In a shocking turn of events, eleven people convicted in the Bilkis Bano case have been freed from Godhra sub jail after a state government panel approved their application for remission of sentence. The men had been convicted for gang raping Bano and murdering 14 people including Bano’s two and a half-year-old daughter Saleha.

The convicts who have been freed are: Jaswant Nai, Govind Nai, Shailesh Bhatt, Radhyesham Shah, Bipin Chandra Joshi, Kesarbhai Vohania, Pradeep Mordhiya, Bakabhai Vohania, Rajubhai Soni, Mitesh Bhatt and Ramesh Chandana.

Bilkis Bano’s husband Yakub told Deccan Herald, “We are shocked. We have no idea about this order. We don’t know what kind of justice system this is.”

The Indian Express quoted Gujarat Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Raj Kumar as saying, “The 11 convicts have served a 14-year sentence in total. According to law, a life term means a minimum period of 14 years after which the convict can apply for remission. It is then the decision of the government to consider the application. Based on eligibility, prisoners are granted remission after the recommendation of the prison advisory committee as well as district legal authorities.”

Further explaining why men were freed, he said, “Among the parameters considered are age, nature of the crime, behaviour in prison and so on…The convicts in this particular case were also considered eligible after considering all the factors since they had competed for 14 years of their life term.”

The fact that the nature of crime was taken into account and yet the convicts were freed, is shocking to say the least, and has sparked outrage on social media.

Read the story of Bilkis Bano who is victim of Gujarat Genocide 2002.

Her 14 relatives were killed including her 3.5-year-old daughter and 1 day old niece.

She was pregnant but she was raped by those people who were KNOWN to her.

Killers were her neighbors.

1/2 pic.twitter.com/2S7unAAwfe

— Gabbar (@Gabbar0099) August 15, 2022

It was lost on no one that the release came on Independence Day, and that too after the Prime Minister made an appeal to people to people to respect women.

हाथी के दांत खाने के और दिखाने के और #BilkisBanoCase https://t.co/xsFwd2D2iA

— Gursharan Sandhu (ਕਿਸਾਨ ਤੇ ਮਜਦੂਰ) (@gurshar28231201) August 16, 2022

Shortly after their release, videos of the men being facilitated outside the prison by people who were probably members of the family began circulating on social media.

2002 बिलकिस बानो गैंगरेप मामले में आजीवन कारावास कि सज़ा काट रहे सभी 11 दोषियों को आज गोधरा उप जेल से रिहा कर दिया गया… pic.twitter.com/U7uZJ5tuPs

— Ashraf Hussain (@AshrafFem) August 15, 2022

How did this happen?

One of the convicts Radheshyam Shah had approached the Gujarat High Court seeking remission of sentence, but the court dismissed his plea stating the appropriate government to consider his plea under sections 432 and 433 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, was Maharashtra and not Gujarat.

Readers would recall that though the trail had originally started in Ahmedabad, it had been moved to Mumbai after Bano expressed concerns about witness intimidation and evidence tampering.

After the Gujarat HC dismissed his remission application, Shah moved SC, and the apex court ruled in May that Gujarat was the appropriate state to examine his plea.

A news agency reported that a few months ago, a committee had been formed to look into the possibility of setting the men free. Panchmahals collector Sujal Mayatra was quoted as saying, “A committee formed a few months back took a unanimous decision in favour of remission of all the 11 convicts in the case. The recommendation was sent to the state government, and yesterday we received the orders for their release.”

Brief background of the case

Bilkis Bano and her family had been attacked in Randhikpur village near Ahmedabad on March 3, 2002. In the particularly brutal attack, 14 members of her family were killed including Bano’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter whose head was smashed on a rock! Bano, who was over five months pregnant, was gang raped.

After Bano approached the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the Supreme Court ordered a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The accused were arrested in 2004 and the trial originally began in Ahmedabad. However, Bano expressed concerns about witness intimidation and evidence tampering and the case was transferred to Mumbai in August 2004.

In January 2008, a special CBI court convicted 11 people in the case and sentenced them to life imprisonment. But seven people including policemen and doctors were acquitted. In 2017, the High Court upheld the conviction of the 11 people. The court also raised important questions about the role of five policemen and two doctors accused of not performing their duty and tampering with evidence, and set aside their acquittal.

