நரேந்திர மோடி கைது செய்யப்படுவாரா?

நரேந்திர மோடி நடத்திய நர வேட்டையில் தன் அழகை இழந்த அஹமதாபாத் நகரைச் சேர்ந்த ஒரு இளம் முஸ்லிம் பெண்.

ON 3 DECEMBER 2010, a leading national daily ran a frontpage story headlined ‘SIT clears Narendra Modi of willfully allowing post- Godhra riots.’ News channels leaped at the story. ‘SIT gives Modi a clean chit’ flashed in bold letters across television screens. The newspaper report that was attributed to anonymous sources and had little more information than the sensational caption was expanded into a certificate of innocence for Modi.

Within hours, a beguiling charade of Modi’s righteousness was constructed. While the Special Investigation Team (SIT), which had done the probe, chose to remain quiet as it was answerable only to the Supreme Court, BJP spokespersons popped up on news channels hailing the imaginary ‘clean-chit’ as a political triumph. An exuberant LK Advani called it “the most heartening news I have read in a long, long time”. Praising Modi’s personality and his style of governance, Advani wrote in his blog: “In my 60 years of political life I have not known any colleague of mine so consistently, so sustainedly and so viciously maligned by opponents as Narendra Modi.”

The BJP patriarch wrapped up his eulogy on Modi with the following remark: “Several papers have reported that the SIT has found no evidence to substantiate the charge and has exonerated the Gujarat chief minister. The country is eagerly awaiting the full text of the SIT report to the Supreme Court.”

Well, the wait is over. TEHELKA has scooped the sensational 600-page inquiry report into Modi’s alleged role in the 2002 massacre. The content is shocking and will come as a serious blow to the carefully cultivated image of Modi as an able administrator and a man of good governance. For eight years, riot victims and human rights groups have cried hoarse about the deliberate miscarriage of justice in Gujarat. About how the police and State machinery had either ignored or abetted rioters and created the space for massacres to happen; about how some ruling party politicians had goaded the public mood to new danger levels; about the State’s blatant and continuing prejudice against the victims; about public prosecutors who were subverting justice in the courts by helping the accused instead of nailing their guilt.

But as the years passed, despite the glaring evidence, the accusations lost their sting and were deemed to be, as Advani called it, merely a vicious maligning campaign. Modi won two elections and the effects of the counter-propaganda began to kick in. Both corporate heads and sections of the national media began to hail Modi as a great statesman and potential prime minister. His sins of omission and commission were set aside. The Congress, blunted by its own abysmal handling of the 1984 Sikh riots, stayed meekly quiet.

But now, for the first time, there is damning official confirmation of many things victims and human rights groups have been accusing Modi of. The SIT was set up by order of the Supreme Court. Far from giving Modi a clean chit, in its report dated 12 May 2010 that the Supreme Court has kept under wraps, the SIT found Modi guilty on many counts: a communal mindset, inflammatory speeches, destruction of crucial records, appointment of Sangh members as public prosecutors, illegal positioning of ministers in police control rooms during the riots, and persecution of neutral officers.

Is there a right-thinking citizen who would say that these are the attributes of a model chief minister? Are efficiency and ability to attract investments the only qualities we seek in our leaders?

This damning report, now exposed by TEHELKA, blows craters into the BJP propaganda that the SIT had exonerated Modi and vindicated his handling of the 2002 riots. The text of the report, in fact, points to exactly the opposite. The report comments that political and communal agendas ‘weighed heavily’ in Modi’s handling of the criminal justice system. It records his government’s abject failure in providing justice to the victims. It also accuses Modi of making “sweeping” and “offensive” comments against the Muslim community that “showed a measure of thoughtlessness and irresponsibility on the part of a person holding a high public office.”

But these are only a fraction of the things the report found Modi guilty of. Here are a few of its key findings:

SIT Chairman Raghavan notes: ‘The inquiry clearly established that such a meeting was in fact held at the chief minister’s residence on the night of 27.02.02 after the chief minister’s return to Ahmedabad following his visit to Godhra earlier in the day.’ (Page 3 of chairman’s comments)

According to inquiry officer AK Malhotra, a retired CBI man, the meeting lasted for about half an hour. There were eight confirmed participants:

1. Chief Minister Narendra Modi

2. Acting Chief Secretary Swarna Kanta Verma

3. Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Ashok Narayan

4. DGP K Chakravarthi

5. Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police PC Pande

6. Secretary (Home) K Nityanandam

7. Principal Secretary to CM PK Mishra

8. Secretary to CM Anil Mukim

1. The report says, “In spite of the fact that ghastly and violent attacks had taken place on Muslims at Gulberg Society and elsewhere, the reaction of the government was not the type that would have been expected by anyone. The chief minister had tried to water down the seriousness of the situation at Gulberg Society, Naroda Patiya and other places by saying that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” (Page 69 of the report)

SIT Chairman RK Raghavan further comments that Modi’s statement “accusing some elements in Godhra and the neighbourhood as possessing a criminal tendency was sweeping and offensive coming as it did from a chief minister, that too at a critical time when Hindu-Muslim tempers were running high.” (Page 13 of SIT chairman’s comments)

The inquiry officer also notes: “His (Modi) implied justification of the killings of innocent members of the minority community read together with an absence of a strong condemnation of the violence that followed Godhra suggest a partisan stance at a critical juncture when the state had been badly disturbed by communal violence.” (Page 153)

