No bail for  Godhra accused

OPENING COMMENTS

Godhra –Discriminatory Justice

Acknowledgement, remorse, justice and reconciliation are the accepted steps required for collective healing when wounds of an indescribable nature have been inflicted on a whole population. In Gujarat, five years after independent India’s worst genocide, there has been little or no acknowledgement of the crimes and no question therefore of any expression of remorse from perpetrators and masterminds. Justice, except in a few isolated cases, dodges Gujarat’s survivors. It must therefore be a while before we talk of reconciliation.  

Similar or worse questions arise from Gujarat today. An analyses in detail of the evidence placed before the Nanavati-Shah Commission. Thousands of victim survivors braved threats and intimidation from a vindictive administration to place their affidavits on record. (In August 2004, victim survivors and members of citizens’ groups were assaulted and threatened by riot accused, Babu Bajrangi, in the premises of the circuit house where the commission sits.) The rare courage of two police officers has exposed the cynical nitty-gritty that shaped the orchestration of the genocide. The tenacity of groups in deconstructing the Godhra fire before the commission pokes serious holes in the barefaced lies behind the Godhra train burning. Today, more than ever, it appears that the incident was an accident and not an ‘ISI-inspired conspiracy’ as touted by former union home minister LK Advani and Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi.

Now, even as the Godhra fire can no longer be used to justify the post-Godhra massacres, 84 accused languish in Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati jail. Meanwhile, escaping the long arm of the law, perpetrators of the genocide, many with powerful political connections, roam free. Details of the illegal continued custody of those accused in the Godhra arson have been placed before our apex court for three years now. However, despite sincere efforts by legal action groups and counsel, these men have been denied bail.

The fact that 84 accused still remain in Gujarat’s jails five years after the incident, the fact that many of them are ill, one is blind; the fact that their families have been reduced to penury and indignity while the main accused and masterminds of the post-Godhra carnages not only roam free but rule Gujarat by action and word, raises the niggling, troublesome question once again.  Discriminatory justice. Can a discriminatory system of justice be viable in principle, given what our Constitution espouses? What does this reality mean in practical terms, given that today we also face the challenge of another kind of terror, internationally supported bomb terror? In the ultimate analysis, genuine secularism and constitutional governance must mean that issues of mass violence, accountability, transparency, impunity for mass murderers and government officials, are not merely the stuff of election campaigns but the basis on which the balance sheets of our public servants and representatives are drawn. Only then would we have made the transition from a purely electoral democracy to true constitutional democracy.

Teesta Setalvad