Comment

Care should be taken and facts verified before launching action against leaders.” This remark made last week in the court of the acting chief justice of the Bombay High Court seems to have gone unnoticed in all the recent hullabaloo surrounding the Thackerays.

Seemingly innocuous, it sums up the equation between the Congress and Mumbai’s ruling family, not just as it stands today, but as it has been ever since Bal Thackeray launched the Shiv Sena in 1966.

The remark was made by assistant government pleader Niranjan Pandit when Justice JN Patel asked whether Bal Thackeray or Raj Thackeray had been prosecuted for the acts of vandalism their followers had indulged in last year. In his reply, Pandit cited the abovementioned Supreme Court directive.

Facts should always be verified before any arrest, but in this specific case, there seems to be no confusion in anybody’s mind about the vandals’ political links. During the same hearing, the government pleader informed the court that a Shiv Sena worker and some MNS men had already been fined for these acts of vandalism.

The question therefore boiled down to:were these vandals acting on their own or as Justice Patel asked, were they instigated by their leaders? An almost identical question was asked by counsel for the Srikrishna Commission of inquiry into the December ’92-January ’93 Mumbai riots.

Under discussion was the violence in January ’93, the second phase of the riots, which, claimed the police, was a “backlash’’ (by the Hindus) to the violence started by the Muslims.Who was directing the backlash, the senior inspector of Dongri Police station was asked.

“Bad elements,” was the answer. “So each of the individual bad elements must have, at about the same time, thought of expressing its anger by stabbing a Muslim?” was the next question.

Muslims comprise 80 per cent of Dongri, yet, such was the ferocity of the violence against them that they were compelled to flee their homes in January ’93.

Witness after witness told Justice Srikrishna how Shiv Sainiks had attacked them in the presence of the police and how they had named these assailants in their police complaints.

Yet, the inspector in charge of the area maintained that he had no idea who directed the rioters. Similar was the case with Dharavi, where violence was initiated by a Sena victory rally hours after the Babri Masjid was demolished. In Mumbai’s police stations, the shakha pramukh is probably the best known figure.

But there’s a time to flaunt this closeness and a time to deny it. In front of the Commission, the denial went all the way to the top.

The then police commissioner SK Bapat maintained, even when confronted with case papers showing the names of Sena accused, that these papers only showed evidence against Shiv Sainiks, not the Sena as a party. In his opinion, the political links of an accused were irrelevant while investigating and registering cases; an observation the Commission commented on sharply.

Pointing out that finding out such links “tags the accused, so that the next time the opportunity arises for preventive or detective action, the police can easily zero in on the tagged accused as well as his associates from the identified communal organisation”, Srikrishna recommends a special proforma to interrogate riot accused so that these links become clear.

Like its other recommendations, this too has been ignored, and with good reason. Invariably, successive Congress CMs have had to explain their inaction against the Thackerays’ habitual inflammatory utterances.

Demands from angry citizens can be ignored, but when such explanations are demanded by courts, it certainly helps to claim that the police have no way of knowing whether Mumbai’s first family did in fact instigate street violence.