Can it be that guilty are only foot soldiers?
Afew weeks before a Supreme Court-led investigation led to the conviction of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator and minister Mayaben Kodnani in 2012, I was in Naroda Patiya, speaking with eyewitnesses who had stood firm for 10 long years. They had been threatened and intimidated for naming the minister.
They gave graphic descriptions of that day in February 2002, when their nondescript neighbourhood in Ahmedabad resembled a gigantic bonfire. Mobs had gathered at Noorani Masjid, located on the main road, and then roamed its labyrinthine bylanes, shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ slogans and brandishing swords and trishuls (tridents).
Among the 97 Muslims that the fire devoured were Shakeela Bano’s mother, two brothers, a sister-in-law and a young niece and nephew. Bano remembered the children being flung into the blaze. She and many others told the special court about Kodnani’s alleged role; of how she allegedly came to the area and exhorted the crowd to kill Muslims. They claimed she oversaw the distribution of swords and trishuls and assured the crowd that there would be no police enquiries against them.
The police didn’t name her as 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?