Naroda Gam to Atiq Killing is a Straight Line. What You Get is India’s ‘Thok Do’ Culture

Shekhar Gupta

Two judicial orders in old cases of mass murder in two neighbouring states have resulted in the acquittal of the accused. In the first, the Rajasthan High Court set aside on March 29 this year the conviction and severe sentencing of four Muslims in the Jaipur serial bombings case of May 2008.

In the second, earlier this week, a trial court in Gujarat acquitted all 67 Hindus who were accused in the Naroda Gam killings in the course of the Gujarat riots of 2002. For the sake of this argument, let’s presume that the judges in both cases are right, and that all the accused were innocent.

Three consequences then arise directly from it. One, that the victims, the dead, the maimed and their families have found no justice at the end of 15 years since the bombings in Jaipur, and 21 years since the killings in Gujarat.

The victims in the first case were mostly Hindu, and in the second, all Muslim. Two, that if the accused — all Muslims in the first case and Hindus in the second — are innocent as finally ruled by the respective courts, they wasted decades of their lives in jail. If you add all of them up and multiply it by the number of years each spent in jail unjustly, you might find nearly 1,000 years of freedom taken away from people finally proved innocent.

We could summarise the first two points as follows: that at the end of these decades, injustice to so many aggrieved Indians — victims of serial bombings and targeted communal rioting — and to the alleged perpetrators of these crimes, was delivered in a manner that was equal in its unfairness.

And secular. Which brings us to our third point. In any criminal case, besides the victim and the accused, there is another, equally important party, the state. It’s a tough thing to say, but philosophically and in principle, it is even more important than the other two. Because the other two sets of victims are individuals. The state stands for all of us, the entire society. And the majesty of the Constitution and the Republic.

For the Republic to deliver on its true promise to its citizens, it must be able to catch the guilty, put them on trial and ensure they get their deserved punishment. Remember that phrase the Supreme Court once used while justifying the execution of a convicted terrorist: satisfaction of the collective conscience of the people of India.

That satisfaction is grossly denied in both these cases. While the appeal processes will drag on, given the way the legal system works, there will be no fresh investigation in either case. If higher, appellate courts also hold that those now acquitted are indeed innocent, those truly guilty will never be caught.

This will make the state also as much a victim of injustice as the Hindus and Muslims listed earlier on either side, whether victims or alleged perpetrators. List this as a case of justice denied thrice over. Why does such awful denial of justice take place, and so often? If you analyse the court orders in these cases, as in so many others where ultimately nobody got punished, you can find a pattern. Shoddy investigations, hastily and clumsily fabricated evidence, tutored witnesses.

Then, as decades pass, witnesses die and many others are ‘persuaded’ to change their minds. And finally, shifting politics. The next factor is the influence and clout of the accused. Uttar Pradesh’s gangsters and their ‘wars’ have been in the headlines over the past couple of weeks.

Each one of the three most prominent ones, Atiq Ahmed, Mukhtar Ansari, and Brijesh Singh, calmly survived multiple political assassination/mass murder trials. Each case saw witnesses becoming unavailable, turning hostile, or the prosecution losing interest. Atiq Ahmed was charged with assassination of newly elected BSP MLA Raju Pal (he had just defeated Atiq’s brother Khalid Azim alias Ashraf) on January 25, 2005.

The assassination was dramatic, public, with a large audience. Eighteen years on, that trial was still on. Witnesses were turning hostile, disappearing, and in one better-known case, both. Umesh Pal was a prosecution witness. He turned ‘hostile’ — obviously under pressure — changed his mind, and was kidnapped by Atiq’s gang in 2006.

He was assassinated on camera by Atiq’s son, Asad, on February 24. Atiq may have been convicted now for kidnapping Umesh Pal in 2006, but the murder trial was still ongoing. The trial had waxed and waned with changes in political fortunes in the state. That’s why it’s no surprise that rather than opprobrium, there is wide popular celebration of Atiq and his brother Ashraf’s public execution in police custody just a couple of days after Asad’s killing in an “encounter”.

Failures of justice like these