A hate-laden speech and murder: Why did Chetan Singh vanish from the news cycle?

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 10, 2023

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/08/10/a-hate-laden-speech-and-murder-why-did-chetan-singh-vanish-from-the-news-cycle

July 31, 2023. That is a date we need to remember. What happened that day has already been relegated to the inside pages of most newspapers and has vanished altogether from our shouty TV channels. They are currently obsessing over the violence on the doorstep of India’s national capital, and the debate in Parliament over the no-confidence motion tabled by the opposition parties.

Yet, while the media must address the latest drama, there are several reasons why the event of July 31 needs to be followed up and analysed in much greater detail. 

On July 31, even as the Jaipur-Mumbai Superfast Express was speeding through Gujarat towards Mumbai, a Railway Protection Force jawan decided to make use of the loaded weapon he was carrying. Chetan Singh first shot his own senior after an altercation. He then walked through the train, picking out bearded men and shooting them at point blank range. He shot three such men. They were all Muslims. 

It is not just the act of shooting Muslim men, whose identity was evident from their beards and clothes (in one instance, he asked the name of the man to be sure). It’s Chetan Singh’s rant, recorded by several passengers on their phones, that is chilling. Here is what he said according to a report in The Wire:

“Pakistan se operate hue hain, tumhari media, yahi media coverage dikha rahi hai hai, pata chal raha hai unko, sab pata chal raha hai, inke aaqa hai wahan...Agar vote dena hai, agar Hindustan me rehna hai, toh mai kehta hoon, Modi aur Yogi, ye do hain, aur aapke Thackeray.”

Loosely translated: “They operate from Pakistan, this is what the media of the country is showing, they have found out, they know everything, their leaders are there...If you want to vote, if you want to live in India, then I say, Modi and Yogi, these are the two, and your Thackeray.”

Singh was apprehended before the train reached Mumbai. Most of the early reports in print media focused on his mental stability rather than his deliberate targeting of Muslim men.  

Television news coverage was a different story altogether. According to this episode of TV Newsance in Newslaundry, Times Now reported that the men were killed in “crossfire”. By this, one presumes they thought that Singh and his senior were firing at each other with loaded guns and three Muslims, sitting in different compartments just happened to come into the line of fire!

After this first, brief, and mostly inaccurate reporting of the train killings, television news moved on to the communal clashes in Nuh just outside Delhi. The follow-up was done mostly by Mumbai’s local newspapers. 

Mid-Day, for instance, reported that the investigators had concluded that the man knew what he was doing and admitted he hated Muslims. He also said, according to the paper, that he would have shot many more people had the train not stopped before reaching Mumbai. Singh has now been charged under sections relating to hate crimes.

Apart from follow-up reports, there was also little by way of comment that questioned why Singh had such a deep hatred of Muslims that he would go about shooting them without provocation. An exception was Ajaz Ashraf who writes a column in Mid-Day. 

Ashraf’s op-ed is worth reading because it questions the talk about mental illness and this kind of targeted killing. 

He concludes:

“We would be deceiving ourselves in case we think Chetan’s killing spree was merely because of his mental illness, which might also be a condition waiting to be diagnosed among a substantial segment of Indians, given the increasing frequency with which hate-driven violence is perpetrated. Certainly, the impulse not to hurt has weakened over the last nine years. There is a post called Chief Statistician of India. We desperately need to have a Chief Psychiatrist of India, who could measure India’s growing sickness.”

“India’s growing sickness”, as Ashraf terms it, is the visceral hate of Muslims that has been planted in our minds. Of course, political parties, specifically the BJP and its family members like the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, are primarily responsible.  But their hate-filled narrative would not have found purchase to this extent had not the media amplified it.  

Whether you watch Indian TV news channels or not, look at the episode of TV Newsance mentioned above to get a sense of the poison emanating from them every night. 

There have been instances in the past where the media has been held responsible for spreading hate.  For instance, after the 2002 Gujarat communal carnage, the Editors Guild of India had sent a team to look specifically at this aspect.  

Their report makes interesting reading today, more than two decades later.  Although TV news was not as ubiquitous as it is now, Gujarat 2002 is often referred to as the first “televised” riot because by then there were private television channels not beholden to the government. Journalists from these channels were stopped and even attacked by Hindutva groups, accusing them of only giving the Muslim point of view. This is unlikely to happen today.

Print media was still dominant and several leading Gujarati newspapers were questioned about the headlines on their front pages, and the news that they chose to emphasise. But the report also mentions pamphlets distributed by groups like the VHP that played a role in spreading misinformation. A parallel today would be social media that is all pervasive and much more dangerous.

Clearly, we need a detailed study on how and to what extent all media, television, print and social media, have amplified the narrative of hate, especially since 2014. 

How is this deliberate spread of hate to be checked? No one in the media will recommend government censorship. There are already rules and regulations in place that could, if they are used, offer some checks.

But ultimately, the responsibility lies in the hands of those who finance these media houses, the owners, as well as those who support them by way of advertising.

