#dnaEdit: Why the Gulberg Housing Society verdict is significant

It would be unjust and unfair to say that there could ever be a closure for the victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots, majority of whom were Muslims. So the judgment delivered on Thursday by the Special Court in the Gulberg Housing Society case, where 24 have been convicted, 10 of them for murder, though significant in itself in the context of other judgments delivered in the riot cases, is unlikely to bring solace to the families of the victims. The feeling would persist among the riot survivors that many of the guilty had got away even as the court admitted that there was not enough evidence against the 36 who were acquitted. There is a difference between not being guilty and getting away because of lack of evidence.

There will be dissatisfaction and discontent among the riot survivors and the activists that the court had rejected the conspiracy theory. It would appear that the court had taken the right position. Unless proved beyond reasonable doubt, courts cannot give credence to conspiracy theories. The real issue that stands out as a sore thumb in this case as well as in the Best Bakery and Naroda Patiya cases is the failure of the state administration to anticipate trouble in the sensitive, trouble-prone post-Godhra train carnage situation. 

There is, however, something significant happening in the cases and the verdicts being delivered with regard to the 2002 Gujarat riots. For the first time in the country’s post-Independence history, perpetrators of a communal riot have been tracked, brought to trial and punished. It has to be recorded that this did not happen because the Gujarat government and the state investigation agencies were sincere and diligent. The cases were brought before the courts because of the unrelenting efforts of the civil society activists, lawyers, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the brave pursuit of justice on the part of the surviving members of the victims, and the intervention of Supreme Court. Civil society activists might be unmitigated irritants to those in authority but it has to be acknowledged that but for them, the nine cases relating to the riots would not have reached the trial stage.

The BJP government in Gujarat and the state investigation agencies had aggressively pursued the men behind the Godhra carnage, but they did not display the same sense of public duty with regard to the anti-Muslim rioters.

Gujarat’s BJP government is not alone in its tardiness to nail the rioters. The Congress and the Shiv Sena-BJP governments in Maharashtra had pursued the March, 1993, Mumbai serial blasts case aggressively, but they did not show the same purposefulness with the regard to those who were behind the December, 1992, January, 1993, communal riots. Fortunately for the civil society activists in connection with the riots cases in Gujarat, the Supreme Court had intervened and the apex court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) had followed up investigation.

The more troubling question that stares an observer in the face is the fact that the people of Gujarat had not thrown out the BJP government for its 2002 failure, both with regard to the killing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) activists on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra and in the killing of Muslims in the riots that had followed. The BJP, including now Prime Minister, and then Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, defends itself saying that they did what they could to control the situation. But it is quite evident that there was a clear failure on the part of the state administration.