Comments
Share this article
Print
Email
They have been given stringent punishment, yet because of the Dutt hoopla no one is paying the slightest attention to them. To take one example, rivers of tears have been shed over Dutt’s six-year term, but has anyone spared a moment’s thought for Zebunissa Kazi, a 60-year old woman given five year’s RI for “abetting terrorist acts”?
Apparentlyshe stored explosives in a garage, which does sound like abettment, but her defence, that some young men she knew requested her to keep a bag in the garage, which she did, not knowing its contents, could be the bare and simple truth, couldn’t it?
And what about the Memon who came back to India because he was sure he would get a fair trial, when he could easily have stayed outside the country? Add that to his heartfelt absolution of Judge Kode who handed him the death penalty, “Forgive him Lord for he knows not what he’s done”, and you begin to wonder, was justice really done?
I am not casting aspersions on Judge Kode, whose conduct of the trial has been exemplary and fair. But over a 14-year trial, with scores of accused, hundreds of witnesses and thousands of pages of testimony, you would have to be God to have not missed out on certain nuances or the telling detail. Or overlooked biases if they were there in the evidence placed before you.
But this is only one aspect of the story. Look at the big picture and you would see that a vital part is being missed, which is of Cause and Effect. The Babri Masjid was demolished on December 6, 1992. On the same day, the Shiv Sena took out “victory processions” in Dharavi and elsewhere.
These were “answered” by Muslim processions. On January 1, 1993, a car containing three Muslims was stopped at Antop Hill and its occupants burnt alive. On January 6, a group of Muslim criminals burnt alive six Hindu residents of a chawl in Jogeshwari.
Then followed large scale violence, uncontrolled by Congress CM Sudhakar Naik in which 900 people by official count (1200 by NGO count) were killed, 85 per cent of them Muslim. This was followed by the serial blasts of 12th March 1993 which killed 257 people by the act of Muslim terrorists.
It’s a grim scenario of kill-counter-kill, which is why murderers and terrorists, whatever their colour or religion, need to be given the harshest possible punishment. Many Muslims and secular liberals point to the sequence of events given above to assert that it’s always a case of Muslim extremist reaction to Hindu extremist action.
That Hindu extremist provocation is the Cause and Muslim extremist violence is the Effect. But does Muslim reaction always have to be violent? Isn’t there an option to this, which is for Muslims, even hot-headed Muslims, to say : let us not take the law into our own hands; let the Hindu criminals who caused the carnage be given the legal punishment they deserve?
Ah, if only. The 1993 Bombay blast perpetrators, as we have seen just last week, have been given their sentences. But what punishment did the 1992-93 Bombay violence or Babri demolishers get? Not one of them has even been brought to trial. In Bombay, a cop or two was suspended, many were transferred and some were even subsequently promoted, while LK Advani and co, the instigators of Babri Masjid, remain national leaders. This is justice?
What happened in Gujarat in 2002 is even worse. The Muslims held responsible for the Godhra train fire are in jail, but the Hindus (politicians, policemen, men and women on the streets) who killed hundreds of Muslims roam free. Go back to 1984 and the killing of 2000 Sikhs in Delhi. Has a single person gone to the gallows? Or even to jail?
Judge Kode dealt as fairly as he could with the evidence placed before him. But unless there are other Judge Kodes dealing even-handedly with Hindu extremist violence, our justice will be a huge, and sad, farce. Shame on all of us.