There is little doubt that the deterioration in media content has coincided with the corporatisation of the media from the early 1990s. Since then, media professionals running these organisations have to find ways to make their companies profitable. And what better way than to sensationalise and play up sentiments that echo what the majority believes? The combination of this is deadly, as we can see. 

This daily dose of poison has not just been seeded in the minds of millions of people but has begun to bear fruit. Chetan Singh’s hate-filled killing of Muslim men is a telling example of this.

Can our media introspect? Will it? I personally doubt it so long as people continue to buy and financially support the peddlers of hate. Even tighter regulations will not suffice if there is a “market” for these ideas, which there is, and so long as the dominant politics supports it, which it does.

July 31 and Chetan Singh’s targeted killing are a warning that we must heed, as media, but also as citizens of a country that seems to be hurtling down a precipice of hatred and violence. 

 

Modi’s misstep: By banning BBC documentary, far more people have now watched it

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on January 27, 2023

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/01/27/modis-misstep-by-banning-bbc-documentary-far-more-people-have-now-watched-it

The Modi government has scored a self-goal.

By using emergency provisions in the Information Technology Act to order YouTube and Twitter to take down links to episode one of the BBC’s two-part series India: The Modi Question, the government has ensured that thousands of people have now watched the programme.

The programme was telecast on January 17 on BBC Two, which is only available to viewers in the UK. Yet, given the nature of the internet, it was widely available on social media in no time for anyone anywhere to watch it.

Two days after the first episode was telecast in the UK, India’s external affairs ministry spokesperson Arindan Bagchi said the documentary was a “propaganda” exercise that reflected a “colonial mindset”, and that the government had taken the step to get all links to the episode taken down.

Under the emergency provisions of the IT Act, the government can ask for content to be removed if it affects the “unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India”. It has been used several times since these provisions were introduced and Twitter has acceded several times to the government’s requests based on this provision. In this instance, barring Bagchi’s statement, the government has not issued any explanation about how this programme falls under any of these categories.

The first episode focused on the communal killings of 2002 in Gujarat when Narendra Modi was chief minister. Its news peg, so to speak, was a confidential report prepared at the time by the British high commission in India on the events that unfolded in the state. According to the report, which has been published on the Caravan’s website, the team that went to Gujarat concluded that Modi was “directly responsible”. 

For those familiar with what happened in 2002, there is little that is startlingly new in the programme, barring the British high commission’s report. We see distressing footage of those days and weeks in Gujarat that are familiar to many who watched the events unfold on live television, as India had private TV channels by then that covered the killings. There have also been films like The Final Solution by Rakesh Sharma that recorded the events of 2002.

The producers of the documentary have ensured that both critics and supporters of Modi have a say, giving the former plenty of airtime to put forward their views. There is also a mention of the Supreme Court clearing Modi of all charges of conspiracy.

Then why object to the programme? It’s evident that any reminders of what happened in Gujarat in 2002 are not welcome, even if they are by a foreign channel with a limited audience, now that Modi is the prime minister. If the government thought the documentary would sully Modi’s image internationally, especially when India is chair of the G20, the decision to take it down has misfired. Leading international outlets – including the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Guardian and others – have questioned the Modi government’s commitment to freedom of expression. Hardly appropriate at a time when the government has claimed that India is the “mother of democracy”.

Apart from individuals viewing the banned episode, there have been attempts at public screenings. But by overreacting to such screenings at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where the power went off just as the screening was to begin, or detaining students who were organising screenings at Jamia Millia Islamia, the government is only adding more fuel to the fire it has lit. 

There are likely to be even more acts of defiance, and the debate over the documentary is likely to continue for some time. In some ways, the government has done us a favour. It has drawn the attention of the public to these emergency provisions that have a direct impact on freedom of expression.

Incidentally, so far, the government has raised no objection to the second episode of the series. This looks at what has happened since 2014, when the BJP came to power at the centre and Modi became prime minister. Its specific focus is the status of Muslims in India today and, over the course of one hour, it records the lynching of Muslim men, the impact of the National Register of Citizens on Muslims in Assam, the opposition to the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Delhi riots of 2020, and the reading down of article 370 in Kashmir. Together, this makes a powerful indictment of the policies of the current government. 

One of the most chilling sections in episode one is the interview by BBC correspondent Jill McGivering with Modi in 2002. It concludes with this exchange. McGivering asks, “Do you think you should have done anything differently?” Modi responds: “Yes. One area where I was very, very weak. That was how to handle the media.”

The Modi who is now the prime minister of India has figured out how to handle the media. 

The provisions of the IT Act that the government used to order the taking down of links to the BBC programme are only one of several steps that this government has taken in the last eight years. They are incremental, like a slow burn. Hence, the response to them has been muted, limited to statements by media organisations and some editorials.  But the cumulative impact of these measures has been to try and stifle freedom of expression.