Injustice upon injustice

On April 23, 2019, the State was ordered to pay Bano not only compensation worth Rs 50 lakh, but also give her a job and accommodation. But despite multiple reminders and orders to provide Bano what is owed to her, the government allegedly failed to fulfil its obligations until pressured to do so by the apex court. It may be recalled that it was only after an order by the Supreme Court on September 30, 2019, to pay Bano compensation within two weeks, that the amount was released to her.

But then it appeared that the government was trying to shortchange her for the rest. Instead of accommodation, Bano has been allotted a 50 sq meter plot in an area earmarked as a garden zone. Instead of a regular government job, she has been offered a contract-based peon’s job on a particular project with the Irrigation Department!

This is why, in October 2020, Bano moved an interlocutory application before the Supreme Court stating she was not satisfied with the manner in which the State had complied with the court’s order. A bench comprising Chief Justice SA Bobde, and Justices AS Bopanna and Ramasubramanian, then directed Bano to approach authorities and seek what is due to her. Bano thus withdrew her application with liberty to make a representation.

Before that, in July 2020, some of the accused who were out on parole, allegedly assaulted and attempted to intimidate a witness in the case. This after the witness tried to prevent them from assaulting two women in a separate matter.

Related:

Bilkis Bano case: Is the Government trying to hoodwink the SC on compensation?

Bilkis Bano case: SC directs Guj gov’t to pay compensation in 2 weeks

Bilkis Bano case accused allegedly threaten witness!

Will Use the Compensation for Battles of Other Sisters: Bilkis Bano

Exclusive: Interview with Bilkis Bano’s lawyer, Ms Shobha

Reparation for Violence: 50 lakhs awarded to 2002 Rape Survivor Bilkis Bano by SC

The post Bilkis Bano case: Eleven people convicted of gang rape and murder freed appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
In Volume II, that contained Findings t has a detailed section on the Godhra Incident as also on the Role of the Central Government. This is what the findings of the Tribunal were on the Role of the Atal Behari Vajpayee central government.
 
Role of the Central Government
 
1.1. The complicity of the state government is obvious. And, the support of the central government to the state government in all that it did is also by now a matter of common knowledge.

1.2. The entire country had been held to ransom by the vitriolic rhetoric around the building of the temple at Ayodhya; the threatening statements by leaders of the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and the BJP kept communal temperatures on the boil. It was in the midst of this surcharged national climate that Godhra happened and the Gujarat carnage was masterminded.

1.3. Within hours of the Godhra arson, an organised carnage was planned and ruthlessly executed over the next 72 hours in 15 of Gujarat’s 25 districts. It was apparent that thanks to the instructions from the state government, the administration and the police stood paralysed as the brutal massacres — Naroda Patiya and Gulberg society in Ahmedabad, Pandharwada in Panchmahal and Sardarpura, Unhava and Kadi in Mehsana apart from Nadiad – were clinically executed; yet the government of India turned a blind eye. In a situation such as post-Godhra Gujarat, when huge, organised mobs of the majority community were attacking the minorities, when the state government and the administration sided with the majority, it was a clear case of a breakdown of the constitutional machinery in the state. The culpability of the central government in the Gujarat carnage lay in its failure to invoke its executive powers available under Article 355, read with Entry 2.2A of List 1 and Entry 1 of List II and Entry I of List III of the Constitution of India, to take over the administration of law and order in Gujarat, and to send in the Army under direct orders of the Centre.

1.4. At no time during the Gujarat carnage did the central government and its functionaries show any initiative or commitment to constitutional values, impelling them to intervene and intervene swiftly and effectively to end the violence.

1.5. Far from invoking the provisions of the Constitution and performing their constitutional obligations and duties, neither did the Prime Minister nor the home minister even issue a stern order to the chief minister to crackdown on the lawless elements.

1.6. Late on February 28, after he had cancelled a scheduled foreign visit, the PM met RSS and VHP leaders in the nation’s capital, not to discuss the quartering and massacre of innocents in Gujarat, but to dialogue on the Ayodhya issue! Later, the Cabinet Committee on Security met and merely ordered the Army to be on alert.

1.7. The attitude of both Shri Vajpayee and Shri Advani appeared to aim at diverting the nation’s attention away from Gujarat, and directing it instead towards Ayodhya and the happenings there.