2. The report says, in an extremely “controversial” move, the government of Gujarat had placed two senior ministers — Ashok Bhatt and IK Jadeja — in the Ahmedabad city police control room and the state police control room during the riots. The SIT chairman comments that the two ministers were positioned in the control rooms with “no definite charter”, fuelling the speculation that they “had been placed to interfere in police work and give wrongful decisions to the field officers”. “The fact that he (Modi) was the cabinet minister for Home would heighten the suspicion that this decision had his blessings.” (Page 12 of chairman’s comments)

(It is to be noted that Ashok Bhatt’s cell phone analysis showed that he was in touch with VHP leader Jaideep Patel, a key conspirator of the Naroda Gaon and Naroda Patiya massacre, and with Gordhan Zadaphia, the then minister of state for home and who is now seen by the SIT as a major culprit of the Ahmedabad massacres.)

3. The report affirms that police officers who took a neutral stand during the riots and prevented massacres were transferred by the Gujarat government to insignificant postings. SIT’s Raghavan has termed these transfers “questionable” since “they came immediately after incidents in which the officers concerned were known to have antagonised ruling party men”. (Pages 7-8 of chairman’s comments)

4. The report says “The Gujarat government has reportedly destroyed the police wireless communication of the period pertaining to the riots.” It adds, “No records, documentations or minutes of the crucial law and order meetings held by the government during the riots had been kept.” (Page 13)

(This is a shocking finding. Why were these official records destroyed? What was there to hide? It has to be remembered that the Gujarat government had constituted the Justice KG Shah Commission (which was later reconstituted as a two-member commission headed by Justice GT Nanavati with KG Shah as its member) on 6 March 2002, one month after the riots, to inquire into the circumstances around the riots and was thus dutybound to preserve police control room records and other documents and minutes of meetings as they could have been vital evidence of the partisan role played by the State machinery.)

5. The report says Modi displayed a “discriminatory attitude by not visiting the riot-affected areas in Ahmedabad where a large number of Muslims were killed, though he went to Godhra on the same day, travelling almost 300 km on a single day.” (Page 67) The SIT chairman also comments that “Modi did not cite any specific reasons why he did not visit the affected areas in Ahmedabad city as promptly as he did in the case of the Godhra train carnage.” (Page 8 of chairman’s comments)

6. The SIT confirms that the government appointed VHP and RSS-affiliated advocates as public prosecutors in sensitive riot cases. The report states: “It appears that the political affiliation of the advocates did weigh with the government for the appointment of public prosecutors.” (Page 77) The SIT chairman further comments that “it has been found that a few of the past appointees were in fact politically connected, either to the ruling party or organisations sympathetic to it.” (Page 10 of chairman’s comments)

7. According to the report, the Gujarat government did not take any steps to stop the illegal bandh called by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad on 28 February 2002. On the contrary the BJP had supported the bandh. (Page 69)

(It is important to remember that it was Hindu mobs mobilised by the local VHP and BJP leaders in the name of bandhs that had carried out the horrific massacres at Naroda and Gulberg Society on 28 February 2002.)

8. The SIT report also says that, in an inexplicable move, the police administration did not impose curfew in Naroda until 12 pm and Meghani Nagar (Ahmedabad city) until 2 pm on 28 February 2002. By then, the situation had severely deteriorated at both places.

9. According to the SIT, despite detailed reports recommending strict action submitted to Modi by field officers of the State Intelligence Bureau, the Modi government failed to take action against a section of the print media that was publishing communally- inciting reports, inflaming base emotions. This had vitiated the communal situation further. (Page 79)

10. The SIT also asserts that in August 2002, in a bid to ensure an early Assembly election, top officials of the Modi government misled the Central Election Commission by presenting a picture of normalcy when the state was still simmering with communal tension. (Page 79 to 86)

(The BJP had prematurely dissolved the Assembly on 19 August 2002, nine months before the expiry of the five-year term, and demanded an early election. The BJP clearly wanted to take electoral advantage of the communal polarisation.)

11.The SIT discovered that the state police had carried out patently shoddy investigations in the Naroda Patiya and Gulberg Society massacre cases. It deliberately overlooked the cell phone records of Sangh Parivar members and BJP leaders involved in the riots — prominent among them were the Gujarat VHP president Jaideep Patel and BJP minister Maya Kodnani. If these records had been analysed and used as evidence, it could have established their complicity. (Pages 101-105)

12. Many senior police are now being investigated by the SIT for their suspected complicity in the riots. The former Ahmedabad joint commissioner of police MK Tandon, in whose area around 200 Muslims were killed, has been found guilty of deliberate dereliction of duty. (Post the riots, however, far from being censored, he got one lucrative posting after another and retired as additional director general of police in June 2007.) His junior, former deputy commissioner of police PK Gondia, has also been found guilty of willfully allowing the massacres. The SIT says that if the two had just carried out their duty hundreds of Muslims could have been saved. (Pages 48-50) Neither of these officers was held accountable by the Modi government.

13. The SIT has also found evidence against the then minister of state for home Gordhan Zadaphia (who was reporting directly to Modi) for his complicity in the riots. Another BJP minister Mayaben Kodnani has already been booked in the Naroda Patiya massacre. (Pages 168-169)

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