The government’s latest move to control the media is a draft proposal amending the IT Rules that will give the Press and Information Bureau the power to determine what is “fake” or “false” news and demand that it be taken down. The draft has not yet been accepted and several media organisations, such as the Editors Guild, have issued strong statements against it. As a result, the deadline set for objections has been extended. Whether these objections will be taken on board remains to be seen.

 However, the very fact that this government can contemplate such an amendment, essentially allowing a government department to decide what is “fake”, with little recourse to a hearing before the action is taken, indicates a larger plan to control free expression.  As the Indian Express points out: “...to remove content merely because the government decrees it ‘false’ would restrict free expression without any constitutional justification, violating citizens’ rights to receive all information on public issues, whether true or false.”

Incidentally, for those of us who were journalists during the Emergency of 1975-77, and had a direct experience of press censorship, it was the same PIB that operated as censor under orders from its political bosses.  Although today we are not living under an Emergency, to institute a system that gives such powers to a body whose principal job is to put out information about government programmes is ominous, to say the least, and totally unacceptable under any criteria of press freedom.

Unfortunately, as I have mentioned earlier, such incremental steps are like a slow burn. The public does not realise how gradually these curbs are being put in place. It is a perfect strategy to lull people into believing that we live in a free country, with guarantees of free expression, even as this right is being stifled slowly and surely. 

From Bilkis Bano to Zakia Jafri, the media needs to ‘keep the pot boiling’

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 25, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/08/25/from-bilkis-bano-to-zakia-jafri-the-media-needs-to-keep-the-pot-boiling

August 15, 2022 will be remembered. Not for the flag-waving or declarations made by the prime minister from the Red Fort, but for the fact that, on this day marking 75 years of India’s independence, 11 men convicted of a heinous crime were granted remission from their life sentences.

Even as the prime minister spoke of women’s safety and empowerment, his home state of Gujarat released these 11 men from Godhra sub-jail. The crime for which they were convicted is horrific, even in the retelling today. Worse still, the survivor, Bilkis Bano, is now condemned to relive it. Yet, as these men emerged from jail, they were greeted with sweets and garlands by members of the prime minister’s party, the BJP.

The Bilkis Bano case is one that should never be forgotten. Soon after dark on February 28, 2002, a five-months pregnant Bilkis, 21, and members of her family left their village of Randhikpur in Dahod district. They hid in fields, hoping to escape mobs that had descended on the village following the Godhra train burning the previous day.

But they could not escape. On March 3, a group of 20 to 30 men carrying swords and sickles assaulted them. They raped Bilkis, her mother, and three other women; and killed her three-year-old daughter Saleha and most of the others in the group of 17. Only three, including Bilkis, survived.

The fact that we remember this case is because it is emblematic of the horrific communal violence that took place in Gujarat, where Muslim women were the targets of the most repulsive acts of sexual violence and assault.

We remember it, but not because the media continued to report it. Some journalists did persist but after 2019, when the Supreme Court asked the Gujarat government to pay Rs 50 lakh compensation to Bilkis, the media lost interest. The only reason it is still remembered is because of this woman’s singular courage and determination to continue her fight for justice with support from civil society organisations.

For the media, the Bilkis case holds out several lessons.

We remember it, but not because the media continued to report it. The only reason it is still remembered is because of this woman’s singular courage and determination to continue her fight for justice with support from civil society organisations.

We have to remember that today, there is an entire generation that has grown up since the Gujarat communal carnage of 2002. They would not have known about Bilkis or the other atrocities during that period. Thus, the significance of this particular case, and the context in which it took place, bears repeating.

If this story had been left to television channels, we would have heard a lot of noise but very little by way of factual background or context. Barring exceptions like NDTV, mainstream TV did not give the recent release of the convicts the attention it deserves. As a result, the significance of what has happened in the context of today’s communal politics, and the historical details that are essential to understand this, would have been lost to most consumers of mainstream media.

Fortunately, the print media in India is not yet extinct and hopefully will continue to survive. Mainstream newspapers, or at least the English papers I looked at, did provide explanatory stories to fill in details that many would either not have known or forgotten. It is interesting that so many mainstream newspapers are now doing explanatory journalism – it seems that there is a demand for this that is unfulfilled by reporting and commentary.

More importantly, newspapers also reported not just what Bilkis and her husband Yakub Rasool felt, but also the response of now retired Bombay High Court judge UD Salvi, who gave the original ruling in 2008 against these men. Justice Salvi also spoke to several television channels and independent YouTube channels, like Barkha Dutt’s Mojo Story. He was clear and unequivocal in all these interviews, stating as he does in this report in Indian Express, that “if it is being said that they are innocent, they did not commit the crimes and hence they are being honoured, it is defaming the judiciary which gave the judgments convicting them”.

There were also disturbing follow-up stories that need to be noted for the record. For instance, Indian Express reported on how the released convicts had been out on parole several times while serving their sentences. Several people living in Randhikpur, who had testified in the Bilkis case, had filed police complaints of being harassed and intimidated by these men during those periods when they were out on parole.

...if it is being said that they are innocent, they did not commit the crimes and hence they are being honoured, it is defaming the judiciary which gave the judgments convicting them.