1.8. The conduct of the railway minister, who rushes to the spot whenever a train accident takes place, failed in his duty to visit Godhra, to survey the situation for himself and to order an immediate inquiry into the cause of the fire. Questions about the fire in the railway compartment at Godhra still beg for an answer. Who pulled the chain? How did the fire occur? Surely this merited the urgent attention and immediate intervention of the railway minister? Yet, to this date, the minister has not visited Godhra. What explanation has he to offer for his utter inaction?

1.9. The conduct of the railway ministry related to the entire Godhra arson is shocking. On February 27, as reported in The Times of India (February 28), Shri Nitish condemned the attack on the Sabarmati Express and asked the Gujarat government to take proper measures to ensure the safety of railway property and passengers. Shri Kumar, who spoke to the Gujarat chief minister on telephone in this regard, asked the state government to take appropriate measures to ensure the smooth and safe running of trains, from the capital without visiting the scene of the incident.

1.10. However, in the six months that have followed, Shri Nitish Kumar has been distancing his ministry from the Godhra carnage on the ground that what happened was not a ‘rail accident’ but a law and order issue. But the very fact that the Railways made speedy ex-gratia payments to the relatives of those killed and to those injured is proof that the ministry indeed treated Godhra as any other ‘accident’ with a difference: in many earlier rail accidents the ex-gratia payment has not necessarily been so prompt.

1.11. In fact it was not until the media made specific inquiries that the internal Western railway reservation list of that day was made available. From this, it is not at all clear if all those killed were kar sevaks. Reservations for coach S-6 were made in Lucknow and not Faizabad. The Gujarat government released the names of 39 of those who died. Nineteen of the 58 dead have yet to be identified. One of the passengers who suffered grievous injuries was a Muslim.

1.12. The Prime Minister’s prevaricating statements, saying different things at different times at different places, left everybody in utter confusion. Had he already prejudged the situation and apportioned blame for the Godhra arson to the Muslim minority or did he attribute guilt to the goons from the Hindu majority who indulged in this carnage and brought a bad name to the country in the international community?

1.13. On February 27, hours after the Godhra tragedy, the PM said in Parliament that from the preliminary reports it appeared that the incident was the result of slogan shouting. On April 4, when he visited the Shah-e-Alam Camp, he bemoaned the burning alive of women and children, the rapes and killings and urged the Gujarat government to observe its duty. But only a fortnight later, at his party’s national executive meeting in Goa on April 22, he said the Gujarat carnage would not have occurred but for the Godhra arson. Thereafter, he bemoaned India’s loss of face in the international community. He termed the Gujarat carnage as “a blot on the nation.” His statement at his party’s national executive in Goa bears mention. “Wherever there are Muslims, there is a problem… What happened in Gujarat? If the passengers of the Sabarmati express, innocent, unblameworthy, had not been deliberately burnt alive, Gujarat’s tragedy (Gujarat ki trasadhi) could have been avoided. But this did not happen. People were burnt alive. Who were they? Intelligence is investigating but we still need to ask, how did this all happen? The latter happenings should not be criticised till we understand who set Gujarat on fire. Who lit the fire? How did it spread?Our country is multi-religious, multi-linguistic. We believe in cooperation, we believe in sarva dharma sambhav (respect for all religions). We are proud of our secularism… From Goa to Guwahati, wherever I go, the Indian is not a kattarwadi. Yeh maati ek hai (the Indian is not a fanatic. This soil is one). But whenever I travel around the world, our officials in all the embassies tell me, ‘militant Islam raaste mein kaante bo raha hai’ (‘militant Islam is sowing thorns in our path’). One Islam there is which is tolerant to all, that believes in truth: samvedna aur daya sikhata hai (it preaches compassion and mercy). But the kind of Islam being perpetrated in the world today is a violent, intolerant Islam that has no room for tolerance.” This statement, made after the worst state-sponsored carnage against Muslims post-Partition had been so cynically carried out, is unfortunate, to say the least.

1.14. The role of the then union home minister and now deputy Prime Minister, Shri LK Advani appears to be patently partisan. His pat on the back for Shri Modi, not once but on several occasions and his rejection of the state government’s Forensic Science Laboratory Report (FSLR) as soon as it appeared in the press, amounted to no less than his assuming the role of a judge. His dogged refusal to acknowledge within the country that the Gujarat carnage was an inhuman, shameful act on the part of the communal elements among Hindus, yet accepting it as a blot on the country during his foreign jaunt in England, makes people wonder whether he is a spokesman of the party which he represents or the home minister/deputy Prime Minister in the government of India? Is he simply a time server when it comes to a foreign audience? What is inexcusable on his part is the assumption of the role of both a lawyer holding the brief for Hindu communalists as also of a presiding judge giving his verdict on the carnage. When he rejected the state government’s Forensic Science Laboratory Report, was he doing so on behalf of the Hindu communalists or the central government? It appears that like Shri Modi, he too keeps forgetting that he holds constitutional office and is not a Sangh pracharak.

1.15. His statements with regard to the entire carnage make people wonder whether any impartial investigation is at all possible into the charges against the accused, with him in charge of the home affairs of the country.

1.16. As noteworthy was his reluctance to visit extensively, affected areas of the post-Godhra carnage, immediately after it took place, despite the fact that he is elected from the Gandhinagar parliamentary constituency each year.

1.17. Shri Advani is one of the leading figures in the central government who has irresponsibly peddled the theory of a “foreign hand” behind the Godhra arson without any proof; described Godhra as an “act of terrorism” and the subsequent carnage as a “communal riot”; debunked the findings of official investigations as contained in the FSLR; repeatedly praised Shri Modi as “being the best chief minister India has seen in 50 years” and lauded him as being the best example of “good governance”; and, most dangerously, given a clean chit to indicted organisations like the VHP and BD, who were openly gloating over the violence.(See section on Annexures, Volume I).

1.18. It needs to be recorded here that barely a few days after Rev. Graham Staines, the Australian priest who had been working with lepers for years, was torched to death along with his two young sons inside a jeep in Orissa on the night of Jan 22/23, 1999 and Shri Dara Singh, a man with clear links with the RSS/VHP and BD was named as the main accused in the case, Shri Advani had shown similar partisan conduct when he had said on the floor of the Lok Sabha, “I know these people (Bajrang Dal), they will never do such a thing.”

1.19. Shri George Fernandes, the union defence minister, emerges from the entire episode as a pathetic character. While he no doubt visited Gujarat immediately after the outbreak of the violence to oversee the role of the Army, and for which he undoubtedly deserves appreciation, it appears he learnt nothing from whatever he may have surveyed. Had he done so, he would not have made the statement that he did in the Lok Sabha on April 30. That statement not only added insult to the injury of those brutalised by the pogrom but also undermined all human values. If a minister of his rank and a politician of his experience chooses to liken the mass instances of gender violence (perpetrated against 150-200 women and girls) and the subsequent slaughter of most of them, as “nothing new”, it is sufficient indication of the seriousness with which the whole carnage was looked upon by the central government. His attempt at whitewashing his statement at a later stage made things even worse.

1.20. As the union law minister, it was expected that Shri Arun Jaitley would have more respect for the rule of law than Shri Modi. Instead, he showed complete disregard for the basic human rights of innocent men, women and children who fell victim to the carnage. He patted Shri Modi’s back, the man who was the root cause of the massacre of humanity in the state of Gujarat. His attitude was and is sufficiently representative of the view and attitude of the central government to the entire incident.

1.21. In short, the inaction on the part of the central government and the utterances of its spokesmen occupying responsible positions show that not only had the central government failed in its duty but it also had no intention to discharge it at all. Contrast this conduct of the central government with its prompt action after the Akshardham Mandir massacre. This only shows that if the central government intended to take action, it could have done so. The fact that the central government failed in its constitutional obligations during the post-Godhra carnage is indisputable. In the event of any international authority also indicting the state government, which we believe to be inevitable, the central government will have to bear a major share of the blame and will be liable for censure.
 
 
 
 

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Are suffering and oppression mere accidents of birth? If so, resistance must also be an accident of birth. Harsh Mander has titled his recent book Fatal Accidents of Birth: Stories of Suffering, Oppression and Resistance after the powerful phrase from Rohit Vemula's suicide note. Published by Speaking Tiger, this book carries compelling stories from two decades of journalism and activism. 

