Image for representation purpose only

Something is amiss in the state of Denmark. The proverbial Shakespearean phrase appears to sum it all.

Yesterday, May Day 2016, more than 300 rural families employed in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme in Jharkhand's Latehar, one of India's poorest districts, have donated their small annual wage increase to prime minister Narendra Modi. The workers attached five rupee notes to a letter addressed to the prime minister that was posted on May Day.

“The government must be really short of money if it is unable to raise NREGA wages to the minimum wage, that too when one third of the rural population is affected by drought,” reads the letter by the workers, noting that the central government had increased their wage this year by only Rs 5, from Rs 162 to Rs 167 earlier in April. This the villagers of this village in Latehar, Jharkand saw as an insult. Rs 167 is Rs 45 below the state minimum wage Rs 212 per day in Jharkhand. There are over 1.1 lakh families in Latehar district working in the scheme under which the government provides 100 days of employment a year to any rural household willing to do manual work – building public works such as roads, ponds, wells. Of this, 43% are women, and 37% are tribals.

Then today, May 2, the very next day, The Times of India and The Indian Express have broken the news that 35 Dalit families, living in Nedali village of Mehsana, just 15 kilometres from Modi’s hometown of Vadnagar have threatened self-immolation  due to the humiliating boycott that they face. The boycott is on account of their struggle for justice under the Atrocities Act — they dared to seek legal actions against alleged atrocities committed by eight members of upper castes in the village—and that is not on in Mehsana. It is this extreme discrimination has forced them to write to the chief minister seeking her leave to immolate themselves in a village just 15 km Modi's home town, Vadanagar. All this while the BJP dominated NDA II government seeks to appropriate Babasaheb Ambedkar and the country as a whole is celebrating Dr BR Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary.

Dalits Discriminated in Gujarat
Dalits are not a happy lot in the state of Gujarat. A quick look at the detailed documentation of violence and exclusion suffered by Dalits in the state since January this year reveal sharp and persistent cases of exclusion, violence and a denial of basic rights especially in Mehsana district and even in Sabarkantha.

Only in February this year, Dalit families from Lakshmipura-Bhandu, a small village of Visnagar taluka also in Mehsana ( Mehsana is also the home district of Anandi Patel, chief minister) were ‘not allowed’ to build a toilet! Even with today's reports of this letter seeking permission to self-immolate another one, of a Dalit groom and his family members being attacked and assaulted for ‘daring to ride a horse’ during the marriage procession )Khadol village Sabarkantha were documented by the media. Newspapers say this is the second such incident in 12 days.

In January 2016, on two separate occasions, Dalit sarpanches were not ‘allowed’ to hoist the national flag, the tricolour, on Republic Day.

The government, following the famed Gujarat model, has also passed a controversial land acquisition bill that will deprive small land-owners, farmers, Dalits, Adivais,owners of any say in land acquired by big business and government (April 1, 2016)  but is doing precious little on issue related to the fundamental protection of the rights of all it citizens. The resistance of the Gujarat government to make public the Inquiry Report into the Thangadh firing that left three Dalits dead after Gujarat police officers had used AK-47s to kill peaceful protesters.
 
But this letter written by 35 Dalit families representing a few hundred residents of the village seriously questions the government. The Times of India reports that the letter written by Babubhai Shankarbhai Senma, 46, of Nandali in Kheralu taluka of Mehsana district, addressed to the chief minister, says that Senma families, comprising 35 members, seek permission of self-immolation as members of upper castes have forced all villagers to boycott them. The boycott is in reaction to Senmas seeking legal action against eight upper caste persons under atrocity laws.

 According to the letter accessed by the TOI, Senma, who belongs to Dalit community, had gone to Mehsana district industrial centre to seek a sewing machine for her daughter-in-law, when one of the accused, identified as Jujarji Parmar, had hurled casterelated slurs and slapped him. Following the incident, Senma had approached local police, but no actions were initiated. However, the accused as ked villagers to boycott Senma and other members of his community. Following the direction from the upper caste member, villagers had not only boycotted the Senmas, but also stopped supplying essential commodities to them.

“Senma community members are not being given food grains, water, milk and fodder for their cattle. The villagers have stopped employing Senmas as daily wage labourers. Upper caste community members have issued diktat that if any villager is found employing a member of Senma community , then he too will be boycotted,“ said the letter. Senma alleged in his letter that the upper caste community members have been threatening Dalits to leave the village or face dire consequences.
 “The accused persons are threatening to burn us alive. Despite making several representations to the state administration, no government representative came to meet us. Therefore, please allow us permission for self-immolation," said Senma.
 

