Monsoon justice for Modi’s Gujarat

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 writer.