The Gujarat Carnage: Commissions of Enquiry into the Godhra Train incident
The Background
Not since the days of Partition have Indians witnessed a carnage of the size and horror of the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in the summer of 2002, ostensibly triggered off by the rioting at Godhra Railway Station on the morning of Feb 27, 2002, which resulted in a carriage, S-6, of the Sabarmati Express catching fire and the death of 58 persons, many Hindu kar sevaks returning from Ayodya, U.P. In the following weeks massacres of Muslims claimed over 2000 lives, by all reliable non-governmental accounts, and several hundred Muslim women were raped, and babies killed in broad daylight by ferocious Hindu mobs. The Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, of the BJP Party, referred to the ``natural and justified anger'' of the people of his State, while the then Prime Minister, Vajpayee, focussed his criticisms on the ``trouble-making Muslims''. George Fernandes, the then Defence Minister, likewise brushed aside the carnage as another regular act of violence.
Previous Reports
The Concerned Citizen’s Tribunal Report, under the leadership of retired Supreme Court judge, VR Krishna Iyer, and published later that year, laid the blame for the carnage on the inaction of the State Government. An Independent fact Finding Mission, led by Kamal Mitra Chenoy, said the State government seemed ‘to be the main sponsor of and partner in the planned massacre, loot and arson.’ Paul Brass in Theft of an Idol, 1998, called the Gujarat State an institutionalised riot system. An IAS Officer, Harsh Mander, resigning his commission, said: “The unconscionable failures and active connivance of the state police and administrative machinery is also now widely acknowledged.” Julio Reibero, ex-Director General of police, Maharashtra, called the Gujarat Police “eunuchs” for having attacked helpless people including old men, women and children.[Ashgar Ali Engineer, Secular Perspective, June 16-30, 2002]. Foreign analysts compared the action of the Modi government with that of the Nazis pogram in the November of 1938 against Jews, known as Kristallnacht - night of broken glass. [www.countercurrents.org] Sudhir Kakar [ TOI, April 29,2002] emphazised that for a riot to occur, there had to be ‘an assessment by the rioters that violence carries little risk to themselves.’ K.N.Pannikar [Hindu June 15,2002] stated magisterially: ‘The Gujarat pogrom was the result of the convergence of purpose of a communalised state and a part of civil society.’
Despite such wide-spread condemnation, the Government of India, failed to censure, let alone remove the State government from power. Even liberal Hindus, such as the columnist, Prem Shankar Jha, continued to believe that the mob fury was unleashed because of the deliberately planned burning of the kar sevaks’ compartment by Muslims. The Nanavati Commission set up to enquire into the incident has yet to say anything definite.
Hence the Justice U.C. Banerjee interim Report [ Hindu January 23, 2005], taken together with the analysis of the expert engineers of The Hazards Centre, New Delhi, is widely welcomed for the illumination thrown on the incident. It was clearly an accident, caused by a fire started from within the compartment. The Muslims of Godhra were not to blame. The report castigates the inefficiency of the police in carrying out investigations, eye-witnesses contradicting the police charge-sheet.
The report brings back focus on the carnage that followed and the role of the BJP State Government in permitting it to happen, as averred by several independent civil society organizations and commentators. President’s Rule has been declared in the past for lesser failures to maintain law and order. In this case, there seems to be prima facie evidence that the Government, or at least some high level politicians and officials actively connived in the riots, and deliberately allowed Muslims to be killed. Clearly, the BJP party which held power at the centre when the incidents happened protected its own party in the State, but by such action brought into contempt a cardinal principle of good governance. It is the government’s primary duty to protect the lives and property of its citizens; and in this case it did just the opposite.
Possibly rattled by the Banerjee Report, leaders of the BJP and the Hindu right-wing VHP admitted before the Nanavati and Shah judicial inquiry commission that they had no information or evidence to suggest that the Godhra train carnage was a Pakistan-sponsored Conspiracy, as they had previously maintained.[Hindu February 6, 2005] There seems to be sufficient grounds for the Congress Party now to dismiss the BJP government in Gujarat, except for memories of their own involvement in the Sikh massacres in Delhi in 1984. It is likely that neither party is keen to rake up their records over communal riots.
When the Railway Minister, Lallu Prasad Jadav, who had instituted the Banerjee Committee, said he would bring to light the communal nature of the BJP, the Chief Election Commissioner insinuated that he had engineered release of the report to support his party in the Bihar elections which have just been held. The Hindu editorial [ January 21, 2005]sternly commented: ‘The BJP under Narendra Modi's leadership fought and won the Gujarat elections on the plank of the Godhra deaths and their communal fallout. If the Election Commission were honestly and uncompromisingly to adhere to its own guidelines, the entire election process in Gujarat would have to be nullified. Constitutional experts, therefore, have suggested that Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and expression, subject to reasonable restrictions imposed by law, must guide every attempt to regulate public and political activity.’
From the above incident, it is clear that a major Constitutional issue has also surfaced in the wake of the Godhra accident. How do we as a polity maintain the vibrancy of democracy – in Jawaharlal Nehru’s words, even ‘ the noise and chaos of democracy,’ – and the freedom of speech and expression, without giving space to politicians to ‘create’ a favourable incident at the last minute before elections? The release of the Banerjee interim report was not such a created incident, though the Chief Election Commissioner, T.S. Krishnamurthy suspected such to be the case. And that intervention also brings to the fore another important factor in political governance: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? How will we ensure that the guardians of democracy are themselves above prejudice?