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In September 2003 the then chief justice of India, VN Khare, had sharply chastised the Gujarat government for not only its failure to protect lives and property but its open collusion in the subversion of the justice process and had subpoenaed evidence in the now famous Best Bakery case. The indignities heaped on the Gujarat state apparatus included the cross-examination in open court of the two most senior civil servants in Gujarat at the time – its chief secretary, PK Lahiri, and director general of police, K. Chakravarti. The judge’s remarks were occasioned by the state’s abysmal failure to offer cogent explanations for the hasty completion of the Best Bakery trial (in a matter of a few weeks!) and the failure to protect evidence or to ensure that all witnesses had appeared for the prosecution, which led to speedy acquittals. It was possibly the first time ever in the history of independent India that the higher judiciary had spoken, and spoken sharply, in a case of mass communal violence. (The apex court then decided to monitor the government’s appeal in the case and subsequently, in an indictment of the Gujarat high court which had dismissed the appeal, ordered retrial and transfer of the case to Mumbai, Maharashtra.)

Two months after these remarks, the first ever conviction in a 2002 carnage case occurred in Nadiad in Kheda district. On November 24, 2003 Judge CK Rane sentenced 12 persons to life imprisonment and three to two years’ rigorous imprisonment. Forty-eight persons were acquitted. The crime: the brutal massacre of 14 Muslims at Ghodasar and Jinger villages in Kheda on March 3, 2002. Six years later, six convicts had jumped parole and the Gujarat state apparatus claimed inability to track them down. About a year earlier, in October 2002, two other carnage cases, Pandharwada, where about 25 Muslims were killed (the unofficial figure is higher), and Kidiad, where 61 Muslims had been chased and burnt alive in two tempos, saw complete acquittals. In both cases, senior elected representatives and functionaries of the ruling dispensation were accused; in both cases, the story behind the acquittals was similar to that in the Best Bakery fast track trial in Vadodara in May 2003 – witnesses had been made to turn hostile.

In February 2006 the Best Bakery retrial judgement of Judge AM Thipsay finally convicted nine persons (if the Gujarat police are to be believed, seven of the accused are still absconding!). On October 30, 2007 eight persons who were accused of rape and murder in Eral, Panchmahal, were sentenced for life while 29 were acquitted. They were part of a mob that had brutalised, raped and then killed seven Muslims. In January 2008, in the Bilkees Bano case, also transferred to Mumbai, Judge UD Salvi sentenced 11 to life imprisonment. The case involved the brutal gang rape of Bilkees and the slaughter of her three-year-old daughter Saleha, during an incident in which 14 Muslims had been massacred. Though a constable was convicted for destruction of evidence, government functionaries, including doctors, escaped the arm of the law and senior policemen who had orchestrated the subversion of the case were let off by the court.

It is in this overall context that the November 9, 2011 verdict in the Sardarpura massacre case – which convicted 31 persons, all of them landed Patels responsible for assaulting defenceless agricultural labourers who had toiled in their fields for generations – must be viewed and assessed. Communalism Combat brings its readers edited excerpts of the judgement as this month’s cover story. This is the highest number of convictions ever recorded in a case of targeted communal violence in independent India. It is a tribute to the grit and courage of the 33 survivor witnesses, displaced from their homes, who testified in court, identified the accused despite threats and inducements and ensured that justice was delivered. That the case was one among those monitored by the Supreme Court, whose directives had ensured effective witness protection, enabled the impossible to happen. That the judge cleared Citizens for Justice and Peace and its secretary of malicious and motivated charges of tutoring witnesses was another landmark. None of this would have been possible without the energetic and committed CJP team, especially its lawyers in Gujarat. Advocates Yusuf Shaikh, Aslam Baig and Sameer Mansuri assiduously participated in an onerous process.

Some points for reflection: Even in simple cases wherein a group of persons acting with one mind have assembled to commit a set of crimes, the charge of conspiracy holds. Why then were the charges of conspiracy under Section 120B of the Indian Penal Code dropped?

Remember that Gujarat 2002 was about 300 ghastly incidents in 19 of the state’s 25 districts. Evidence was led through witnesses who testified about significant preparations by politicians and leaders of the Bajrang Dal who enjoyed state patronage and protection. Witnesses also sought to lead evidence on Tehelka magazine’s courageous sting ‘Operation Kalank’ which revealed specific and relevant aspects concerning arms and ammunition being brought into Mehsana (the district in which Sardarpura is located) prior to Godhra, February 27, 2002. At witnesses’ insistence, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) did record the statement of Tehelka’s correspondent Ashish Khetan but they did not call him as a witness. Why? Though former director general of police RB Sreekumar’s affidavits, with annexed reports of the State Intelligence Bureau, corroborated some of this evidence, the SIT was reluctant to probe this aspect further.

