A senior member of the SIT, while expressing satisfaction on the sentencing in the infamous Naroda Patiya rioting case, said the SIT had come under severe criticism after Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi got a clean chit in another case. With this court order in which a former minister and a senior sitting MLA has been convicted, people will realise that SIT conducted meticulous investigations, he added.
Maya Kodnani has been sentenced for 10 and 18 years respectively under different sections of the law and her 18 years sentence will come into effect only after she has spent the first 10 years in jail.
The court described Maya Kodnani as the “kingpin of the entire riots” saying, “she led the mob and incited them for violence. She even abetted and supported the violent mob”.
SIT sources told this newspaper that apart from the statements of witnesses the technical evidence in terms of the cellphone locations of Maya Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi were of “immense help” during the trial. “The technical evidence against the two was very strong as it confirmed their presence in the Naroda are when rioting was at its peak,” an SIT official said.
While coming down heavily on the issue of communal riots, Judge Jyotsna Yagnik described them as “cancer on constitutional secularism and the incidents that happened in Naroda Patiya are a black chapter in the history of Indian Constitution”.
“Acts of communal violence are brutal, inhuman and shameful. It (Naroda) was a clear incident of human rights violation as 97 people were killed brutally within a day which included helpless women, children, aged persons. The climax of this inhuman and brutal act of violence was reflected in murder of an infant, who was 20-day old,” the order states.
In an important observation, the court noted that the Naroda violence was a pre-planned strategy and trashed the defence argument that it was in fact a fallout of the Godhra train burning incident. The court said no one can be allowed to take law in their holds as India is country which upholds the rule of law.
The court also directed the Gujarat government to pay a compensation of `5 lakhs to a victim of gang rape though nobody could be charged with this heinous crime in absence of any concrete evidence.