Justice UD Salvi to the Indian Express

Even more disturbing is this Indian Express report about Muslim families leaving Randhikpur and seeking shelter in a relief camp in Devgarh Baria, where Bilkis Bano and her family have been living since 2017. One of the women arriving at the camp said, “None of us has the kind of courage that Bilkis has shown in the past two decades to fight. On our way here, we came across a huge convoy of the ruling party near Kesharpura and were petrified. I held on to my daughter tight.”

Clearly, this is a story that has not yet ended, not just in terms of legal challenges to the release of the convicts but also the renewed fear in Muslims in a state that is heading for an election. For them, the memories of 2002 have not faded.

Surveys have suggested that editorials in newspapers are not widely read. Yet they are important as a record of the stand a newspaper takes on a particular issue. In this instance, both Indian Express and the Hindu carried strong editorials on the release of the convicts and their subsequent felicitation by members of the BJP and its affiliate organisations. The editorial in the Hindu concluded: “With an Assembly election due in Gujarat at the end of the year, it is difficult not to read political significance into this decision. The sight of the released convicts being greeted and feted on their release will not sit easy on the country’s conscience.”

The other lesson for the media is the importance of memory, of reporters recalling what they reported. For instance, one of those who diligently covered Bilkis Bano’s case, when it was shifted at the behest of the Supreme Court from Gujarat to Maharashtra, is senior journalist Jyoti Punwani. She was able to remind us that the attitude towards these 11 convicts even in 2008, when they were sentenced to life imprisonment, was no different to what it is today. She writes in the Deccan Herald:

“It's not the first time these men, who gang-raped women and killed 14 innocents, including Bilkis Bano’s infant daughter, are being honoured. The day they were sentenced to life in Mumbai in 2008, this reporter saw people touch their feet in the trial court. The courtroom was packed with villagers from Randhikpur, the mood overwhelmingly sympathetic to the guilty. Snide remarks were made against the alleged ‘bounty’ given to Bilkis (there was none). Even others present in court for unrelated matters muttered that shifting the case from Gujarat to Mumbai was a ‘conspiracy against Hindus’. One of those sentenced even declared that he’d done what he had ‘for God’, and that it was ‘a crime in Hindustan’ to belong to the Vishva Hindu Parishad.”

The Supreme Court, in its judgement in the Zakia Jafri case challenging the findings of a special investigative team into the attack on Gulberg Society in which Jafri’s husband was killed, used the phrase “keeping the pot boiling” while referring to those who helped Jafri. As we now know, that particular ruling resulted in human rights activist Teesta Setalvad and former senior police officer RB Sreekumar being taken into judicial custody. Their bail hearing is before the Supreme Court.

I would argue that it is the job of the media to “keep the pot boiling” on issues like the communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002, the continuing attacks on Dalits and minorities in many parts of the country, the human rights violations in Kashmir and the Northeast, and much more. If the media does not do this kind of follow-up, the memory of these atrocities will fade and ultimately disappear, especially when the justice system also often fails.

 

A Book of Memory and Forgetting

Published in Economic and Political Weekly

Splintered Justice: Living the Horror of Mass Communal Violence in Bhagalpur and Gujarat by Warisha Farasat and Prita Jha; New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2016, pp 221, Rs 500 (paperback).

Does anyone even remember the communal violence that tore apart Bhagalpur in Bihar in 1989?  According to official estimates, around 250 villages and 50,000 people were affected.  The official death toll was estimated to be over 900 although the unofficial toll was higher.  It was familiar story because it had happened before.  And since then it has happened again.  And will do so in the future.

The partition of India after the British left is now history.  But every day there are partitions taking place in independent India, where people who have coexisted, tolerated difference, even celebrated it, are now being forced into separate territories, their differences highlighted and exacerbated by a dominant politics that has given a new twist to the old divide and rule policy of the British.

Why is it important to record these divisions, these conflicts that recur with such worrying frequency?  Would it not be better to erase these memories and look ahead? 

The writers of this book demonstrate convincingly why incidents of mass violence must be recorded and followed up.  If they are not, then history will only remember the version of the victors while the victims will continue to remain voiceless, unheard, without justice.

In this regard, the book under review serves an important purpose.  It is a record of the communal killings in Bhagalpur in 1989, and in Gujarat 2002. But instead of going over familiar ground, the authors help us understand the legacy of such mass violence.  These recorded memories show us the costs of a broken criminal justice system and the price that victims of mass violence continue to pay for decades.

Although a great deal has been written about the mass violence in Gujarat in 2002, not that much is known about Bhagalpur. Yet, this is a good time to remember it as the issues that triggered the violence are alive today, and are likely to be ratcheted up in the next two years leading up to the next general election in 2019.  In fact, with the Supreme Court having ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to speed up hearings in the two cases on the destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, the central controversy over the building of the Ram temple on the site of the demolished mosque will remain alive.

