The statement by Gujarat’s Director General of Police (Acting), Mr. Chittaranjan Singh, immediately after the conviction in the Ode riot case, ‘that the conviction is a lesson for the critics of the state police as well as the state’s judiciary’, is disgusting, to say the least. A statement will not absolve the police and the state’s administration of their responsibility from preventing the riot, and further contributing to it. The 2002 riot will remain a deep scar on the psyche of the nation; just as other orchestrated communal violence that Indian’s are forced to live with. (Picture: Mr. Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat during and after the riots)
Chittaranjan certainly will not require someone to remind him that one of the alleged triggers for the Ode riot that burned 24 people alive in two separate incidents is the death of minor Nishith in the police firing on 1 March 2002. In fact Chittaranjan’s statement is part of an elaborate and pretentious state act of whitewashing the past, which ironically right now reads with his designation, Acting DGP!
Referring those who criticised the judiciary, the state police and the administration for their despicable role in the state-sponsored riot and handling the post riot scenario, as ‘impediments in the process of justice’, is an insult to the victims. The statement intentionally portrays those who critique the state and its functionaries, as always wrong. It also reads in an additional misinformation, targeted at the civil society organisations, with an intention to differentiate human rights organisations from the victims of human rights violations. In fact Chittaranjan is just an addition to a growing number of individuals in the country who hold an antagonistic view against civil society groups, accusing them as responsible for maligning the country due to vested interests. Such gross statements ignore the fact that no more damage could be brought to the country and to its people beyond orchestrated violence. The convoluted logic is, speaking openly against injustice is more harmful than the injustice itself. The Prime Minister of India is also a member of this chauvinistic club.
In all the cases relating to Gujarat riots, the witnesses are threatened, and in some, wrong persons cited as the accused to the save the actual miscreants. Is it not enough proof to the conniving role the state police played in the entire incident? That none from the state administration, or its political elite, are charged for the crimes they have committed during the 2002 Gujarat riots is proof to the fact that the term justice is a misnomer in India.
But for the intervention of the civil society organisations, even this much, of investigation and holding a trial, would not have happened. At the very least, it required a special investigation team constituted at the behest of the Supreme Court, to complete the investigation, however unsatisfactory it is. The state police, that Chittaranjan heads and now pompously speaks about, had done enough damage to the investigation by then.
That Gujarat is an example where the police undertake targeted assassinations for claiming rewards or obliging their political masters does not speak well of the state police. Instead it reiterates the fact that the police in Gujarat, like in most of India are nothing but uniformed criminals paid by the exchequer. This caricature of the Indian police cannot be whitewashed with the conviction in the Ode riot case. The damage that the police have done to themselves, to their morale, which is the basis of the public perception that the country’s police are not more than uniformed street thugs is far deeper and requires more than a few belated convictions to change.
The fact that the trial took more than seven years to start and the first trial judge resigned after the trial started speaks volumes about the judiciary. The delay in the process was not because of the civil society filing applications, but due to the inability of the state police to file a proper charge sheet in court. A true investigation would and should have booked those who instigated a state-wide carnage. The state police cannot and will not venture into this task, since many of them are the top political brass of the country. What justice is then Chittaranjan claiming about?
Violence committed upon individuals leave deep wounds. When it is committed upon a community, the magnitude of it is higher and incalculable. What have the state police done to address this? Or does the establishment have even an understanding about what it means by post violence trauma? The state administration and the police deny admitting that the 2002 state-sponsored violence has not only adversely affected the Muslims who were the target, but has equally hurt the rest of the population who witnessed the violence and are today forced to live as part of the same wounded society without the possibility of healing.
Much has been exposed and written about the Gujarat riots of 2002, that once again mentioning that it is entirely a state creation, is repetition. Of the mess that Gujarat is today, officers like Chittranjan is merely parroting what the government would want a person in his position to say. Had there been a true police officer in his uniform, the sentence and conviction in the case should have gone down as an affirmation by the judiciary of what his force failed to prevent. The conviction would have been understood as the shameful failure of the state and of its various apparatus. Instead, just as it is fitting for an Indian bureaucrat, failure is considered an occasion to celebrate shameful ineptitude.
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