Modi, Teesta will have to SIT still till 29 Feb for Gulbarg report

Anything to do with Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi is bound to be exciting and controversial. On Wednesday, the Ahmedabad magistrate who is trying the Gulbarg Society massacre case of 2002, managed to get everyone’s blood pressure up when he ordered that the report of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) that probed the massacre should be given in full, along with all supporting documents, to the court by 15 March. [caption id=“attachment_214427” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The SIT report is supposed to have given a clean chit to Modi.AFP”]  [/caption] Zakia is the widow of Ehsan Jafri, a former Congress MP who was burnt alive along with 68 others when the Gulbarg Society buildings were torched by a Hindu mob on 28 February 2002, in retaliation for the Godhra train burning the day before (See Gulbarg timeline in this report). Both sides celebrated the magistrate’s order. The SIT lawyer was happy that activists such as Teesta Setalvad and others were not to be given a copy of the SIT order. Teesta & Co celebrated claiming the report was to be given to Zakia, and hence it was a defeat for Modi and SIT, which is headed by former CBI Director RK Raghavan. The real story is that the court is yet to decide who will get access to the SIT report – and this decision will probably come on 29 February. The chances are at least Zakia’s lawyers will get copies, since the Supreme Court order says she has to be kept in the loop on whatever the court decides to do with the SIT report. The SIT report, which is now with the magistrate, has become controversial since it is supposed to have given a clean chit to Modi. Zakia Jafri wants Modi’s name included in the list of people accused of the Gulbarg massacre. But nobody barring SIT and the trial court now know what the report actually says. Moreover, there is no such thing as a clean chit, for the SIT cannot pronounce Modi guilty or not guilty; all it can say is whether it found evidence of Modi’s complicity in the Gulbarg case, and whether the case will really hold up in court. The court may decide on this too. Assuming the SIT report has indeed given Modi a clean chit, if Teesta & Co still want to go after Modi, they will have to produce evidence for the same. They can’t get Modi just because they believe that he is responsible for the post-Godhra violence. Belief is one thing, proof quite another. Teesta & Co have been gone overboard in waging a war of slander against the Raghavan SIT claiming it is biased in favour of Modi. It was successful in raising enough doubt in the Supreme Court’s mind to prompt the latter to ask Raju Ramachandran to act as Amicus Curiae (friend of the court) and vet the SIT report independently after doing his own checks. SIT’s final closure report thus takes Ramachandran’s views too on board. Since no one knows what SIT or Ramachandran really said, the anti-Modi activists are thus jumping the gun. The trial court’s order, that the SIT report should be given in full by 15 March, instead of cooling things down, only seems to have fuelled the suspicions of activists. One of them, Mukul Sinha of the Jan Sangharsh Manch, plans to move a higher court to get a copy of the SIT report. Sinha can save himself the trouble. If the court is going to give Zakia or her lawyers a copy of the report by 15 March, there is no reason why he can’t lay his hands on it the same day too. Has he not heard of Xerox machines? When the highest court ordered on 12 September 2011 that the case will revert to the trial court, all it asked the magistrate to do was to give a hearing to Zakia before deciding on the SIT report. The magistrate, in fact, might go one step further and give her lawyers a copy of the report. As usual, the activists seem to smelling a rat where there may be none. 29 February should be the next date on their calendar.