By Mukul Dube (Mainstream)
On April 27, 2009, over seven years after the cataclysmic violence in Gujarat, the Supreme Court of India directed the Special Investigation Team (also known as the Raghavan Committee) to look into the role of Narendra Modi, then as now the Chief Minister of Gujarat, in that violence. The focus is naturally on Modi, although the SIT was asked also “to probe the roles of 62 other top ranking politicians, bureaucrats and police officers of the State”.
There have been two reactions to this. One is to say, “Der aye, durust aye: that is, even if it comes late, the right step has been taken (a variant is a dry ‘and about time too’).” The other reaction is to refer to the dictum that justice delayed is justice denied.
I suggest that the second reaction is the valid one in the unusual circumstances that we are considering. The reason is that those who ruled Gujarat in 2002 still rule that State. They are widely held to have been responsible for the violence or at least to have taken no steps to prevent it or, later, to punish the perpetrators. They did nothing to ameliorate the suffering of the tens of thousands of Muslims who were reduced to living in camps. Indeed, their leader Modi was callous enough to describe the camps as “breeding factories”, and his wit was duly rewarded by the guffaws of his acolytes.
Two thousand or more Muslims were killed in the violence.1 This was justified by calling them “enemies”, “outsiders”, “Pakistanis” and “terrorists”. Muslims in Gujarat continue to be described in these terms, and they continue to be treated as aliens who have no rights, not even the right to return to their own homes. The areas in which they live—and these have been called ghettos—are denied the basic amenities of water, sewage collection and electricity. No banks serve them and there are no schools in them. They are in the “Hindu Rajya” yet not in it, in the “Hindu Rashtra” yet not in it. A neighbourhood in which Muslims live is labelled “Pakistan” and is treated as enemy territory. Certainly it is not part of “Shining India”, the fiction about which the Hindu Right cried itself hoarse.
Time is the great healer, they say; and then there is the excellent idea of “forgive and forget”. We have before us the relatively recent example of South Africa, where literally millions of the gravest crimes against humanity were exposed and then buried in the name of “truth and reconciliation”. It is truly sound reasoning to look not at the past but to the future; but there are compelling reasons why that cannot be done in the instance of Gujarat.
“I doubt that that woman’s wounds will ever be healed who was raped, whose husband and brother were killed before her eyes, whose unborn foetus was held aloft on the point of a sword, whose house was destroyed with exploding gas cylinders.” This is what I wrote two years after the Godhra railway carriage fire (‘Answer to a Question’, published on the Internet on February 28, 2004). The truth of it has since been underscored by something I had not foreseen: for all these years, killers and rapists have swaggered about, free as air, and have each day held up the threat of repetition—no less real for being unspoken—to their victims. And the prisons of Gujarat have, over this entire period, housed without trial many hundreds of victims whom a criminal state apparatus has declared criminals.
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