Fertiliser of Communalism

Bhagalpur happened before the Babri Masjid was destroyed.  It was one of the many incidents of rioting triggered by the frenzy that the Sangh Parivar built up by mobilising Hindus on the Ram temple issue.  While the embers of the communal killings in Bhagalpur were still glowing, L. K. Advani of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) launched a rath yatra to build up support for the temple in September 1990. It culminated in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 when thousands of kar sevaks converged on the Babri Masjid and carried out their well laid plan to destroy it even as senior BJP leaders, including Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati stood by watching and even cheering.

The commission of inquiry set up by the Bihar government to look at the Bhagalpur riots in 1990 concluded that the Ram temple movement was the trigger that set off the killings and that it was "acting as a fertiliser to give nourishment to the soil of Indian communalism" (p28-29).  The commission also noted the failure of the district administration and the police to control the fraught situation in Bhagalpur.

One of the authors, Warisha Farasat, a trained lawyer, visited Bhagalpur in March 2011, 22 years later, to find that the "wounds are still raw, the hearts charred" (p 31).  Farasat sought out men and women who remembered what happened, who had witnessed the killings, who had attempted to seek justice through the legal system, and who were left only with bitter memories. As in other similar situations after a communal massacre, some of the victims decided to go back to their own villages while others moved on, fearful of returning to a place where even trusted neighbours had turned on them.

The exercise of looking at Bhagalpur and Gujarat together establishes several common threads. Irrespective of the party in power in the state or the centre, the system followed a similar pattern. At the time of the Bhagalpur killings, there was a Congress government at the centre headed by Rajiv Gandhi and a Congress government in Bihar headed by Satyendra Narayan Sinha.  In Gujarat in 2002, when the communal violence occurred, the BJP was in power in the state with Narendra Modi as Chief Minister and a National Democratic Alliance government headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee was at the centre.  In both instances, the party in the state and the centre were the same.

Yet, whether it was a Congress government or a BJP government, the state machinery was equally irresponsive. In both Bhagalpur and Gujarat, the cases filed after the riots by the victims mostly failed and were delayed for so long as to lose any meaning. In both places, victims had similar experiences in the course of seeking justice. For instance, they had a hard time getting FIRs recorded by an unsympathetic police.  Even if they succeeded, they would find later that the information in them was either wrong or incomplete. There were several instances of omnibus FIRs that clubbed the complaints of several victims together even if individually, these men and women had identified their killers by name, as they were people known to them.

Indifferent Prosecution

Many cases were closed because an indifferent prosecution did not put forward a convincing argument while the accused had private lawyers with the ability to browbeat and intimidate the witnesses.  Even where cases were reopened, through the intervention of civil society groups as in Gujarat, or by a different state government as in the Bihar under Nitish Kumar, many of the original witnesses had either turned hostile and were unwilling to testify, or had died, thereby weakening the cases. 

In both Bhagalpur and Gujarat, the story of inadequate compensation for loss of life and property is virtually identical.  In many cases, the information that should have been in the FIRs was simply not there because the police had not recorded it.  There were no surveys to assess damage apart from loss of life, and no one informed the victims of the processes they needed to undertake to access the compensation.  As a result, only a small percentage of the affected actually received the compensation to which they were legally entitled even if these amounts were far from sufficient and did not compensate for the real losses that they had incurred.

The book records the Gujarat government's shocking decision to differentiate between the victims of the Godhra train fire, all Hindus, and of the subsequent killings, all Muslims.  While the families of the former were given Rs 2 lakh, the families of the killings that followed Godhra were given only Rs 1 lakh.  Only after an uproar and civil society intervention did the government concede that both should receive equal amounts, fixed at Rs 1.5 lakh.

In Bhagalpur, where civil society presence was minimal and only one human rights group, the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) sent a team to study and record the incidents of sexual violence, the fate of the victims was even worse.  In moving testimonies recorded by Farasat, we hear the hopelessness of people who have lost everything -- members of their family, their homes, the tools of their trade -- and given practically nothing by way of compensation. 

In the chapter titled, "The Unhealed Wounds of Bhagalpur", Farasat relates the case of Ali Ahmad of Shahpur Tamouni.  Both his parents were killed by a Hindu mob.  Seven months later, he received a cheque of Rs 3,500 as compensation. "That was the value the state put on two human being killed", writes Farasat (p 89).  Nothing was given to him for the 20 cows and bulls, the agricultural machinery and other valuable and household items that they had lost.

When the Bihar government under Nitish Kumar reopened some of the Bhagalpur cases in 2006, people did receive higher compensation.  But many missed out on this as they did not have the requisite paper work, nor did they know what they should do to avail of the higher amount.  The state too did not help as much as it could have. For instance, even though the government's policy acknowledges that an FIR is not the only proof of murder, and that other evidence must also be taken into account, in compensation cases for loss of life, only the FIR is accepted.  This is despite knowing that in communal riots, police simply do not register FIRs.

