NEW DELHI, 1 July 2003 — The acquittal of 21 people accused of burning 12 Muslims to death on the premises of a bakery in Gujarat last year has stunned minorities, human rights activists and secular Indians. It is the first court verdict in the five cases of communal violence in the western state that the National Human Rights Commission wanted handed to the Central Bureau of Investigation.
National Conference President and MP Omar Abdullah expressed dismay over Friday’s Baroda court verdict. “A little more than a year ago, the government of India — of which, regrettably, I was a part at the time — sat on its hands while thousands of innocent men, women and children were brutally murdered in Gujarat. Their only crime was that they were Muslims.”
“Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done, and that will only happen when justice is blind to religion,” Abdullah said in Srinagar. “If Godhra was terrorism, so was what followed.”
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) called for an appeal against the judgment. The party said the trial was marked by “intimidation of witnesses, blatant negligence by police and shoddy prosecution by state authorities.” The CPI-M described the verdict as a “miscarriage of justice.”
Rohit Prajapati of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties said: “The government has used this to show how justice can be defeated... When witnesses voluntarily approach the National Human Rights Commission and say these are the people who attacked us, and then they tell a court that these very people are the ones who saved us, there has to be something wrong.”
“This just goes to show how the criminal justice system has been communalized,” rights activist J.S. Bandukwala said.
Newspapers also slammed the acquittals. In an editorial titled “Justice blindfolded”, the Hindustan Times said the verdict, given in Gujarat, marked a “black day” for the Indian justice system.
The Indian Express said “the tidy acquittal of the accused... is a betrayal of faith. It must sound a nationwide alarm...
“It must be asked whether it was because the witnesses were silenced by fear and coercion. Or due to the deliberately botched investigation that... is a common feature of all riot cases.”
