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In pursuit of justice

The Supreme Court may have baulked at transferring the most important Gujarat riot cases out of the State but its order on the establishment of a Special Investigating Team (SIT) to probe these incidents will provide some succour to victims of the 2002 massacres. It was precisely because of the Gujarat administration’s wilful obstruction of justice that the Supreme Court earlier ordered the reopening of hundreds of riot cases that had ended in tame acquittals. In the Best Bakery and Bilkis Bano rape cases, the apex court went further and placed the Central Bureau of Investigation in charge of the investigations. The trials in these two cases were held in Maharashtra and ended in convictions. In 2003, the court stayed proceedings in several high-profile massacre cases, pending final disposal of the National Human Rights Commission’s plea for these trials also to be moved out of Gujarat. This week’s order meets the NHRC half-way: the trials will now be held in Gujarat but the SIT will be empowered to conduct further investigations and file supplementary charge-sheets if it finds the Gujarat police’s original investigations to be incomplete or infirm. The cases relate to some of the worst crimes committed against hundreds of innocent Muslims in Gujarat under the watch of the Narendra Modi government: Naroda-Patiya, the Gulberg Society, Odh, Sardarpura, and Naroda Gaon. Also included is the Godhra train fire of February 27, which took the lives of 59 innocent passengers.

While the order is a step in the right direction, continuous monitoring of these cases by the Supreme Court is needed to ensure final delivery of justice. An independent investigation is a necessary but insufficient condition for ensuring that the guilty are punished. The prosecutor is an equally important part of the process. In several Gujarat riot cases, the public prosecutors did not seem particularly interested in winning convictions. Some of these prosecutors are directly affiliated to the RSS or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, while others do not wish to inconvenience or embarrass the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. In the Odh massacre case, where the perpetrators buried their victims’ bodies at different locations, the public prosecutor has actually opposed the plea by the victims’ families for the bodies to be exhumed. If the SIT is to make headway in all these cases, it will require the court’s strong backing in dealing with other branches of the justice delivery system. In the Godhra case, where more than 100 people have been languishing in jail for five years on terrorism charges which the POTA Review Committee found to be unwarranted, the SIT’s mandate must include impartially assessing the nature of the evidence against the accused and taking a call on whether the official charge-sheet, with its multiple contradictions, is sound.

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