A SENSE OF DEJA VU mingled with a quiet rage vied with each other as I watched Operation Kalank through the night of October 25-26. Killers and conspirators bared all, not in a court of law as is right and just, but in a brave but covert operation that cannot but assist the limping struggle for justice. Or so we must still hope. Déjà vu because since Communalism Combat’s Genocide 2002 issue of March-April 2002, which I had authored after four weeks of one of the most anguished periods of my life, the detailed ingredients of the State-sponsored mass massacre had been documented with maimed and ghastly photos of babies hacked, women dismembered and men slaughtered, before being burnt alive. The five years since have witnessed one of the most rigorous battles for justice in independent India’s history, where victims, survivors and witnesses stood hand in hand with citizens’ rights groups demanding acknowledgement, justice and reparation.

Quiet rage because of the pain and humiliation that thousands of survivors have had to undergo after 2,500 of their near and dear ones were brutally massacred, and because the Gujarat government, whose sworn Constitutional duty was to protect their lives, today lives with a carefully cultivated cloak of normalcy, development and denial. Quiet rage also because we have had to get the survivors to tell and re-tell their tale of humiliation, denial and segregation before diminishing audiences, in desperate attempts to keep the 2002 genocide on the national radar. Zakia apa’s pained but composed testimony should have put all our Constitutional bodies to shame.

Quiet rage because the makeover of Gujarat’s image has been in large measure possible because of the failure of the Indian political class to keep up the pressure on the system to deliver justice to the victims of mass crime. (The Congress has a poor record on mass crimes given the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre and the failure to implement the Srikrishna Commission report; on Gujarat its silence is palpable and self-accusatory. The Indian Left, that will call the UPA coalition to book over the Indo-US deal, has shown a morally lukewarm attitude towards the struggle for justice in Gujarat; other formations use the issue of Gujarat as political rhetoric alone; the BJP, the unquestionably guilty party, is shifty and silent.) This image re-make has been possible because of the huge money in large projects poured into Gujarat by the Ambanis, the Ruias, the Adnanis and the Tatas.

Our courts have assisted this by allowing the Gujarat government’s blatant efforts to keep cases pending — in cold storage — year after year, for over four years. Time after time in the courts, documented facts and a zealous prosecution by us have exposed the lies of the Gujarat state on record. Unable in the face of these explosive facts to outrightly dismiss pleas of victim-survivors and citizens groups, the courts have done what they best could — adjourn the cases again and
again, over three dozen times.

What the TEHELKA tapes have blatantly revealed could have been exposed through a rigorous scrutiny by our courts if the trials that have been stayed since November 2003 had been re-investigated, transferred and prosecuted. If the deliverance of justice had been speedy and fair. If the courts had responded to the victims’ plea for justice and not succumbed to the state’s efforts at delay and digression. (There have been about 37 hearings in the Supreme Court. At each, we have rigorously been pushing an insensitive system the best we can.) Justice delayed is justice denied is a lesson learnt outside of law school. If this is not a brazen attempt to wear out the struggle for justice, what is?

Coming back to Operation Kalank, how much more evidence will it take before those who should be prosecuted and behind bars are actually done so? We have in this remarkably courageous operation seven or eight players from the Hindu Right, that is Sangh Parivar outfits, directly pointing a finger at chief minister Narendra Modi’s direct involvement in orchestrating and executing mass murder. The most chilling is the account of a rapist (Suresh Richard) from Naroda, who speaks of Modi arriving at Naroda the evening after 200 persons had been butchered and burnt, and euphorically congratulating the army of marauders. We have a man working in the accounts office of Vadodara’s MS University speaking of direct orders from Modi, as also Modi’s street operator Babu Bajrangi, who was thereafter sheltered by Modi at Gujarat Bhavan in Mount Abu. The judiciary was also carefully manipulated to ensure that mass murderers and rapists get bail, sometimes anticipatory bail, and roam scot-free. (The Muslims accused of mass arson in the S-6 coach of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra have been denied bail for over five years. Here too the Supreme Court has consistently postponed hearing of the cases. There is also by now sufficient evidence to show that the fire was the result of an accident and not an “ISI conspiracy”.)

Modi, accused for over five years of planning and executing a genocide, was able to carry it out because of an armed militia trained and created for mass rape and murder. Hate camps held every Tuesday and Saturday at Naroda, Kheda and a host of other locations in the state since mid-1985 have poisoned young minds and readied a population that can possibly rise again if the battlecry is given. Since 1998, carefully circulated anonymous pamphlets (that were submitted by me to the Gujarat Police) guide the rank and file of this militia to manipulate evidence, file false FIRs, destroy bodies and forensic evidence to leave no trail of their crimes. All this was executed masterfully in February-March 2002.

THE TEHELKA operation substantiates, with self-confessions that are crucial evidence, what was revealed by the issues of Communalism Combat before and after the genocide, a host of media reports and the Concerned Citizens Tribunal report. Ahmedabad Police Commissioner in 2002, PC Pandey, has been flayed for his role. Through the TEHELKA operation we are told how he brazenly ordered the 200 bodies of the Naroda Gaon and Patiya massacres to be removed and destroyed so that the death count stayed down to 105 — 97 from Naroda Patiya and eight from Naroda Gaon. The postmortem records show that even these 105 bodies from Naroda were brought to the hospital piecemeal, with the last few bodies being brought in a full four days after the massacre. The police did not carry out post-mortems on as many as 41 bodies recovered from Naroda Patiya and Naroda Gaon. Needless to say, the names of Modi or Pandey are not recorded in any FIR for any crime. (We have filed a comprehensive case along with Zakia Ehsan Jafri demanding simply a registering of the crime.)

As Gujarat burned in 2002, even the Supreme Court failed to issue suo motu notice and initiate any process to demand justice. Traumatised voices from inside the Shah-e-Alam dargah, which was converted into Gujarat’s largest relief camp, were met with silence. Raped women and bruised men urged the highest court in the land to bend to a nation’s conscience. The Supreme Court, which had issued suo motu notice when rocks in the Himalayan mountainside were defaced, turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the cries for justice from Gujarat.

The time has come for all of us to seriously question our system. The political class, the legislature, the courts. Clearly, cleansing the State and society of a gang of mass murderers cannot be a task left only to our courts. State terror and State-sponsored terror has always generated terror of a reactive kind. We live in fragile and dangerous times. Blasts in Nanded, Purnea and Parbhani in Maharashtra clearly point to the involvement of Hindu terror groups like the RSS and the Bajrang Dal. Gujarat 2002 saw a coming together of State terror and terrorists of the Hindu Right. The TEHELKA exposé details the use and distribution of firearms by these groups for mass murder. Inaction now will mean complicity and acceptance. Let it not be said of Indian democracy that Hindu Right-wing terror enjoys State patronage at the highest levels.