The sting in the story
by ASHISH KHETAN
Justice returns Babu Bajrangi (left) and Maya Kodnani, a former minister in Modi’s Cabinet
PHOTOS/AFP/AP
I was over the moon the day TEHELKA’s six-month-long undercover operation on Gujarat riots was scheduled to be aired on AajTak and Headlines Today and couldn’t sleep the previous night. The AajTak editor, QW Naqvi, had called the programme ‘Operation Kalank’ — a blot on the nation and democracy. I remember Tarun Tejpal, TEHELKA’s editor-in-chief, go on about how our investigation was going to change the narrative of Gujarat riots and the politics around it.
After all, what we had achieved was groundbreaking. Rioters, conspirators, public prosecutors, Sangh Parivar leaders and a BJP MLA, were all caught on tape confessing to their roles in the 2002 massacre and the systemic subversion of justice in its aftermath. How women and children were hacked and burnt to death, how Ehsaan Jafri was lynched and set on fire, how women were raped, a foetus impaled on a sword straight out of the mother’s womb, how the police had assisted the rioters, how ministers were taking a blow-by-blow account of the ongoing massacre from them, how witnesses were bought or intimidated into silence, how evidence was destroyed, how judges were transferred to secure bail for rioters. All of this was said on record by the very men who did it.
Tehelka for more
(Thanks to Aslam Merchant)
Editorials from The Hindu and The Indian Express welcomes the Naroda Patiya case verdict
The Hindu, August 30, 2012
A stunning verdict
The conviction by a Gujarat court of BJP legislator Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi along with 30 others for their role in the Naroda Patia massacre is the strongest judicial affirmation yet that large-scale communal violence is almost always a product of pre-meditated political planning and calculation. An estimated 95 Muslims, many of them hapless women and children, were hacked to death in Naroda, a minority neighbourhood in Ahmedabad targeted by armed mobs under the indulgent gaze of the Gujarat government in the wake of the February 27, 2002 Godhra train carnage. The verdict is a landmark one. It is for the first time that an Indian court has convicted a sitting MLA — Ms Kodnani was also a minister in the Narendra Modi government from 2007 to 2009 — for mob aggression against members of a religious community. Secondly, the court has not only upheld the charge of criminal conspiracy against the 32 individuals convicted, it has also found one of them guilty of rape and sexual harassment.
The Indian Express
Where law wins out
Aug 30 2012
The arc of history may finally be bending towards justice for the victims of communal violence that gripped Gujarat in 2002. Thirty-two people, including Maya Kodnani, formerly women and child development minister in the Narendra Modi government, and Babu Bajrangi, a Bajrang Dal leader, were convicted by a special court in Gujarat for their roles in the Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad.
This is the first time, after exhaustive investigations, that convictions have touched Gujarat’s powerful. In April, the special court convicted 23 in the Ode case, another flashpoint in the 2002 violence. The Supreme Court has gone to great lengths to insulate the legal process from powerful vested interests — setting up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) in 2008 at the request of Zakia Jafri and the NHRC to examine nine of the most critical cases, and also sending amicus curiae, Raju Ramachandran, to conduct independent investigations. The divergences in those two reports point to the complexity of assigning culpability in these cases. Kodnani, in fact, had been arrested by the SIT in 2009. This is a moment to admire the judicial system that has wrested some resolution for the trauma of Naroda Patiya.
Communalism Watch for more
(Thanks to Mukul Dube)