August 2016. In a surge of collective rage, hundreds of Dalits joined the Azadi Kooch, a protest march from Ahmedabad to the village of Una in Gir Somnath district against the public lashing of Dalit men for skinning a dead cow. One among them was a middle-aged man who repaired shoes on a street-corner in Ahmedabad and who, for many years, had slept on the pavements of the city. He declared that he would work for Dalit-Muslim unity. His name was Ashok Mochi. Fourteen years earlier, in 2002, when angry mobs surged through the streets of Ahmedabad, burning and looting the homes and shops of their Muslim neighbours, murdering and raping thousands, this man’s face stamped itself indelibly in public memory. The man himself slipped quickly back into oblivion, from where he was briefly resurrected by the Azadi Kooch.
~
For the world, one picture became a symbol of those terrifying days in February 2002 when angry mobs roamed the streets of Ahmedabad, killing, raping and looting Muslims. The camera captures a lean, bearded young man in khaki trousers and a loose black T-shirt with sleeves folded, his hair parted in the middle, a saffron band on his forehead, standing with both his arms raised, one hand brandishing an iron rod, one with fist clenched. His mouth is open, as though he is shouting slogans. There are blurred images of men in the rear, and a burning heap of materials. Behind him the sky is black with smoke rising from burning homes, cars and shops across the city.

This photograph, by Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer Sebastian D’Souza, was carried across the world in newspapers, on newsmagazine covers and, later, in books which reported and analysed the carnage. It quickly became a symbol of those gruesome days, of the hatred that breached its dams and unleashed one of the most bloody communal massacres after Partition.
 

2002 Ahmedabad, Sebastian D’Souza
 

In the decade that followed, striving for the healing of the survivors of this carnage, and fighting for justice for them, became a dominant concern not just in my life but also the lives of many friends and colleagues. Together, we fought several hundred cases in the courts, trying to bring those responsible for this massacre to justice. A few cases were won, but the large majority ended in acquittals. Even so, this was the largest collective striving for justice after communal massacres in the history of the country.

My colleagues in Aman Biradari, peace-workers who helped fight hundreds of criminal cases after the carnage, were idealistic young lawyers and women and men from the ravaged communities. They measured their success not only in the outcomes of these protracted legal battles, most of which were ultimately lost, but in the success of at least engaging the perpetrators in the criminal justice system. It was the first time that this happened on this scale after any major communal riot in the country.

Yet, as the years passed, we realized that most of whom we succeeded in engaging in these legal battles were the foot-soldiers of the carnage, not its leaders. Who were these men, we wondered. What happened to them in the years after?

These questions led me to seek out the young man in the AFP photograph that had transfixed the world. I contacted Kishore Bhai, a dedicated colleague with the Aman Biradari, and a justice-worker who had pursued the man’s criminal case in court. Kishore Bhai told me that the man was Ashok Mochi, a cobbler from the working-class neighbourhood of Shahpur in Ahmedabad. His full name was Ashok Kumar Bhagwan Bhai Parmer.

His name did not appear in the initial police complaints, but that could have been because the police mostly did not record the names of the men the complainants said were part of the mobs which attacked them. However, Ashok Mochi’s name entered the records in the course of later police investigations. A local resident, Mohammad Hussain Ramzanbhai Sheikh, in his statement to the Madhepur police in September 2002, charged that Ashok Mochi was part of a riotous mob of men, armed with daggers and sticks, who attacked and looted several Muslim homes on the morning of 28 February 2002. Since the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) had called for a bandh, most Muslim residents were in their homes. They watched with alarm as the mob, which included in its ranks Ashok Mochi, gathered at Shahpur Chowk, which is where Mochi was when this photograph was taken. It was at the chowk that they were alleged to have burnt a couple of autorickshaws. According to Sheikh, he saw the men enter the homes of his brother and other relatives, loot suitcases, gas-cylinders, television sets and other items before dousing the houses with petrol and setting them on fire. Light bulbs filled with acid were hurled at the taller buildings and was followed by death threats to the residents, all of whom left for relief camps by evening.

