As the country marched forward with the “baggage” of the pain and suffering of hundreds of families that fell victim to the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat 10 years ago, much of the credit goes to the Supreme Court and the National Human Right Commission (NHRC) for not allowing the Narendra Modi government to brush under the carpet the cases of massacre of this scale unlike it had happened in the killing of over 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi 1984.
The initiative was taken suo motu by then NHRC chairman A.S. Anand, the former Chief Justice of India, who personally assessed the situation on the spot by visiting all riot-affected places and subsequently filed an exhaustive public interest litigation in the Supreme Court seeking its immediate intervention.
The NHRC filing a PIL like this was perhaps the first instance in the history of the country that a national human rights body constituted under the Act of Parliament even required to knock the doors of the SC after finding the Gujarat government’s action against the perpetrators “grossly” inadequate.
A SC bench, headed by then CJI V.N. Khare, first sought the details of the total number of cases registered by the Gujarat police and when the reply was found to “evasive”, a peeved Justice Khare reminded the Modi government of his party’s patriarch and then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s words of wisdom on “rajdharma (duty of the ruler towards citizens)”.
In the strongest indictment of the Modi government, CJI Khare said: “I have no faith in the prosecution and the state government... I am not talking about Article 356 (imposition of President’s Rule). You have to protect the citizens and prosecute the guilty. What is rajdharma! If you can’t protect them, then it is better to quit.”
The top court also allowed an NGO, Citizens for Justice and Peace, floated by some human right activists, to join the NHRC to take up the cases of the riot victims wherever they found the action of the police lacking or attempts were made to hush up the cases.
Not only this, the SC put under watch the proceedings in different trial courts in the state as it apprehended “fudging” at the trial stage by the prosecution despite filing of chargesheets after the top court started monitoring.
SC’s fear proved right when the first judgment in the Best Bakery killings was out, with the acquittal of all the 21 accused as the trial judge said he was helpless as no evidence was brought on the record by the prosecution.
Key eyewitness Zahira Sheikh became a victim of “pulls and pressure” from either side — over-enthusiastic right activists and some Sangh Parivar workers — making her testimony “unreliable” though eight members of her family were burnt alive in front of her.
The killing of the husband and four children of Bilkis Bano and her subsequent rape on the outskirts of Ahmedabad and the police closing the case was another example of scuttling the investigation in those cases which did not figure in the NHRC list.