Sharp and aggressive in its approach to the Godhra train burning tragedy, the SIT and its prosecutor had not only bought the Gujarat police’s shaky and shady version of conspiracy but had argued for the death penalty, which was imposed on 11 of the 31 accused. In the Sardarpura case, witnesses, being opposed to retributive justice, did not argue for the death penalty at all.

And thus a niggling question remains: do we view the incidents of Godhra and post-Godhra as qualitatively and quantitatively different kinds of crimes? This is a tough one, which the Indian system would do well to answer.

— EDITORS

Archived from Communalism Combat, December 2011, Year 18, No. 162, Editorial

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By March 1, a similar situation was observed in over one dozen districts of Gujarat. Independent sources show that outside Ahmedabad, as many as 76,000 refugees were housed in camps all over the state. Official figures put this amount at about 25,000. In any event, even by the state government’s own assessment, at least 91,000  persons were displaced as a direct result of the carnage. Independent assessments put these at closer to 1,74,000 refugees in the state of Gujarat after the first flush of brutal violence; a staggering figure by any standards.  Besides, not all the survivors moved into camps — many went to the homes of their relatives and so on. Including them in the calculation, independent estimates put the total number of displaced Muslims in Gujarat at not less that 2,50,000. 

In the days following the first bout of brutal violence, agents of the state, notably the collectors/district magistrates of Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Mehsana, Himmatnagar, Anand, Sabarkantha, Banaskantha, Bharuch and Ankleshwar districts, as also the officials of some police stations, obstructed truckloads of privately mobilised relief material — milk, foodgrains, etc. —  from reaching the camps. Thereafter, the same officials harassed and penalised the refugees by, among other things, not giving them sufficient food. The conduct of these IAS and IPS officials calls for strong penal action.

The Tribunal is greatly concerned and outraged by the fact that only the leadership of the Muslim community was involved in the running of the relief camps because others did not come forward. Though some non–Muslim NGOs did contribute substantial amounts of aid to these relief camps right until August, the vast bulk of relief assistance to the refugees came from the community itself. 

For days and weeks, the Gujarat government adamantly refused to register the relief camps and denied relief assistance from state coffers. In blatant and brazen contrast to the Gujarat state’s attitude to the earthquake victims just one year earlier, when the ghastly earthquake of January 26, 2001 rocked the state, this time neither the Gujarat government nor the government of India applied to the UN and other international agencies for relief and rehabilitation measures. 

Equally, the Tribunal notes with concern and anguish that an insignificant number of international aid agencies came forward in the case of the Gujarat carnage, to help the victims. Given the scale of the state-perpetrated violence and given the response of international aid agencies to such carnages in other areas in the past, it was incumbent on them to provide relief and rehabilitation assistance to all those displaced and dispossessed by the communal carnage in Gujarat, without discrimination. 

Similarly, the fact that major national newspapers which, during such calamities in the past, have always set up independent relief funds, did not do so in the context of Gujarat 2002, speaks for the silence and complicity that surrounds relief and rehabilitation of the survivors of the Gujarat carnage. 

Six relief camps had to approach the Gujarat High Court (special civil applications 3773 of 2002) through a writ petition — supported by the Citizens for Justice and Peace — and a senior advocate had to be flown down from Mumbai for arguments, before the Gujarat government gave an assurance in court that it assumes responsibility for providing adequate relief to the camps. Justice Pradeep PB Majmudar delivered the order on this writ petition on April 22, 2002. 

‘‘What should we do? Run relief camps for them? Do we want to open baby producing centres?’’ — Chief Minister Narendra Modi

The first time that the Shri Modi condescended to visit the Shah–e–Alam Relief Camp in Ahmedabad city was a full month after the carnage broke out, on April 4. As recently as September 9, at Becharaji, Mehsana, during his Gujarat Gaurav Yatra, none other than the chief minister made a shocking public declaration: ‘‘What should we do? Run relief camps for them? Do we want to open baby producing centres?’’ 

Again on May 31, a public interest litigation (special civil application number 5311 of 2002) had to be filed in the Gujarat High Court by the Citizens for Justice and Peace and Communalism Combat to elicit an assurance from the state that relief camps would not be forcibly closed down. On June 4, the petitioners obtained an oral assurance from the government pleader that there would be no closure of the camps at least until June 30, 2002. It was on this precise date, that the state government began exerting pressure on camps and threatened penal measures against camp managers, if they did not ‘voluntarily’ sign a statement saying they wished to close down their camps. On June 26, when the matter came up for hearing, the petitioners, several camp managers and refugees filed 25 affidavits, detailing the extent of abdication of primary duty by the state and shocking instances of coercion and pressure being used against refugees and camp managers.

