It was some weeks before the recent developments in the Best Bakery case that we had
resolved that our next cover story would commemmorate the 20th anniversary of the anti-Sikh massacre of November 1984. Written by senior lawyer, HS Phoolka, who has been at the forefront of the legal battle for the victims of that carnage, the facts, dispassionately narrated, log serious black marks against our system.
Phoolka, incidentally, was publicly threatened in the course of a live programme on national television on September 7, 2004 by Union Minister Jagdish Tytler, a man who continues to face the charge of leading and inciting a mob during the anti-Sikh carnage in Delhi. This speaks volumes for the impunity that our system gives to those charged with serious mass crimes. On the basis of the evidence placed before it, the ongoing Nanavati Commission has issued notice to Tytler, on the prima facie ground that there was a case against him. The Commission relied on the eyewitness report of Surinder Singh, a head granthi (priest) of a Sikh gurdwara, who had said in his affidavit that during the November 1984 carnage he saw Tytler incite and lead a mob of rioters to burn the gurdwara and kill Sikhs.
Of the 2,000 prosecutions launched in courts arising out of the massacre of Sikhs, only nine convictions have resulted. None involved prominent politicians or members of the police force who hold command responsibility and need to be directly held responsible and culpable when mass crimes against sections of the population take place.
Eighteen years after Delhi 1984, the Gujarat genocide of 2002 shocked the conscience of the people, including jurists, profoundly. A historic verdict delivered on April 12, 2004 not only attempted corrective justice but in scathing, no-nonsense terms, squarely detailed the hell let loose on the soil of Gujarat by the political leadership. Just as a corrective process was underway and the re-trial had begun in Mumbai in accordance with the historic verdict, (see Special Report in this issue), a serious attempt to challenge these remedial attempts is afoot. Since the day that Zahira Sheikh held her press conference in Vadodara on November 3, 2004, at which she rubbished the historic steps underway to renew faith in the judicial process and hurled baseless allegations at us while declaring herself as a hostile witness, we have maintained that she is a pawn for those who would like to see justice subverted in Gujarat.
In a system and society that grapples with the reality of interminably long drawn out criminal trials, a very low conviction rate (a mere six per cent in criminal cases) and a huge backlog of cases, the phenomenon of witnesses being made to turn hostile is unfortunately routine. Radical reform and corrective measures that include both police and judicial reform, witness protection schemes and a new law to prevent and punish genocidal killings are the crying need of the hour.
Between Delhi 1984 and Gujarat 2002, the mapping of violent internal conflict includes the Meerut-Malliana (UP) massacre in 1987, where Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) jawans lined up and shot dead in cold blood 53 Muslim youth and the Bhagalpur massacre of 1989 during which an overnight slaughter of the minority (nearly 1,000 were killed) was organised. In one gruesome incident, bodies were buried and vegetables planted over them in a unique cover-up operation. There have been no convictions worth the name for these crimes. In the post-Babri demolition violence in Bombay 1992-1993, despite the publication of the Srikrishna Commission report in February 1998, no significant prosecutions have followed.
The message is therefore clear. For the perpetrators of a pogrom or genocidal killing, impunity from prosecution and punishment appears to be guaranteed in advance. Armed with this impunity, the mass murderers have mastered techniques of subversion of investigation. And the destruction of evidence is now ‘in-built’ into the very modes of killing adopted. This was clearly visible in Gujarat where a chemical powder was extensively used while burning people so that no trace of the victims remained and which made it all the more difficult to ‘count the dead’.
Demonisation of sections of the population through hate speech and hate writing are a vital ingredient of the genocidal plan. Delhi 1984 and Gujarat 2002 displayed this tendency in full as did the pogroms in between. Economic crippling and cultural humiliation wrap up the picture. If 270 dargahs and masjids were destroyed in the first 72 hours in Gujarat (see Genocide; Gujarat 2002), 450 gurdwaras (nearly 75%) were destroyed or seriously damaged in 1984.
Each or all of these elements have been visible on Indian soil for well nigh a quarter of a century. Nineteen-eighty-four constitutes a watershed in the history of communal violence in post-Independence India. While earlier there were riots, what we have been witnessing with frightening frequency since 1984 are one-sided pogroms and genocidal assaults with the active connivance of, if not brazen sponsorship by, the State. Even as justice eludes the victim-survivors of 1984 (Delhi) and Mumbai (1992-93), the post-2002 attempts to subvert investigation and justice for the victim-survivors of the Gujarat genocide are a new challenge to Indian democracy. Will it respond?
— Editors
Archived from Communalism Combat, November-December 2004. Year 11 No.103, Editorial