Can it be that guilty are only foot soldiers?

an accused but the apex-court driven Special Investigation Team said it found evidence of her involvement – including call logs of her being in touch with the other Patiya accused.

The victims’ families led wretched lives for 10 years until judge Jyotsana Yagnik delivered her judgment in 2012, convicting Kodnani and sentencing her to 28 years in jail. Detailing the minister’s alleged role, the judgment called her the “kingpin of riots”.

Kodnani has now been exonerated by the Gujarat high court. Survivors such as Bano remain at the mercy of their neighbours, who have continued to threaten them for naming their Hindu neighbours. Patiya’s residents had, in the worst form of betrayal, turned on their own.

“Communal riots are like cancer on constitutional secularism and the incident in Naroda Patiya was a black chapter in the history of the Indian Constitution,” special judge Yagnik had observed. Her words had gone a long way in assuaging the wounds of Patiya’s survivors but today, the high court overturned the conviction, saying the witnesses were unreliable and that none of them had named Kodnani when the case was first registered.

India has a spectacular record of not delivering basic justice when it comes to brazen riots, carried out in broad daylight, be it Delhi or Ahmedabad. Who killed 3,000 people in Delhi and 1,000 in Gujarat? Can it be that the guilty are only petty foot soldiers? Did political exhorters have nothing to do with 1984 or 2002?