The writ petition pertaining to relief is still alive before the Gujarat High Court. 

Compensation
The Gujarat government showed itself in a crudely partisan and anti–constitutional light when it initially announced discriminatory amounts of compensation for the survivors of the Godhra tragedy and the post–Godhra carnage. Abdicating its primary role as protector and provider of all its citizenry, it has made no efforts to compute the extent of the loss of lives, the quantum of the destruction of homes, belongings, businesses and agricultural properties to date.

A measly Rs. 2,500 was given as dole to persons for loss of household goods (ghar vakhari) and, though the Prime Minister had announced that Rs. 50,000 would be given for loss of homes, less than 10 per cent of those who have obtained home compensation from the Gujarat government (at least 25 per cent of the total affected have not received anything at all) have got more than Rs. 30,000 each. For most of the survivors of the Gujarat carnage, the state government has rubbed salt on the wounds already suffered, by giving them paltry amounts of Rs. 1,200-2,500 each or less.

Rehabilitation
The Gujarat government has shown a similar callous indifference to the rehabilitation of the victims of continued violence. Barely a year ago, when a devastating earthquake struck the same state, the Gujarat government evolved an elaborate Earthquake-2001 Rehabilitation Package No. 1 for the earthquake affected and similar Packages No. 2, 3, 4, 4a, 4b, 5 followed. 

The Tribunal has closely examined these packages. Details of these seven-eight packages announced by the government of Gujarat, run by the same party, just over a year before the carnage, clearly establish how deeply discriminatory, callous and objectionable the conduct of the Gujarat government is in the context of the carnage.

By its behaviour and action, the government has made it clear that it wishes to have nothing to do with the physical and psychological rehabilitation of its own people, the Muslims of Gujarat. Shri Modi has made public pronouncements, stating that there was no question of his government either buying land to re-house survivors, for whom returning to a threatening environment is an impossibility, or of repairing or rebuilding mosques, dargahs and shrines that have been damaged.

Situation of Muslims in Gujarat
The Tribunal notes with concern and dismay, the continuing misery of the victim Muslim community in Gujarat. In areas where the most brutal incidents of mass killing, quartering and killings (often after sexual crimes against women and girls were committed) took place, statewide surveys by independent groups show that there is no question of the victimised section of residents returning to their original place of residence. 

These include survivors of Ghodasar, Sardarpura, Pandharwada, Ode, Sanjeli, Randhikpur and Chanasma massacres, as also residents of villages in Gandhinagar district itself, where Muslims were in a small and hopeless minority. They also include areas like Gulberg society, Ahmedabad. Though many residents of Naroda Gaon and Patiya have returned, this has been under duress, after the forced closure of the refugee camps where they had sought shelter. Many others have been rehabilitated by Muslim NGOs in different parts of Ahmedabad, while a significant number have migrated to other states.Agricultural land holdings owned by Muslims in districts are being callously taken over by miscreants and dominant interests.

In many villages, especially in Mehsana, Gandhinagar, Panchmahal and Dahod districts,  Muslims who have returned to their battered homes were facing a strictly enforced economic boycott by the dominant castes and communities through their refusal to buy milk products from them, to hire them as labour on their fields, etc. A near permanent loss of livelihood, and therefore a reduction to penury, was an imminent and serious likelihood. 

In welcome contrast to the above, in many regions of Sabarkantha and Banaskantha districts, it appears that a sincere effort was being made by members from the dominant community to isolate those in their midst who have led and fomented trouble, and to take a stand against violence in the future. In Chhotaudaipur, where sections of the Adivasi population have been misled and misused by dominant sections of their own and other castes, there has been a genuine expression of remorse, too, about the incident.

It is shocking and unfortunate that while the situation on the ground remains grim in the state, where no remorse has been expressed, no justice is in sight, where relief has only grudgingly been given and rehabilitation measures have been meagre, the sole desire of the government appeared to be to proclaim ‘normalcy’ before the country and the world. At no time was this babble of normalcy exposed more effectively than during the visit of the two teams of the Chief Election Commission to the state in August 2002. 

The story of Gujarat today, especially of cities like Ahmedabad, is one of brutally enforced ghettoisation of the Muslim minority in their residential colonies as much as in their business and trade enterprises. In parts of Ahmedabad, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Muslim minority to live, inhabit and move freely in areas that are now seen as “Hindu”. This state of affairs should be unacceptable in any part of Constitution–bound India.

For the religious minorities, the state of affairs in Gujarat is blatantly discriminatory and in violation of the Indian Constitution. The Tribunal regrets to record that with the connivance of the state, they have already been reduced to the status of second–class citizens. 

Archived from Communalism Combat, November-December 2002 Year 9  No. 81-82, Relief and Rehabilitation

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