MUMBAI, 4 August 2007 — India ended an epic trial this week which saw nearly 100 people, mostly Muslims, convicted for bomb attacks in Mumbai, but the Muslim victims of the communal riots that triggered the attacks say they have yet to receive justice.
Fourteen years after the blasts that killed 257 people, the judge delivered his final sentence in the case on Tuesday.
But if justice ground slowly in the Mumbai blasts case, it ground to a halt when it came to the communal riots which preceded the bombings, where around 900 people, two-thirds of whom were Muslims, were killed.
Politicians indicted by a judicial inquiry for inciting Hindu mobs have gone on to win elections and policemen accused of shooting dead Muslims “point-blank and in cold blood” were either acquitted or never brought to trial.
“We were praying in the mosque when police barged in and started firing,” said Farukh Mapkar, who was shot in the back. “The policemen were brutal. They didn’t even spare a boy who was trying to run away. They shot him from point-blank range. It’s been 14 years. It will be 24 years and still justice will not be done,” he said. “There’s no justice for us because we are Muslims?”
Communist leader Sitaram Yechuri says it is an example of a double standard that undermines India’s secular democracy, when the “majority terrorism” of the Hindu mob is not punished with the same zeal as the “minority terrorism” of the Muslim bomber.
“Just as there are two Indias — Shining and Suffering — there are two 1993s for Mumbai, the ghastly communal riots and the serial blasts,” he wrote this week. “Justice can never be complete unless both of these are dealt with.”
The Mumbai riots followed the demolition of the 16th century Babri Mosque in northern India by Hindu fanatics in December 1992. In retaliation, Muslim gangster Dawood Ibrahim ordered a string of bombings in the country’s financial capital. Ibrahim, India’s most wanted man, is believed to be hiding in Pakistan.
But after one of the world’s longest criminal trials, in a high-profile anti-terrorism court, the people who did his gory work have finally been sentenced, 12 to death, all of them Muslims, and 20 to life in prison. By contrast, the trial into the riots “was quietly consigned to a commission of enquiry — that classic Indian euphemism for official stonewalling,” Farah Baria wrote in the Indian Express.
But Justice B.N. Srikrishna spent five years collecting a mass of evidence for that commission of inquiry. His 700-page report makes chilling reading.
He indicted 31 policemen, an “effete” political leadership that failed to arrest the violence and several top Hindu leaders, including Bal Thackeray the chief of the radical Shiv Sena party.
Thackeray, the report said, “like a veteran general commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to carry out organized attacks against Muslims.”
The commission also accused then Mumbai police joint chief R.D. Tyagi of shooting nine Muslim boys during the riots. Tyagi was tried and acquitted in 2003. None of the other policemen named has yet been convicted.
Muslim groups are still demanding action, holding protests and asking the Supreme Court to get involved.
“What is the point in setting up a commission of inquiry if its recommendations aren’t to be implemented?” said Naseem Khan, a Maharashtra lawmaker and a petitioner from the Action Committee for the Implementation of the Srikrishna Commission Report.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court told them to file an affidavit detailing the alleged lapses on the part of the government of Maharashtra in implementing the commission’s recommendations.
The petitioners blame successive governments. First, when Shiv Sena came to power in 1995, it accused Srikrishna of being “biased against Hindus” and tried to disband his commission, only reinstating it after a public outcry.
Later, a government led by the supposedly secular Congress party buried the commission’s report, officially because it didn’t want to “reopen old wounds,” but really, analysts say, for fear of alienating Hindus.
Maharashtra’s Congress Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh has constituted another panel to look into the implementation of the Srikrishna Commission’s recommendations.
“We have taken action against many of the guilty persons,” Deshmukh told reporters last week. “But if there are still cases where action has not been taken, such lapses will be taken into account.”
