The immediate provocation for the public hearing had been the affidavit filed by the Maharashtra government in the Supreme Court on September 5(see CC, September 2000) in which it had revealed it’s intentions of letting most of the guilty policemen and politicians, guilty of participating in the violence, go scott free. This affidavit was itself in response to a reprimand made by chief justice, A.S.Anand of the Supreme Court, demanding complete details on the status of implementation of all recommendations made by the Justice Srikrishna in his report from the Congress-NCP led Democratic Front government. Ironically, however, since that date, despite repeated dates being announced before the court, the combined writ petitions have simply not come up before the SC bench.

Our experience in organising the event and re-dedication to pursue issues of rehabilitation, relief and justice have showed us the murky sides of the administration and government, revealing starkly, a system that moves only when it is shaken. Over 175 victim-survivors who’s near and dear ones fell in the ‘missing but dead’ category (because in most cases despite efforts their bodies could not be traced) have still not received their compensation due. Despite the fact that the CWC has verified at least 47 cases and the Collectorate has accepted that 15 of these are acceptable, even these 15 persons have not received their amount.

About 200 children, who had been receiving tuition grants from the National Foundation for Communal Harmony affiliated to the union home ministry, suddenly stopped receiving this amount, we discovered in the course of the CWC work. Why? Inexplicably callous and tardy behaviour on the part of the city and suburban collect orates that are the nodal, local agency responsible for feeding details of schools/fees etc of the recipients to the central government outfit. Thanks to interventions made by the CWC, the Collector, Mumbai city has resumed payments to most of the children. We have not been so lucky with the suburban collect orate; however, and therefore plan to organise some protest there, soon.

The CWC also proposes to push for the punishment of the guilty and has been monitoring the activities of the Special Task Force (STF) under the Mumbai police looking into the wrongly closed cases by the city police that were ordered to be re-opened and re-investigated by the Judge. In the midst of this monitoring, in early January we were informed of some policemen attempting to bring pressure on some survivors who had filed cases against politicians and policemen. Timely intervention on the issue helped rectify the case but it also brought home to us that close and systematic monitoring is required on the issue, or else there are chances that justice would still evade the victim-survivors.

Bombay, that had pushed the deep scars and schisms caused by the violence to it’s sub conscious, was shaken by the Public Hearing, that had survivors face to face with citizen’s revealing how their lives had been irretrievably changed. While the response from the government has been predictably reluctant and tardy, it has been the spontaneous responses from individuals and organisations from civil society that have been very heart-warming. Individuals have already contributed generously to the tuition fees of individual cases of children of survivors, an organisation run by Vimla Dangs in Amritsar sent support grants to two of the victim survivors and a prestigious city school used the occasion to concientise it’s students and parents about the issue of child victims of a mindless violence. The result: a substantive grant to the CWC to enable us to contribute to the annual tuition fee of at least 50-70 child victims for a year to begin with.