The strength of this book is that it does not depend only on secondary information.  It is a follow up to an earlier study by the Centre for Equity Studies based on legal documents, several obtained through Right to Information (RTI) applications.  They looked at Nellie, 1983; Delhi, 1984; Bhagalpur, 1989 and Gujarat, 2002.  This information was assembled in the book "On Their Watch: Mass Violence and State Apathy in India" (Chopra, Jha, 2014). The book under review goes further by including the testimonies of the victims of Bhagalpur and Gujarat recorded by the authors. 

Role of Judiciary

An important point that Prita Jha makes in her section on Gujarat is the role of the judiciary.  Not all judges were hostile, as victims told the writers.  In fact, many felt that the only people sympathetic and willing to listen to their story during the court hearings were the judges as the police was usually hostile, the prosecutors unhelpful and the defence aggressive. 

Jha mentions the remarkable judgment delivered on 29 August 2012 by Jyotsna Patnaik in the Naroda Patiya case in which 97 Muslims were killed in one day.  Patnaik convicted 32 people, including Maya Kodnani, a minister in Modi's government, and Babu Bajrangi of the Bajrang Dal. In her historic judgment, Patnaik calls 28 February 2002, the beginning of the Gujarat violence, as "the day of a cyclone of violence, one of the black chapters in the history of democratic India when violation of human rights and Constitutional rights was publicly done by the assaulters on the victims" (p 167).

In the course of the trial, Patnaik was aware of the problems victims faced in registering their cases with the state machinery and intervened often to ensure that victims would be able to speak instead of being bullied by the defence.  In doing this she was implementing the spirit of the 2004 Supreme Court directive in the Best Bakery case relating to the killing of 14 Muslims. Both the trial court in Vadodara and the Gujarat High Court had absolved all those accused, as the main witness had turned hostile. After going through the proceedings of the courts in Gujarat, the apex court ordered a retrial in a fast track court in Maharashtra headed by Justice Abhay Mahadeo Thipsay, who recognised that the investigation into the case had been defective.  He convicted nine of the accused.   

In its 2004 judgment, the apex court criticised the Gujarat High Court judge who heard the case and also the investigation and prosecution of the case by the state machinery. Justice Arijit Prasayat's observations on the role of a judge in a criminal trial are as pertinent today as they were when the judgment was delivered.  He said,

"If a criminal court is to be an effective instrument in dispensing justice, the presiding judge must cease to be a spectator and a mere recording machine by becoming a participant in the trial evincing intelligence, active interest and elicit all relevant material necessary for reaching the correct conclusion, to find out the truth and administer justice with fairness and impartiality both to the parties and to the community it serves. Courts administering criminal justice cannot turn a blind eye to vexatious or oppressive conduct that has occurred in relation to proceedings" (p 165).

There is a great deal of thoughtful material in this slim book and given the times we live in, what it contains becomes all the more relevant.  Apart from the way in which complicit state authorities have permitted these incidents of mass violence to rage on, the criminal justice system and an unsympathetic state machinery revisits violence on the people who have already suffered it.  This has to be fixed.

Reference:

Chopra, Surabhi and Prita Jha, 2014; On Their Watch: Mass Violence and State Apathy in India, New Delhi: Three Essays Collective.

Clamping down

Modi government's hounding of Teesta Setalvad is a message to all dissidents

The numerous cases foisted on her have little substance but are intended to paralyse work to seek justice for the victims of the Gujarat riots.

Kalpana Sharma  · Today · 09:15 am

Photo Credit: Jaffar Theekkathir / Wikimedia Commons

Incredible as it might sound, the government of India is so irritated with the activities of one woman that it is finding all kinds of ways to catch her and lock her up.  The woman who continues to be a thorn in the flesh of the Modi government is Teesta Setalvad. The reason the government thinks she should be locked up is because this tenacious woman refuses to allow India, or the world, to forget what happened in Gujarat in 2002.

It's another story that the multiple cases being foisted on her have little substance.  What one needs to realise is that together they are part of a plan to paralyse her ability to work and eventually to find a way to take her into custody.

The latest in the long list of inquiries and cases against Teesta Setalvad, her husband Javed Anand, and the organisations they established and run – Sabrang Communications, Sabrang Trust and Citizens for Justice and Peace – are so numerous and complex that one would need hundreds of pages just to run through the bare description.

The earliest cases date back to 2006. The latest was just last week when newspapers reported that the Central Bureau of Investigation had filed an FIR against Setalvad under Sections 120b read with Sections 35, 37 of IPC and Section 3, 11 and 19 of the FCRA Act of 2010 (criminal conspiracy and receiving funds illegally).  Setalvad has not received any notice but only heard about it from the media.

So how does one make sense of these cases that began almost a decade back but have accelerated in the past year?

Work began in 1993

Setalvad and Anand did not begin their work on communalism after the 2002 Gujarat violence, as is sometimes assumed. In fact, they set up Sabrang Communications in 1993 and began publishing the journal Communalism Combat.  It was also this company that published the Justice Srikrishna Commission Report on the Mumbai communal riots of 1992-'93 at a time when the state government would not make it available to the public.

