our country united to have tolerance and respect for all communities and sects.” Few of us in the right mind can disagree. But what is the notion of tolerance that the court is applying in this case?

Surely, as the OED definition quoted above reflects, tolerance must mean a recognition and respect for the beliefs and practices of others without interference. A voluntary decision to participate in the practices of other communities may evidence commendable goodwill, but it is beyond the requirement of tolerance. But forcing someone through legal sanction to participate in the practices of another community can only mean intolerance. The impugned law forces everyone else to refrain from eating meat because Jains don’t eat meat for religious reasons. Wouldn’t it be the same thing to require non-Christians to fast during Lent, non-Muslims to refrain from eating pork and non-Jews to eat only Kosher food? One may even envisage positive legal duties which require non-Muslims to celebrate bakr-id and non-Hindus to burst crackers on Diwali (of course, in this religious maze, an atheist is not even counted). With great respect to the Hon’ble Court, forcing the beliefs of one religious group on all others is quite the opposite of tolerance.
On religious sentiment

In this judgement (perhaps with the incidents involving Taslima Nasreen, M.F. Hussain, Khushboo and Raj Thackeray in mind) the court complains that “these days unfortunately some people seem to be perpetually on a short fuse, and are willing to protest often violently, about anything under the sun on the ground that a book or a painting or a film, etc, has ‘hurt the sentiments’ of their community. These are dangerous tendencies and must be curbed with an iron hand.” Again, few will disagree. Note that the sceptical emphasis on the phrase “hurt the sentiments” of their community is provided by the Court and not myself.

And yet, not a few paragraphs later, the court sees no contradiction in relying on a similar ‘respect for the sentiments of the Jain community, which has a sizable population in Gujarat and Rajasthan’ to uphold the impugned law (this time, the emphasis is mine). In saying so, the Court disturbingly establishes religious sentiment as a valid basis for secular law. Further, by emphasising on the “sizable population” of Jains, it links the validity of a given sentiment to the number of people who share it.

But fundamental rights are neither about numbers nor about sentiments. If ‘sentiment’ was an adequate basis for law, why have an independent Supreme Court isolated from popular pressures? Wouldn’t the directly elected Parliament do a better job of eliciting popular sentiment? With respect, religious sentiment is precisely the type of argument that cannot justify a law in an equal, liberal and secular society. Much less can a law be justified because a ‘sizable’ number of people share that sentiment.

The point can be seen clearly if one considers that the issue is not ban on meat per se. There can be secular and non-sentimental reasons for banning the sale of meat products. The ban on sale of chicken during the bird flu outbreak is one example. To justify such bans as respect for religious sentiment is a dangerous precedent whose only logical conclusion is a minimum measure of liberty that is left after we are done respecting all religious sentiments. It also gives reasons for those ‘perpetually on a short fuse’ to remain so — if religious sentiment is a valid justification for law, what better strategy to get one’s way than to cite religious sentiment for all your demands? The Court has mollycoddled those very dangerous tendencies it called for being ‘curbed with an iron hand’.

On discrimination

One aspect that the judgment is entirely silent about is that discrimination on the basis of food preference, even though facially neutral, has a disproportionate disadvantageous impact on certain religions and castes and not others. It therefore amounts to an indirect discrimination on the basis of religion and caste.

The judgment in Hinsa Virodhak Sangh involved discrimination by the State — it is relatively easier to argue that the State should refrain from discrimination (even though the Supreme Court did not acknowledge it). What if the discriminator is a private person? There has been also been a string of news reports in recent months on discrimination in the private housing sector. The most striking of them was reported widely in the beginning of April. Madhavi Kapoor wanted to sell her apartment in a posh housing society in Pune to a Muslim family. She faced all sorts of obstacles and discouragement. She told a news-channel that some gentleman asked her “Toh phir aapko chalega lawn par bakri katne ko.” (“So slaughter of goats on the lawn will be ok with you?”).

How likely this (or any, for that matter) Muslim family is to slaughter goats on the lawn is questionable. This gentleman would probably have had no objection to selling the flat to meat-eating Hindus, but Farrah, my vegetarian Muslim friend, would certainly invite hostility. The incident shows how, on the pretext of vegetarianism, we are building exclusive intolerant ghettoes in our cities. Sometimes, even this pretext is not present. Recently, Kanaklata Rani was allegedly beaten up by her landlord in Delhi when he discovered that she was a dalit.

Of course there are cases where vegetarianism is not necessarily a pretext for religious and caste discrimination but is a genuinely held moral objection to (somebody else’s) preference for meat. Citizens have a constitutional guarantee of freedom of association which they can exercise based on this moral objection. Freedom of association of vegetarians who object to living in close proximity with non-vegetarians must get due legal consideration. But the individual harm and social exclusion that follows when certain groups are systematically excluded from housing societies must outweigh this moral objection. At an individual level, several fundamental opportunities and life choices (including where to live) are denied to non-vegetarians because of exercising the basic right to choose what to eat. More importantly, at a societal level, a widespread practice of exclusion of non-vegetarians from residential opportunities will inevitably lead to apartheid-like social ghettoes (especially given the Indian context where meat-preference has a strong correlation with one’s caste and religion). Restrictions on freedom of association in order to limit these resultant societal and individual harms are reasonable and will pass constitutional muster.
Need for urgent action

The judgment in Hinsa Virodhak Sangh is not the first of its kind. In Om Prakash v. State of U.P. (2004), a ban on sale of any meat, fish or eggs at anytime in the year in Rishikesh was upheld by the Supreme Court. In Zoroastrian Co-operative Housing Society Limited v. District Registrar Co-operative Societies (2005) the Supreme Court upheld direct religious discrimination by allowing co-operative housing societies to restrict their membership to followers of a particular religion. These are disturbing trends.

Where the executive is making intolerant orders and the courts are routinely upholding them, it is imperative that Parliament acts to prevent our cities from fragmenting completely on religious and caste lines. Recently, the Menon Committee set up by the Ministry of Minority Affairs “to examine and determine the structure of an Equal Opportunity Commission” recommended draft legislation to combat discrimination in the private sector. The Bill makes education and employment its initial focus, but the recent events pointed out above make it imperative that combating discrimination in the housing sector should also be one of its central concerns.

(Tarunabh Khaitan is a vegetarian and researches on anti-discrimination law at the University of Oxford.)