Despite Ramzanbhai Sheikh’s statement, the police did not arrest or even question Ashok Mochi at that time. His was one of the two thousand criminal cases registered after the carnage. Most of these were closed by the police, who simply claimed that they could not find sufficient evidence against the perpetrators. Within a year, the police proposed that half the criminal cases connected with the carnage be closed, and the lower courts concurred. I became an intervener in a case filed by the National Human Rights Commission which, under Justice Jagdish Sharan Verma’s leadership, was deeply perturbed by the failure to deliver even elementary justice to the survivors of the carnage. In my petition, argued by leading human rights lawyer Indira Jaising, we established, with the help of several examples, that the police had deliberately undertaken shoddy investigations to protect the perpetrators. The Supreme Court accepted this petition and, in a historic judgement, ordered the reopening of all the closed cases and also supervised their re-investigation and retrial.

Various human rights groups took charge of these criminal cases. The case in which Ashok Mochi was an accused was among the several hundred cases that Aman Biradari took responsibility for. Ashok Mochi, accused of looting and burning Muslim homes and shops in the area falling under the jurisdiction of the Madhepura Police Station, was charged under Sections 435 and 436 of the Indian Penal Code (crimes of arson and causing destruction by fire), and arrested. He spent fourteen days in jail after which he was released on bail furnished by his elder brother. The case dragged on for several years, and Ashok Mochi attended every hearing with more than twenty other accused men. Justice-worker Kishore Bhai attended as many of these hearings as he could to sustain the morale of the complainants. But the cases were adjourned month after month, and the complainants were wearied by their struggles to rebuild their homes and livelihoods. Altaf Sheikh, a young lawyer working with Aman Biradari, recalled that on the day the court wished to record the statements of Ramzanbhai Sheikh, he was unable to attend the court. Vexed by his absence, the court closed the case for lack of evidence and acquitted Ashok Mochi and all the others who had been accused in the case. Ashok Mochi joined the thousands who had been charged with crimes in the carnage of 2002, but ultimately walked free.
~
Years later, in 2014, I asked Kishore Bhai if Ashok Mochi would be willing to meet me. He was. I walked with Kishore Bhai to where he plied his trade on the corner of a sidewalk near Lal Darwaza in old Ahmedabad. He was around forty, but looked older. I would not have recognized him from his photograph. His hair had greyed and he wore it short-cropped. His face was lined. He did not wear the beard he had in his photograph of over a decade earlier. I told Ashok that I would sit with him while he worked. To this he said that business was slow that day, he would shut shop and we could sit in a hotel and talk.

Ashok had inherited his father’s trade as a cobbler. It was not what he wanted to do. He would have liked to do something else, something ‘better’, as he put it. But, ultimately, he could not break out of what his caste had prescribed for him, or the limitations poverty had imposed upon him. The family lived in a small one-room tenement in Lal Darwaza, an area inhabited mostly by people from the working class. On one side of the road lived Muslims, on the other were mostly low-caste Hindus. The inhabitants worked largely as labourers, construction-workers, house- painters and mattress-makers. Ashok’s father’s earnings were meagre. Ashok liked to study and hoped to make something of out his life. But his father died when he was in Class 6, and his mother a year later. He was left in the care of his elder brother.

His brother married and had four children in quick succession. The family fed Ashok, but he often quarrelled with his sister-in-law about money for food and for clothes. After he passed his Class 10 examination, he decided he would fend for himself. He tried his hand at many professions. He said, ‘Maine Hindustan ke woh saare chote kaam kiye jo chota insaan kar sakta hai,’ and described all the mean, low-paying jobs an uneducated, underprivileged man in India is forced to take on. He worked as a sweeper, a security guard, a house painter, and tried many other trades, but could not establish himself in any one. In many, he said, caste was a barrier—people pass on their trades only to people of their own caste.

He finally took on his father’s profession and inherited many of his father’s customers. For a while, he would give most of his earnings to his brother but when tensions in the family grew, he left home and began to sleep on the streets, at the same place where he plied his trade. In the day, next to him sat Nazir Bhai who repaired autorickshaws for a living and, on the other side, sat an upper-caste Hindu who traded in old clothes. Since Ashok slept at his workplace, he would take care of his neighbours’ goods at night. It was an arrangement that worked well for all. He would eat at cheap roadside eateries. There was a working men’s dormitory close by, and he used its bathroom and toilet in the mornings.

