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I HAVEN’T seen such heavy rains in
India in years. It never seems to stop raining although it has
made little difference to the perennial power cuts, not to mention
the rain-induced chaos on the streets. Rains can be both a
blessing and curse. After the 10 Gulf summers though, I am not
complaining.
India lives in several centuries at the same time. Posh high-rises
sit smack in the middle of squalid shantytowns. Fancy foreign cars
forever fight for space with the defiant bikes and bicycles and
unpredictable auto rickshaws. It’s also so vast it seems to
experience all three seasons at the same time.
While it’s raining cats and dogs where I am right now, in many
other parts of the country people have been bracing themselves for
a drought. This is a land of amazing contrasts. Rains and
droughts, prosperity and poverty, good and evil and hope and
despair go hand in hand.
This week a special court in Gujarat convicted a former minister
and 31 others in the infamous Naroda Patiya massacre, bringing
hope to a despairing and harassed people. BJP’s Maya Kodnani has
been given 28 years in prison while Bajrang Dal’s Babu Bajrangi
has received a life sentence.
Naroda Patiya remains etched in public memory for the sickening
stories of the newborns being skewered and pregnant women being
disemboweled and defiled during the 2002 carnage. All this
happened under the watchful eyes of Dr. Kodnani, a practicing
gynecologist. Chief minister Modi gifted her the ministry for
women and child welfare soon after!
While this is the sixth case associated with the 2002 pogrom, it’s
the most significant by far. In a country with a long history of
religious riots, those targeting the weak and vulnerable in
recurring orgies of communal violence have always gotten away with
murder — literally. There have been thousands of riots since
Independence producing hundreds of thousands of victims. But there
hasn’t been a single trial or conviction. No wonder many old and
new scores are settled during riots. The victims of the 1984
anti-Sikh pogrom are still waiting for justice as cases involving
senior Congressmen despite repeated interventions.
All that seems to change with the Naroda Patiya verdict. By
handing out an exemplary sentence, albeit still inadequate, to the
powerful former minister and other senior BJP and VHP
functionaries close to Modi, special judge Jyotsna Yagnik has sent
out a powerful message to everyone concerned. You can’t get away
with murder anymore no matter how powerful and connected you are.
As Tarun Tejpal of Tehelka, which played a crucial role in this
case by catching Bajrangi and other key accused on tape boasting
how they carried out the cold-blooded carnage for weeks and at
whose orders, says, “in India because we do not redress, we
repeat. Because we repeat and repeat, we are never redeemed. There
are griefs that a people must never forget, wounds that must be
resolutely left open to gaze and air.”
Let’s therefore hope this landmark judgment will set a forbidding
precedent deterring cowards who turn on the most vulnerable among
us to satiate their bestial instincts clawing their way to power
over mountains of human bodies. It should serve as a model to try
similar cases of organized violence repeatedly witnessed in the
past across the Hindi heartland.
More important, this verdict has brought the Gujarat trial, as the
Times of India put it, to the doorstep of Modi, the chief
architect of the pogrom that went for three months after the death
of 52 Hindu activists in a train blaze blamed on Muslims. It has
started a fire under the man brazenly being lionized by the
corporate media as the hope and future of the billion plus nation.
Top television networks underplayed the groundbreaking Gujarat
verdict and its far-reaching implications. They instead chose to
go to town with the Supreme Court decision in the case of Ajmal
Kasab for the 2008 terror attacks. The verdict was hardly
unpredictable. All that the top court had done was to uphold the
death sentence for the Pakistani terrorist.
Indeed, many networks chose the occasion to do opinion polls
painting a grim picture for the governing Congress. If the polls
are to be believed, nearly 45 percent of Indians are pining to see
the architect of the Gujarat 2002 replace Manmohan Singh as Prime
Minister. In popularity and electability, the Gujarat CM seemingly
stands far ahead of Rahul Gandhi, the so-called PM-in-waiting, and
other contenders for the top job.
But no matter how hard they try, Modi’s friends in high places
cannot undo the damage inflicted by the special court verdict. The
noose has begun tightening around their favorite candidate and
their attempts to prop him up looking past the bloodstains on his
hands aren’t going to wash.
If many of the Gujarat victims have finally got justice after 10
long years and Muslims’ faith in the rule of law and democratic
institutions is beginning to be restored, it’s largely because of
the reasonable majority of this country.
Most of those who fought this long and frustrating fight for
justice are Hindus and others. If it was lawyer Mukul Sinha who
organized the riot victims under Jan Sangharsh Samith for a united
legal battle, it was senior police official Rahul Sharma who
provided him with the crucial records of cell phone calls during
those critical hours and days in the summer of 2002 incriminating
people like Kodnani and Bajrangi.
While the entire administration danced to political masters
shutting its eyes and ears, officials like R.B. Sreekumar and
Sanjeev Bhatt have had the courage to confront those who presided
over the most organized and shameful religious massacre in India’s
history. And who could ever forget the fiery Teesta Setalvad, who
remains the face of Gujarat’s fight for justice or Tehelka’s
Ashish Khetan whose journalism of courage set the wheels of
justice in motion.
It’s because of individuals like them that India remains an island
of reason and sanity in stormy seas all around it. They make us
proud of this melting pot of a rainbow democracy. I would like to
believe that such a nation will never stoop to be led by a man
like Modi despite all the powerful lobbies and special interests
pushing for him.
By the way, is it a coincidence that the day after the Naroda
Patia verdict, nearly a dozen young Muslims from Karnataka,
Hyderabad and Maharashtra have been picked up for planning terror
strikes against high profile targets? A senior English journalist
and a defense scientist are among those detained. The whole case
is so preposterous and the allegations so ridiculous that they
wouldn’t survive in any court of law, as has been the case with
many such shoddy cases implicating innocent Muslims over the past
few years. Many of them have been freed after years of detention
and after wrecking their lives.
Is it the handiwork of growing Hindutva sympathizers in the
security establishment or is the Congress up to its old tricks?
Having ruled India for the better part of the past six decades,
the party has turned the delicate political balancing into an art
form. Indira Gandhi did this gesture politics rather well,
portraying herself as Ma Durga for Hindus and messiah of Muslims
when it suited her.
Her son started the whole Ayodhya madness to woo the Hindu right
apparently upset over the government “appeasement” of Muslims
after the Shah Bano case. Is the Congress trying the same
balancing act fearing a Hindu backlash over the Gujarat verdict? I
hope I am wrong. The grand old party is dead wrong too if it
thinks that the sensible majority of this country would be hurt if
predators like Kodnani, Bajrangi and those who directed them are
brought to justice. It believes in the old doctrine of Karma and
that the good in the end prevails over evil. Just as Monsoon rains
cleanse India of its rot and refuse to revive and rejuvenate it
every year, this long due dose of justice in Gujarat will
hopefully do the same for the body politic.
Aijaz Zaka Syed is a
Gulf-based widely published writer.
The above article
appeared in Arab News on September 09, 2012.
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