Gujarat police records nail Modi govt's claims on riots

The ghosts of the Gujarat riots of 2002 are proving hard for Chief Minister Narendra Modi to exorcise. Just as his campaign to inject himself onto the national platform, with a very visible campaign to showcase his claims to good governance was picking up momentum, along comes fresh evidence that establishes that the riots were not as spontaneous as Modi and the BJP have made them out to be and that the police force in the State didn’t act promptly enough despite being made aware that a communal conflagration was imminent in February 2002. In a protest petition filed before an Ahmedabad court on Monday, Zakia Jaffri, widow of former Congress MP Ehsaan Jaffri, who was murdered by a mob in Gulberg Society on 28 February 2002, has challenged the ‘clean chit’ provided by the Special Investigation Team to the Gujarat government in the riots cases. The annexures that form part of Zakia Jaffri’s petition, which Headlines Today reported on on Monday, make for sensational reading, and clearly contest the Gujarat government’s – and Modi’s – claims that the riots were a spontaneous eruption of violence in response to the Godhra train burning on 27 February 2002. [caption id=“attachment_703586” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File photo of riots in Gujarat during February 2002. Reuters[/caption] Along with her petition, Zakia Jaffri filed some 3,500 pages of Police Control Room wireless messages and an additional 4,000 pages of the State Intelligence agency’s reports. These documents were made available to her by a very reluctant SIT under orders of the Supreme Court in February 2012. Curiously, there is a back story to the sudden appearance of these documents that points to yet more shadow play behind the riots investigation. The SIT had in its closure report said that it had asked the Gujarat government for the police wireless messages , but had been told that they were probably destroyed. However, when the Supreme Court pulled up the SIT claiming that there were discrepancies between its findings and its conclusions, these police wireless messages and intelligence reports mysteriously surfaced out of nowhere. And, even more curiously, as the Headlines Today report points out, the reports turned up in the hands of PC Pande, who had served as Ahmedabad Police Commissioner during the time of the riots, but had subsequently retired. Precisely how this important bit of evidence turned up in the hands of a retired bureaucrat hasn’t been sufficiently explained. In any case, these wireless messages and intelligence clearly establish that within hours of the horrific burning of kar saveks on board the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, the police control rooms in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar were bombarded with field reports from police officials across the State warning of a communal mobilization campaign by the VHP and the Bajang Dal and the potential for a communal conflagration. All through the day (27 February 2002) and through the night –when the bodies of the kar sevaks were brought to Ahmedabad and taken in funeral processions across the state – the police officials on the ground kept sounding warnings. Likewise, the State Intelligence Bureau too received alarming reports of provocative, hate-mongering speeches by VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders and real-time accounts of violence, including at Sola Hospital in Ahmedabad, where the kar sevaks’ bodies were first brought. In some cases, these reports called for police reinforcement in order to deal with the situation and flagged the need to make preventive detentions and impose curfew. Yet, the State Home Department did not act on this advice – and in that sense allowed the riots to intensify. As RB Shreekumar, who served as DGP of the State police in 2002, told the Headlines Today panel discussion, the documents establish that far from being “spontaneous”, the riots were “conceived, designed, planned, organised and perpetrated.” And, strikingly, where the police officers on the ground acted to impose curfew and make preventive detentions, not a single death occurred. “The riots succeeded only in those areas where the police acted as abettors and facilitators and enablers.” Mukul Sinha, an Ahmedabad High Court advocate, who has taken up cases on behalf of 2002 riot victims, pointed to the fact that the Nanavati Commission had recorded that the then President KR Narayanan had directed the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister to summon the Army as soon as riots broke out, but no action had been taken. “I personally believe,” he told the panel discussion, “that everything was worked out for 48 hours: they wanted the mob to run amok.” It is “impossible to deny” that “people from high places were behind the riots.” The new documents also call into question the readiness with which the SIT gave a clean chit to the Gujarat government, and bought too readily into its claim that the police wireless messages and intelligence bureau reports had been destroyed. As Shreekumar pointed out, there was a fit case for the SIT to have taken action against Pande for withholding evidence from a Supreme Court-appointed commission. The latest sensational revelations also point to one of the immutable laws of public office: if there are documents that have the capacity to embarrass political powers and expose conspiracies, they will come out into the public domain sooner or later. The fact that the Modi government is still grappling with the ghost of the 2002 riots – even 11 years later – is sobering testimony of that. Watch the Headlines Today expose here and here.