Life was routine until the storm of 2002 broke. He had seen many riots in his life, said Ashok. He was ten years old in 1985 when, for several months, Ahmedabad was torn by communal violence which took nearly three hundred lives. Minor riots occurred every two or three years. But none were like the riots of 2002, said Ashok. The riots reminded old people of the riots of Partition, when thousands were forced to live for months on end in relief camps. Ashok recalled the morning of 28 February 2002, and that the street on which he worked and slept was tense and uneasy. The newspapers, he said, had been full of ghastly pictures of burnt bodies from the train in Godhra that made every Hindu’s blood boil. He did not watch television, but he was told that they, too, carried graphic images of the corpses. The Hindus were incensed and furious with the Muslims, he said, and Ashok, too, was angry. The VHP had called for a bandh. Muslims hid in their homes as Hindu men gathered on the streets with weapons and petrol. Ashok worried that the riots would swallow up his earnings for weeks, even months.

Ashok had grown a beard at that time. (He said it was because of a failed ‘love story’. He had wanted to marry the daughter of an upper-caste neighbour but her family had found out and married the teenaged girl off in a hurry to a man of her caste. ‘Therefore I began to grow my beard. Like Devdas, you know. Except that I did not drink!’) Not many Hindu men sported beards and he was afraid that the mobs would mistake him for a Muslim. He looked everywhere for a barber but could not find one. He then tied a saffron scarf on his forehead to mark himself as a Hindu. He joined other young men at the Shahpur Chowk where, months earlier, the VHP had installed a board announcing that Gujarat was a Hindu Rashtra.

It was there, said Ashok, that a journalist walked up to him. The journalist asked Ashok what he felt about the burning of Hindus in Godhra. He replied that the Muslims had committed a vile crime and that he was angry. Ashok claimed that that the journalist then asked if he would pose for a photograph. He agreed, picked up an iron rod, and posed for the picture which was to become history. Sebastian D’Souza, who took the picture, has a different version of the story. In January 2012, he told Indrajit Hazra of the Hindustan Times, ‘Mobs were burning cars and I saw people stabbing people. The driver I was travelling with had fled. In the distance, I saw this man leading a group get up on a raised spot. I took a few long-shot pictures with a 300 mm lens.’ Hazra asked if he knew the man’s name, or if he posed on spotting the camera. It certainly looked as though he was staring directly into the lens. But D’Souza denied this. ‘No, I was too far away. He was just shouting when I left.’ To me, Ashok claimed that he did not lead any mob, nor did he participate in any arson, looting or attacks.

By late afternoon, the mobs started to thin. By evening and through the night, Muslims fled in police buses to the safety of relief camps even as their homes burned. Ashok knew that he would not be able to buy food at eateries, and it would be unsafe to sleep on the streets at night. So he went to his brother’s home, intending to stay there for a few weeks. He was not on speaking terms with his sister-in-law but at such a time, she did not turn him away.

By the following morning, Ashok recalled, the mobs gathered once more and only grew. He told me that people everywhere were saying: ‘Kuch dinon ka chhoot de diya hai hamein Musalmanon ko marne, katne, lootne ke liye’ (We have been given freedom for a few days to kill, attack, loot Muslims). The riots in Ashok’s neighbourhood went on for more than a week. He lived with his brother’s family for three months before returning to his spot on the pavement. During this time, he said, he stayed mostly at home. His picture was published in many newspapers and people believed that he was a major leader with the VHP or the Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of the VHP. He was worried about his own safety after his new-found fame. He decided, therefore, that he would not sleep on the streets for a while. He found a place to bed down in a corner of the working men’s dormitory whose facilities he used in the mornings.

After several months passed, the Muslims began to return from the relief camps. Muslim relief agencies gave them money to help rebuild their homes. The help was meagre, but at least they could have a roof over their heads. Gradually, they also began to rebuild their livelihoods. Nazir Bhai restarted his business of repairing autorickshaws. Ashok returned to sleeping on the streets. He never married. ‘If I did marry, what would I give my children? My father was able to give me neither food nor education. Why should I do the same with my children? I am better living alone,’ he said to me.

Ashok claimed that the statements made by his Muslim neighbours against him in court were false. The attackers had all been strangers from other parts of the city, he maintained, and the Muslims, angry about their loss, just listed the names of the local Hindu men they knew. Years passed before he was arrested and spent a fortnight in jail. He initially refused to give his brother’s address to the authorities. He told the police that his only home was the streets. But they said that he could get bail only if someone with a proper residential address was willing to vouch for him. He then reluctantly gave them his brother’s details, who bailed him out.

