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| Edited By: Devaditya Chakravarti |Source: DNA |Updated: Apr 12, 2014, 02:53 PM IST
Narendra Modi has braved yet another attempt to sabotage his plans for running the country. The judiciary has come to his rescue, yet again, with the Supreme Court of India refusing to entertain a plea that sought to question the clean chit given by the Special Investigation Team’s (SIT) probe into the 2002 Gujarat riots. This, after the Honourable Court had already expressed its satisfaction with the way the SIT had gone along with its investigations into nine cases related to the 2002 riots only a week ago.
This is only the latest in the unending series of a virulent campaign that has been waged by the pseudo-secular apologists ever since Modi has come out to be a potent threat to their grand designs. After all, needless to say, the riots were the perfect alibi to paint the BJP and its allies with a communal hue and how all canons of justice were put paid to so long as the cases remained in Gujarat.
These attacks have been launched from all angles, with many having called him a ‘totalitarian’, a “maut ka saudagar” and recently, Rahul Gandhi attacked him over his overdue acknowledgment of his marital status in his election nomination form. These so called left liberals have been unflinching in their dislike of Modi.
Until now, they would heap unfounded assertions about Modi’s complicity in the riots.
While the author agrees that the truth as to the culpability of some senior politicians has yet to surface, the least we can do is to understand them and trying to mitigate their impact. For the same, an impartial and unbiased contextualisation of the facts has to undertaken to convey the actual truth.
Among the many assertions that have been made is the primal fact that thousands of Muslims were massacred. Nothing can be further from truth in this. On the fateful day the riots broke out, Modi had just been elected to the state assembly recently, and he tried the best he could. Paramilitary forces were airlifted and dispatched on that same day and the Army had begun its flag marches a few days later. All this indicated that the Modi administration did all that was necessary to ensure that the violence was nipped in the bid, as it should have.
However, one cannot help but see that it is rather difficult for the anti-Modi campaigners to be shown the truth for what it is. Elected governments have in fact reacted much worse in the previous riots that left countless people dead. The 1984 Sikh riots saw the Nanavati Commission and the Mishra Commission stating how there was a “colossal failure of maintenance of law and order”. The police were impugned for not being prompt and effective, and rather being indifferent and willfully negligent. The Mittal Report and the Jain Aggarwal Committee recommended departmental actions against 162 police officials for their active connivance and participation in the riots.
In a strikingly similar manner, the 1992 Bombay riots saw the police “mishandling” the entire situation, as the Srikishna Commission noted. It recommended for the state government to take strictest possible action against 31 police personnel who were found to have actively participated in the riots, communal incidents and looting, arson, etc. To drive the point further home, the SIT had conducted the entire probe under the virtual supervision of the Supreme Court, and this was extended to even selecting the judges and public prosecutors under the Honourable Court’s monitoring.
As how the SIT investigation had revealed, the so-called self proclaimed “do-gooders” in the human rights lobby had “spun macabre stories of rape and brutal killings by tutoring witnesses before the Supreme Court”. It is important to state here that these humanitarian lobbyists are a regular extension of the ruling political dispensation in Delhi. Their non-partisanship as to the reporting of the riots is questionable at best.
Modi never used any unfair means or strong arm tactics whenever he deposed before every commission enquiry. He upheld the law of the land as any upstanding citizen would have and chose to cooperate with the law enforcement all along. Others like Jagdeesh Tytler, Varun Gandhi deemed it rather unnecessary for the law of the land to apply to them. The author is of the opinion that the very concerted attempt by sponsored activists, media and NGO’s that prompted the Supreme Court to take over the matter, must now gracefully come to terms with the SIT’s clean chit to Modi and not stall or subvert it any further by filing frivolous and vexatious litigations like the one they did yesterday.
It is rather unfortunate that so many individuals from the minority community have been dealt the wrong card, but the singularly motivated vilification of one man is more unfortunate and condemnable. Instead, one should focus on objectivity and seek accountability from the system. By not doing the same, the pseudo-secularists have only widened the religious fault lines in the society to suit their political ends.
