It is often said that India is afflicted by three
Cs, all in capital letters: Casteism, Communalism, Corruption. The
issue of corruption and Team Anna’s own peculiar recipe to deal with
it have so hogged the headlines through most of 2011 that insufficient
attention has been paid to another bill on the anvil – the Communal
and Targeted Violence Bill – which addresses the other two Cs. In May
this year the Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council (NAC)
placed its draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill
2011 in the public domain, inviting comments from the public. The
draft bill now awaits the consent of the union cabinet before it can
be tabled in Parliament. Meanwhile, the sharpest attacks, the loudest
howls of protest against the proposed law have come from the BJP,
other constituents of the sangh parivar and their political
allies. The fact that communal organisations are so vehemently opposed
to the proposed law indicates that something must be very right with
what has been suggested.
It is true that some misgivings have also been
expressed vis-ŕ-vis certain provisions of the draft bill by some
allies of the Congress and a few others from within secular quarters.
The rationale behind the bill is the subject matter of our cover story
this month, in which the misconceptions and apprehensions of some
secularists have also been comprehensively dealt with. Our limited
purpose here is to draw our readers’ attention to an issue that
Communalism Combat has repeatedly focused on, more so since the
genocidal targeting of Muslims by the Narendra Modi-led BJP government
in Gujarat in 2002.
The issue in question is the culture of impunity in
the context of communal or targeted violence, which has prevailed in
the country since independence. Reports of various judicial
commissions – appointed by different governments from time to time to
probe incidents of communal violence, fix responsibilities and make
recommendations – have two conclusions in common. One, the violence
was not spontaneous but the result of meticulous planning,
organisation and implementation by Hindu communal bodies. Two, the
police and the administration displayed anti-minority bias. The
repeated recommendations by commission after commission on what needs
to be done to pre-empt violence and punish the police officers and
administrators guilty of dereliction of duty have gone unheeded. It is
in this climate of permissiveness and the absence of accountability
mechanisms that the culture of impunity has flourished.
As lawyer HS Phoolka – who for over two decades has
spearheaded the legal battle for justice for the victims of the
anti-Sikh carnage in 1984 – has repeatedly stated in recent years, if
the perpetrators of 1984 had been prosecuted and punished, the 1992-93
anti-Muslim pogrom in Mumbai may have been prevented; and if the
perpetrators of 1992-93 had been punished, the 2002 genocide in
Gujarat may have been pre-empted. Not only have the perpetrators and
errant policemen and civil servants never been punished; in the last
25 years we have repeatedly seen the state playing the role of mute
witness, co-conspirator or even sponsor of mass crimes whose targets
have been the country’s religious and other minorities.
It is against this backdrop that civil society
groups have been campaigning, since the 2002 killings, for an
appropriate law to bring an end to this unconscionable and blatantly
unconstitutional state of impunity. It was in response to this
persistent campaign, in which Citizens for Justice and Peace and
Communalism Combat were among the most vocal, that in 2005 the
first UPA government floated a draft – The Communal Violence
(Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill 2005 – for
discussion and debate. The bill elicited widespread criticism from the
very groups and organisations which had been at the forefront of
demands for a new law. To them, it was evident that the bill as it
stood then would be worthless in preventing future massacres. A
principal demand was that the new law should hold public servants –
politicians, senior civil servants and police officers – accountable
for their failure to control targeted violence. If anything, the 2005
draft envisaged even greater powers for the police instead of holding
them accountable. In the face of all-round criticism, the draft was
reworked but even the second draft was far from satisfactory.
In a welcome move, soon after the UPA-II government
took charge in 2009 and the NAC was revived on Sonia Gandhi’s
initiative, the council included a Communal Violence Bill among its
priorities. The bill of 2011 is a result of that initiative. We need
only add here that since both the UPA-I and UPA-II governments had in
principle accepted the need for such a bill, they now have an
obligation to ensure that the new bill sails through Parliament
notwithstanding the expected resistance from the BJP and its allies.
For the UPA government to delay or procrastinate on the bill – simply
because, unlike Team Anna, the NAC members have neither threatened
indefinite hunger strike nor issued deadlines and ultimatums – would
be unfortunate, to say the least.