Copies of the report were sold outside Bombay High Court and at all possible venues for as little as Rs 60. It was the only way people in the city read in detail about the culpability of the police, the Shiv Sena and the Congress state government in what happened during the weeks of violence that permanently scarred a city once considered liberal and cosmopolitan.

Between 1993 and 2002, during which period Setalvad and Anand also set up the Sabrang Trust in 1995, they were never questioned for their activities. On the contrary, they won several awards for their work. The trouble began after they established Citizens for Justice and Peace in 2002 and actively pursued  the courts cases against the perpetrators of the Gujarat violence.

This work meant collecting testimonies, providing witnesses with protection, getting on board lawyers who could formulate the arguments and ensuring that a couple of cases were moved out of Gujarat because the Supreme Court accused the state government of judicial failure.  That this effort resulted in 120 or so convictions in the different cases is a testimony to this work. The record of convictions in communal violence cases in India is so abysmal that it would not be an exaggeration to state only this type of civil society intervention could make convictions possible.

From Gujarat to Delhi

The one case that cut too close to the bone for the Gujarat government, then headed by Narendra Modi, is that of the widow of the Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, who was killed by a mob during the riots. Aided by Citizens for Jusice and Peace, Zakia Jafri filed a criminal complaint for criminal and administrative culpability against top politicians and policemen, including Narendra Modi. This is separate from the Gulberg trial on the killing of Ehsan Jafri and 68 others.  That trial is still ongoing and is under appeal in the Gujarat High Court.

Jafri had questioned the report of the special investigations team set up by the Supreme Court to look into the charges about criminal conspiracy in the Gulberg Case.  The report is popularly believed to have given a “clean chit” to Modi.  In fact, it merely stated that there was not enough evidence to prove his involvement.

Although Jafri's initial protest petition was rejected on December 26, 2013, in the magistrate’s court, she has not given up and is still pursuing the case. Eight days after this, an FIR was filed against Setalvad and four others, including Jafri’s son, for embezzlement of funds. This was followed by all the organisation’s accounts and Setalvad’s personal accounts being frozen. Despite this, Jafri and Setalvad managed to file a criminal revision to the protest petition by March 15, 2014.  This is the case that will now be heard on July 27 before the magistrate’s court in Ahmedabad.

What we need to recognise is that while between 2006 and last year, the cases filed against Setalvad and her colleagues were mostly initiated by the Gujarat Crime Branch, since the Modi government was formed at the Centre, they are now coming from agencies in Delhi.

For instance, in response to a letter sent by the Gujarat Crime Branch to the Ministry of Home Affairs in Delhi in March 2015, raising questions about Setalvad’s organisations receiving funds from Ford Foundation, the ministry sent notices to them about violating provisions of the Foreign Contributions Regulations Act. Ford Foundation also faced the heat and is now required to get clearance before releasing funds to any non-governmental organisation.

Squeeze from all sides

There were a series of inspections of the accounts of Sabrang and Citizens for Justice and Peace. These organisations have sent in over 25,000 pages of documentation answering every query about funding.  Despite this, the CBI has reportedly filed an FIR against Setalvad.  Why, when the charge is being investigated, and the people charged are cooperating and answering all questions?

What this means, once you wade through the mountain of legalese, is that the government has a single objective: to find a way to get Setalvad into their custody.  By filing FIRs and sending out warrants for her arrest, the government has ensured that a large part of her time, at least three or four days a week, is now spent running from one court to another to get anticipatory bail. These applications can only be made before the Gujarat High Court or the Supreme Court. Setalvad lives and works out of Mumbai.

The other part of her time is spent dealing with the multiple inspections into the accounts of the three organisations and preparing the required documents. What time is left is then devoted to cases such as Ehsan Jafri’s and the Naroda Patiya case, in which a minister in Modi’s cabinet in Gujarat, Maya Kodnani, was convicted and sent to jail. Although Kodnani has managed to get bail, Setalvad and her group are fighting hard to ensure that she does not get acquitted.

In sum, the government’s strategy is to squeeze organisations like Setalvad’s from all sides until they give up. On the surface, it would appear that the government is cracking down on all non-governmental organisations receiving foreign funds.  In fact, it is carefully picking the ones that it wants to shut down. Teesta Setalvad’s organisations are on top of that list.

Crushing dissent

This attack on Setalvad has also to be placed against what is happening in the country since the Modi government took office. We have not seen a major communal conflagration like Gujarat 2002.  But there is a steady stream of incidents of communal violence in various parts of the country.  It is more than evident that minorities are being targeted in direct and indirect ways (the beef ban, questioning education in madrasas, attacks on churches, ghar wapasi etc).  Modi has remained silent on all this, including the inflammatory statements made by ministers in his cabinet.  Against this reality, the effort put in by Setalvad’s team to keep alive Gujarat 2002 in our collective memories, and to get justice for the victims of that period of violence, is relevant.

