wo events have
hung on the conscience of modern India because we, as a society, have not
responded to it. It is not easy to respond to violence either as a mnemonic or
as a continuing process. Witness and victim almost become irritants testifying
to our passivity.
In fact, when one sees the prime agents of ’84, one realises
that as tigers they are toothless. The late HKL Bhagat, even Sajjan Kumar, had
better claims to an old age home than prison. It raises then the question of
whether we should pursue these people into dotage.
Even more, it confronts us with the question – should society
forget and go on?
There is a therapy in forgetting, a hygiene that does not allow
old wounds to fester. But there is a sense of history as convenience which a
society cannot allow. Also, denial produces its own pathologies. For instance,
the Israeli Sabra’s contempt for the Holocaust Jew was so blatant that camp
documents were sold as pornographic literature. The denial of violence comes
back as a new form of destiny. Sociologists also banalised the ’84 riots with
writers like Emma Vidal pursuing a ruthless ethnography of how widows exploited
the situation. While competent as sociology, this form of work blunted the sense
of justice by treating the victims as entrepreneurs of their own misfortune.
What Ms Vidal forgot is that not all memory can be commoditised. All trauma does
not graduate to the circus as a "monster".
The 2002 riots were a bit different from the riots of 1984. The
first major difference was that in ’84 civil society and especially academics,
university students, groups like the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL)
and People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) rose to the occasion to provide
succour to the victim. The state, in Gujarat, treated the victims as
recalcitrant citizens of a development process. The riots were seen as part of a
logic of development, of an old city sulking in its ethnicity. Worse, there was
a blatant sense of exterminism. The local society in general wanted not just to
terrorise the victim but also to eliminate him. This psychology in fact
contributed to the carnivalesque mode in the aftermath of what was genocide.
What kept memory alive, apart from the efforts of the survivor,
was not the media but the defiance of dissenters. One thinks, in particular, of
Teesta Setalvad and the defiant testimony of Sreekumar before the Nanavati
Commission. It was partly because of their efforts that the court established
the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe into the Gujarat riots.
The entry of the SIT was an extraordinary event. It came at a
moment of cynicism about law and justice. It worked quietly, almost invisibly.
Yet its very adherence to protocols, its readiness to listen, its determined
patience created a sense of the law as an occasional oasis of hope. Just like
with Sreekumar in the earlier phase, for RK Raghavan enactment of protocols has
become iconic of the processes of a decent society.
In a performative way, faith in justice is going to depend not
merely on what the SIT unearths but on how Mr Raghavan, in his role as SIT head,
behaves. He has to perform the drama of legal interrogation and investigation
and he has to do it with immaculate correctness. In an odd sense, Raghavan has
to play Raghavan to be convincing. He has created an everydayness about the
interrogation, playing the unflappable Jeeves to a legal system that often tends
to be empty-headed. As CBI director, Mr Raghavan embodied professionalism and
honesty. His was a respected career.
But when, on April 27, the SIT opened the file on 41 new cases,
something new was signalled. A Pandora’s box of question marks exploded to
encompass police officers, IAS officers, including chief secretaries, and even a
few ministers. It was an electrifying moment. A new set of expectations has been
created. The demands for justice as procedure, as ritual, as performance and as
meaning has reached a new high.
Mr Raghavan is not merely a person. He is now a persona. His new
role demands an immaculate performance as the circle of suspicion tightens
around an elite bunch of officers. Tacitly and explicitly, he has to define what
duty is. Is one loyal to a chief minister or the Constitution? Is duty clerical
adherence to procedures or following one’s conscience? Is silence punishable? Is
a request for transfer an adequate form of dissent? Is duty doing things right
or doing the right things?
This drama does not belong to Gujarat alone. It is a truth
commission of a different sort, asking why officers meekly follow unjust orders.
In a psychological sense, we will have to face the idea that obedience is not
enough. Following the psychologist, Stanley Milgram’s questions, one then asks
why people obey indiscriminately and what differentiates the ethics of duty from
the ethics of obedience.
Mr Raghavan has to enact this entire pedagogy and compress it
into a report. If he succeeds, he will become an icon and if he trembles, it is
the bureaucracy that will turn iconoclastic, dismissing the SIT as a partisan or
incompetent body. It is ethical high drama enacted within the procedural domain.
If the rituals are completed with fidelity then a new generation of bureaucracy
will face new standards of truth and propriety. They will realise that truth
does not die when a file is closed. Mr Raghavan has enacted the first move by
summoning one of the members of the SIT itself for interrogation. But the SIT
drama is also a challenge to society.
One of the fragments of violence one has lived with is how
ordinary people kill and live with themselves. The question is what happens to a
society that allows murder as a permissible occasional ritual.
The SIT drama should now be seen as more than a cat-and-mouse
game, a record of which bureaucrat got caught and which did not. One sympathises
with the families of officers under scrutiny. Communities get ungenerous at
these moments. But justice or, rather, the search for justice, can help cleanse
our society. We owe the SIT a debt of gratitude for this moment of ethics.