To begin with, we offer our sincere apologies to
readers of Communalism Combat. This special issue of the
journal should have been with you a few months ago. Unfortunately,
we were unable to bring it out
for unavoidable reasons.
From the feedback we have received over the
years, it is clear that our readers preserve their copies as
valuable reference material. If they have come to expect in-depth
reportage from the journal at one level, at another they look for
reader-friendly, easily accessible, edited versions of court
judgements, inquiry commission reports, etc. We hope our readers
will find the edited excerpts of the landmark judgement in the
Naroda Patiya case of particular interest.
Until now, in the context of communal carnages, a
culture of impunity has been the prevailing story of India where
victims and survivors of well-orchestrated pogroms against the
country’s religious minorities – Nellie 1983, Delhi 1984, Bhagalpur
(Bihar) 1989, Mumbai 1992-93, Kandhamal (Orissa) 2008 – have been
denied justice. When measured against the scale, ferocity and
bestiality of the mass crimes in these cases, there has been no
punishment worth the mention for the perpetrators and the
masterminds or the policemen guilty of partisan conduct and gross
dereliction of duty.
Against this backdrop, the delivery of justice,
even if partial, to the victim survivors of the 2002 genocide in
Gujarat comes as a hopeful sign, a signal to the practitioners of
hate crimes that impunity can no longer be taken for granted. Credit
for this must go to the extraordinary courage and steadfastness of
survivor witnesses, to the legal rights group Citizens for Justice
and Peace (CJP) and to the Supreme Court which since 2003 has
closely monitored the judicial process in Gujarat. By transferring
the Best Bakery carnage case out of Gujarat in 2004 and ordering its
retrial in a Mumbai court, the highest court in the land had made
its intentions amply clear. In a manner of speaking, the 2006
judgement of the Mumbai trial court fully vindicated the
unprecedented verdict of the apex court. In 2003 a Vadodara trial
court had acquitted all the accused and the Gujarat high court
upheld the acquittals. But following the retrial in Mumbai, nine of
the accused were given life imprisonment.
The verdict in the Best Bakery case marked a new
milestone. Never before in the history of communal carnages in
post-independence India had any of the guilty received a life
sentence. Since then, as readers of CC are well aware, many
more of the accused have been held guilty by trial courts in Gujarat
and have received life sentences. The verdicts in the Sardarpura,
Odh and Deepda Darwaza carnage cases, delivered between November
2011 and July 2012, resulted in 79 more life sentences. Then
followed the judgement in the Naroda Patiya case in end August 2012
when 32 of the accused were sentenced to life imprisonment.
While the above-mentioned verdicts stand out,
individually and collectively, so far as criminal jurisprudence in
the context of communal violence is concerned, the Naroda Patiya
judgement is especially significant for more than one reason. In the
other Gujarat verdicts, those convicted were mere "foot soldiers".
But included among those given life sentences in the Naroda Patiya
case are Babu Bajrangi and Dr Maya Kodnani. Babu Bajrangi was a
leader of the Bajrang Dal who enjoyed the patronage of top-level
politicians in Gujarat. Dr Kodnani, a BJP MLA in 2002, was elevated
by chief minister Narendra Modi to the rank of minister after the
2007 assembly elections in Gujarat. Judge Jyotsna Yagnik’s verdict
holds Dr Kodnani guilty of criminal conspiracy, names her as the
"kingpin" behind the crimes committed in Naroda Patiya on February
28, 2002, describing the incident as a "cancer for our cherished
constitutional value of secularism", and awards her a stringent
28-year jail term.
It may be recalled that Dr Kodnani is one of
those named in the complaint of Ms Zakiya Jaffri wherein she has
accused Modi and 61 others, including top BJP politicians,
bureaucrats and police officers, of "criminal conspiracy to commit
mass murder". Thus Judge Yagnik’s ruling may well have implications
for the case against Modi and others that is still before the
courts.
Without doubt, the Naroda Patiya verdict was a
proud moment for the judiciary and the country’s democratic polity.
We are happy to place edited excerpts of this landmark judgement
before our readers.
We urge our readers to treat this issue as a
special edition of CC covering the period August-November
2012. The coming issue will commemorate 20 years of the anti-Muslim
pogrom in Bombay (now Mumbai).