On the other side, while people like Setalvad are being hounded for pursuing these cases of violence, we are watching the disintegration of the cases against Hindutva extremists in the Ajmer bomb blast case of 2007, where witnesses are turning hostile, and the Modasa case the next year, which has been closed for lack of evidence. In Maharashtra, special prosecutor Rohini Salian went public about the National Investigation Agency asking her to “go soft” on the Malegaon bomb blast case of 2008, in which Hindutva extremists have been implicated. All this has happened in the last one year.

The message is loud and clear.  If you come in the way of this government, you will be hounded till you give up. If you are on their side, even if you are guilty, you have a good chance of getting a reprieve.

So the issue is not just whether the Modi government will succeed in catching Teesta Setalvad and detaining her, but also whether there is any hope for dissent and justice when the state uses its power to crush those who question it.

Kalpana Sharma is an independent journalist, a columnist with The Hindu and consulting editor Economic and Political Weekly.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Published in scroll.in July 13, 2015

Importance of being Bilkis

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, January 27, 2008

https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/Importance-of-being-Bilkis/article15401358.ece

The Other Half

Kalpana Sharma


It is one of those horror stories from the Gujarat carnage of 2002 that few can forget. A young Muslim woman, six months pregnant, runs for her life from her village when rampaging mobs attack it on February 28. She has with her a three-year-old daughter, her mother and other relatives. They move out of their village under cover of darkness and
hide in a field hoping to escape. Instead, the next morning they are confronted with a mob of 20 to 30 men carrying swords and sickles who assault and gang rape the four women, including Bilkis and her mother, kill many of the others, and kill her three-year-old daughter by “smashing” her on the ground. Of the 17 who left the village, only three survived, the bodies of eight were found and six are still missing.

The horror does not end there. Bilkis pretends she is dead and waits till the mob leaves. Then with the help of a home guard, and with her six-year-old nephew and a three-year-old boy who have survived, she trudges to a police station to register a complaint. On the way she borrows some clothes from an Adivasi woman to cover herself.

At the police station she receives little sympathy. Instead the policeman on duty pretends to listen to what she is saying but writes something completely different in the First Information Report on which he gets the illiterate Bilkis’ thumb impression.

Two days later, local photographers find eight bodies of the massacred family. This forces the police to act and post-mortems are conducted. Again, instead of recording the truth, they conduct what has now been termed a “shoddy” post-mortem and bury the bodies. Some years later, when the bodies are exhumed as part of a fresh investigation, none of them have skulls. It appears that they were decapitated after the post-mortem to prevent identification. In addition, salt was sprinkled on the bodies so that they would disintegrate.

Need to intervene

The case of Bilkis Bano has all the elements of the worst kind of horror including the indifference and complicity of the State in covering up the truth. But it also illustrates the kind of intervention that is needed in such situations to ensure that some justice is done.

For, it is now evident that the case would not have moved if it had been tried in Gujarat where it was first filed. In August 2004, the Supreme Court ordered that the case be tried in Mumbai. At this stage the CBI took over the investigation and ordered that the bodies of the eight people from Bilkis’ village be exhumed.

In just over a year after taking over the investigation, the CBI gathered enough evidence to arrest 20 people including six policemen. On February 21, 2006, the trial began in Mumbai. On January 18, 2007, the trial court held 12 of the 20 guilty including one policeman, sub-inspector Somabhai Gori, who “suppressed material facts and wrote a distorted and truncated version” of Bilkis’ complaint, according to the CBI. While Gori was given only two years imprisonment, the other 11 were given life sentences.

Apart from hearing the case in Mumbai, the decision to hold the trial in camera has also made a difference as it encouraged witnesses to testify without fear, something they would not have done in an open court. The policeman’s conviction, for instance, was made possible because three witnesses heard Bilkis give her report and what they said they heard differed substantially from what the policeman noted down.

Even today, fear dominates Radhikpur village. In anticipation of the judgment, the 60 Muslim families who still live there apparently quietly left the village as they feared a backlash from the families of those convicted, most of whom are from the same village.
But above all, it is Bilkis’ courage in going to the police station in the condition in which she was after a gang rape and after seeing her infant daughter being brutally murdered that clinched the case. Most women hesitate to go to the police. If you are poor, a Muslim, and living in a situation like the one that prevailed in Gujarat in 2002, the chances of turning to the police are even more remote. This is what makes Bilkis’ action so exceptional.
 
Uncertain future

Even after filing the complaint, she could have given up, been intimidated, allowed herself to be bought off, decided it would be simpler to forget about it. Yet, she persisted even though the personal price she has paid is hard to imagine. Nor can we fully comprehend what is her future, whether she will ever be able to live in peace in her village, or whether she will forever be a refugee hiding from those waiting to teach her another lesson. But amazingly, she has gone on record to say that she will not give up and continue to pursue the case until the five policemen who were let off for lack of evidence are also convicted.
Seeing photographs of this diminutive woman, one wonders from where she got the courage at that terrible moment to make the journey to the police station. If she had not done so, the story would never have been told. This ordinary woman has to be saluted for her extraordinary courage.