The case again went on for many years and over many hearings, so many that Ashok lost count. It was his belief, he said, that with the passage of time the hatred the Muslims felt for the Hindus ebbed. The Muslims knew in their hearts that he—and all the others accused in the case along with him—were innocent and therefore did not testify against them in the end. It was a mellow Ashok Mochi I spoke to, a far cry from the firebrand he appears in the photograph. Riots, he said, are created by political parties that spread falsehoods and hatred. According to him, 5 per cent of the Muslims, like those who set fire to the train in Godhra, were bad, and it was wrong to punish 95 per cent of the Muslims for the crimes committed by the five. He added that Narendra Modi had been chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, but it had made no difference to the ordinary person, who continues to struggle for roti, kapda aur makaan (food, clothes and shelter). ‘I slept on the footpath in 2001. I am still sleeping on the footpath today,’ he declared.
~
If Ashok Mochi’s was one defining picture of the riots of 2002, the other was that of Qutubuddin Ansari, taken by Arko Dutta for Reuters. In the picture, Qutubuddin, a tailor from Ahmedabad, stands with his hands folded, his eyes clouded with tears, desperately begging security forces to rescue him from the first floor of his home in a slum, Sone-ki-Chawl, where he is besieged by mobs clamouring for his blood.
 

 
2014 Kannur, Ashok Mochi and Qutubuddin Ansari at the 20th anniversary of Gujarat carnage
 

In 2014, I read news reports that Ashok Mochi and Qutubuddin Ansari had been invited by the CPI (M) (Communist Party of India [Marxist]) to an unusual programme to mark the twelfth anniversary of the carnage in Gujarat. The CPI (M) brought the two men together for the programme in Kannur, Kerala, and got them to share a stage and even a room. Zahid Qureshi and Swapna Pillai, who were reporting the event for the Mumbai Mirror, wrote that while on stage, Ansari accepted a rose from Mochi. A visibly overwhelmed Ansari said, ‘Even though we are both Gujarati, we could not have met in Gujarat like this. This is a new experience for me.’ He went on to disclose that Mochi was not the first Hindu to apologize to him for the riots. ‘A retired army officer named Anand Shroff, a resident of Pune, had apologized to me on behalf of the Hindu community some years back. Today, my brother Ashok Mochi has asked for forgiveness. It means a lot to me. Let this be the beginning of a new chapter in humanity.’

When it was Ashok’s turn to speak, he declared that the riots were a mistake, ‘a huge blunder. I do not know what to say, I have never addressed so many people in my life. But I cannot leave without talking about insaaniyat (humanity)—that is what I have learnt over these years.’

He then sang the song, ‘Hai preet jahan ki reet sada…’ (Where love has forever been tradition…) from Manoj Kumar’s patriotic film Purab aur Pashchim. Ansari joined in. The journalist P. Sudhakaran, reporting the event for Times News Network, described the event: ‘They sang off key. The audience didn’t get a word of what they sang. But they moved hearts. The applause was deafening.’ As we drank coffee together, Ashok Mochi told me that he and Qutubuddin Ansari still met once in a while. Ansari once even invited him home. Ashok had no home to host him.

I do not know for sure if Ashok Mochi was indeed an innocent bystander, as he claimed, or if he led or joined the mobs that looted and burned the homes of his Muslim neighbours in those hate-charged days in Ahmedabad in 2002. I think he did.
But at least he has expressed public remorse for those crimes. And I think he is sincere in this remorse. It is sobering to remember that most of those who led and organized the massacre have never once said that they are sorry.
 

Read extract from Harsh Mander's Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India and the Enquiry Committee Report written by Harsh Mander et al on Proselytisation of Adivasi in Dang.

Harch Mander is a renowned human rights activist who has worked among the survivors of mass violence, homeless persons, street children and others. He is a founding member of the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information. He formerly worked in the Indian Administrative Service for almost two decades.

© Text, Harsh Mander. Excerpted with publisher’s permission, from Fatal Accidents of Birth: Stories of Suffering, Oppression and Resistance, published by Speaking Tiger, 2017.
 

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