A tale of two investigations

Justice is a strange process. A witness described it is as the longest pregnancy. One waits and waits, hoping for a life that never comes. During the wait, survivors and witnesses become experts on the real nature of the judicial. Every ritual, every legal term acquires a new life.

You have to earn justice by learning what it means. The survivor and the witness become ethnologists, adept at a judicial process they were innocent of previously. This article is an attempt to see how survivor and witness look at two investigations.
The investigations into the Gujarat riots of 2002 have had a chequered career. The silence and indifference of the earlier years when investigations were stone-walled, mutated suddenly into two interesting parallel streams of investigation. The first was the establishment of the Special Investigation Team (sit) under a former director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, R.K. Raghavan. Appointed directly by the Supreme Court, the SIT had to go into the question of whether the Gujarat police was conducting the investigation into the riots with integrity. The second investigation was into a set of encounters, and was led by a CBI officer, P. Kandaswamy.
The contrast between the two investigations is stunning. The arrest of a state minister for an encounter killing is an epoch-making event. It removes the veil of hypocrisy that surrounds such events. To think that the guilt of fake encounters are restricted to police is naïve. One needs the categorical consent, clearance and often specific directives of political bosses. So far few investigations have dared to make the connection. Whether in the case of police atrocities in Punjab as a part of the anti-Khalistan operations or in the Northeast, or against the Naxalites, there is always the politician asking the police to resort to quasi-judicial solutions. As a result, “police officers”, says a retired Inspector-General, “bore the brunt of the aftermath of the police operations. The arrest of Amit Shah will alter that… this government-ensured immunity is broken at last”.
One is intrigued by the arrest record of the two investigations. The SIT, while investigating a plethora of incidents, eventually arrests only one inspector in the Gulbarg Society case. This keeps the complicity level of government functionaries in riots as low as possible. An observer asks, “Can a set of inspectors organise a state-wide anti-minority bloodbath, killing 2,500 people and destroying millions of rupees worth of property, without the clearance of the ministers? Given this, the riot victims cannot but feel that the SIT is inventing directives to act as a B team to the Gujarat police”. The actions taken, the arrest made by the CBI team under Mr Kandaswamy makes SIT a butt of ridicule.
The sudden burst of media publicity given to both groups also raises a set of sociological issues. One is not interested in handing out a report card, but in examining the framework of perception they created. The two investigations are read as if there is a dualistic world of violence, two parallel worlds, where riots and encounter deaths have nothing to do with each other.
While the streams of justice move differently, there is a sanitisation and silence that we have to understand. The psychological separation of riots and encounters is puzzling. The investigation into the riot is a study in the rituals of fairness and objectivity and that into the encounters is read as a failure of governance. This is followed by two other tacit procedures. Firstly, a line of separation is drawn between the politics and the law. There is a secondary sanitisation where the IPS is under furious scrutiny, while the IAS enters the black box of governance. Is one to believe that one system is a den of complicity, and the other an immaculate conception? Politically, this separation creates an eerie space of silence, a no man’s land between riots and encounter deaths.
The separation of the two forms of violence creates a certain perspective on violence in Gujarat. The regime still assumes innocence while it safely argues that there may be a few chinks in its armor. This cynically shrewd act suggests that one should stick to the legacy of law and leave politics alone. It saves the phenomenon of Narendra Modi.
Such a process enforces a sense of status quo. It allows for a focused sense of tacticality which makes politics a place for lazy conviviality. After a few slinging matches there seems to be a tacit contract between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. It reinstates the ethnic stereotypes of Muslims as a criminal community. The general reaction then is that the police officers are being unfairly punished. The ends-means confusion where violence is used to eliminate violent underworld characters is loudly, and not so loudly, legitimised.
There is a sense that a society is returning to normal. The witness might say, to the survivor, why don’t you settle for a small fragment of justice — a punished cop, a minister? Why blacken the system? Why don’t you be pragmatic and settle for less? But it is precisely this pragmatism that one is warning against. Justice does not arrive through placebo effects. A whipping boy does not absolve “the prince”. A sick society cannot remove its appendix and claim it has cured cancer.
One must confess despite the efficiency of the CBI, that the SIT investigation formally commands a different ethical aura because of the responsibility the Supreme Court has vested in it. The SIT is not just an investigation into an act of violence, but a reflective site, where NGO, political party, survivor, witness, whistleblower, housewife have created a kaleidoscope of reflections which need to be considered. It has, at one level, created a Rashomon-like space where justice does not always give the clarity one expects. One senses one woman’s injustice becomes one officer’s indifference. One man’s waiting becomes another man’s sabbatical.
Yet the demand for justice is obsessive. An investigative act which plays it down becomes a violation of both, truth and justice. This is precisely why the SIT as an official ritual of investigative justice cannot be downplayed or sidelined. Congratulating the CBI does not legitimise the inertia of the SIT. It has an ethico-legal role to play. One hopes its silences do not become an absolution for the perpetrators of the riots. The victim waits and watches quietly, expectantly. Yet, even that silence and the waiting becomes a tacit indictment of the politico-judicial system. The sadness remains as one watches the spectacle quietly.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist