Gujarat riots: NCM Report citing govt 'breakdown' now missing

More than a decade after the 2002 Gujarat riots, the National Commission for Minorities is looking for a missing report filed by an IAS officer which had advocated President’s rule in the state following the breakdown of administration. [caption id=“attachment_1434145” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  BJP’s PM candidate Narendra Modi. AP[/caption] The then secretary of the National Commission for Minorities Sarita J Das had in August last year approached the Commission stating that a report prepared by her, recommending that President’s rule be imposed in Gujarat after the 2002 riots, had gone missing. According to the minutes of the meeting, Das, now a retired IAS officer, had recommended President’s rule in view of the breakdown of the Constitutional machinery. “She (Das) also alluded to certain files had been reconstructed by the former Commission to remove some of the critical remarks that had been made. The Commission decided to order a formal internal enquiry to trace the missing documents as it felt that the institutional memory of the Commission had been rendered incomplete,” the minutes of the meeting state. Das claims her ‘damning report’ on the Gujarat riots has vanished from the records and she wanted to set the record straight after news reports quoted Narendra Modi as saying that he was heartbroken post the carnage. However, when she visited the Commission she noticed that the compendium had wiped out all of her submissions recommending President’s rule in the state. “I decided to approach the commission after I saw some news reports on television, quoting Narendra Modi as being heartbroken about the riots. This left me flabbergasted. My conscience hurt,” she told The Indian Express. She was perhaps referring to an interview Modi had given news agency Reuters in July last year, where he had said it was natural to be sad when something bad happens anywhere. “India’s Supreme Court is considered a good court today in the world. The Supreme Court created a special investigative team (SIT) and top-most, very bright officers who overlook oversee the SIT. That report came. In that report, I was given a thoroughly clean chit, a thoroughly clean chit. Another thing, any person if we are driving a car, we are a driver, and someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.” But Das’ intentions of raising the issue after a decade came under scrutiny by the then chairperson Wajahat Habibullah. According to Habibullah, initially the file could not be found but when they did find it, Das’s report was not a part of it. “…Instead there was one by Mr Tarlochan Singh, which according to Ms Das is a thoroughly edited version of what she had submitted. There were some documents missing from the file. I had asked for an inquiry into the parts that were missing,” Habibullah  told The Indian Express. Tarlochan Singh was then the vice-chairman of the NCM (2000 to 2003). He was later appointed as the chairman of the body when the NDA came to power. In 2004, he became a Rajya Sabha member from Haryana with support from the BJP and the INLD. Earlier this year, Singh had claimed that the Gujarat riots were ‘spontaneous’, further saying that the Gujarat government had on its own informed a NCM fact-finding committee that 137 had been killed in police firing. “Our impression after going there was that the Godhra incident was highlighted so much by television channels. That resulted in the spontaneous attack in the Ahmedabad city. It started early morning,” he had told The Financial Express_._ Modi is hopeful of becoming the Prime Minister come May this year. While opinion polls have given the BJP-led NDA a massive lead in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress party claims the electorate will vote for a stable and secular government at the Centre.