[Reader-list] Fwd: [sada_amu] Points to ponder

[Faizan Ahmed]

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Subject: [sada_amu] Points to ponder
Date: 2 Jul 2003 08:01:41 -0000
From: "Nadim Asrar" <nadimasrar at rediffmail.com>
To: sada_amu at yahoogroups.com

DAWN
July 1, 2003

Indira's Emergency vs Advani's democracy
By Jawed Naqvi

Mrs Indira Gandhi locked up India's so-called strongman, Mr Lal
Krishan Advani, on June 26, 1975, the day she declared her
controversial Emergency rule. He was picked up in Bangalore and
later
lodged in the Rohtak Jail in Haryana, a veritable hellhole, for
much
of his imprisonment.
Mr Advani was one of several opposition leaders who spent all or
most
of the 19 months of Mrs Gandhi's authoritarian rule in different
prisons across the country. Every year since then, Mr Advani has
found a ruse to remind us of his undemocratic ordeal. This year
too,
on June 26, he visited the Rohtak Jail with the usual media
ensemble
in attendance. He also got state TV to narrate the sequence of
events
that led to the suspension of civil liberties by Mrs Gandhi. The
programme lasted an entire day. It's election time and these
things
count.
After he was freed from prison, Mr Advani became information and
broadcasting minister in the Janata Party government that removed
Mrs
Gandhi from power. She had miscalculated the national mood and
called
elections in mid-1977. She lost. It was a big day for Indian
democracy. It had narrowly survived what could have been a close
call. But what did Mr Advani do next? He promptly did as a
democrat
what Mrs Gandhi hesitated to do as a dictator. Within days of
its
inauguration, his government banned four school textbooks that
were
written by world acclaimed professors, including Messrs Bipan
Chandra, R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar.
Hindutva is an ideology that equates the demolition of desolate
mosques with national awakening. But in some ways Mr Advani came
to
practise his ideology years before his fanatical followers tore
down
the Babri Mosque in Dec 1992. Banning the books was one such.
Before he became a politician Mr Advani was a film critic. He
seemed
to know his subject when as information minister he chose to show
on
Doordarshan one of the most brazenly communal films made in
Hindi
cinema, Swayam Siddha.
It is a 1950s film about a Hindu woman's zeal to drive out
Christian
missionaries from her village to purify her motherland. As bonus,
in
the process of her exorcism, her deaf and mute husband is cured.
The
issue became one of several that drove a wedge between Mr
Advani's
loyalty to his ideology and his commitment to democracy via the
Janata Party experiment. He chose the former. The government
collapsed.
How do Mr Advani's democratic precepts that he always takes care
to
wear on his sleeves compare with Mrs Gandhi's straight from the
heart, unpretentious fling with dictatorship? Mrs Gandhi
overrode
parliament and jailed her foes. She then used her contrived
majority
in parliament to shape the constitution to suit her purposes such
as
they were. It is rumoured that she also influenced the Supreme
Court
to vacate her indictment by the Allahabad High Court, which had
set
aside her election from Rae Bareily, an issue that prompted the
Emergency.
Mrs Gandhi had used a cocktail of draconian laws to hunt her
quarries. They included MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security
Act),
COFEPOSA, a law ostensibly to track and check smuggling, and the
Defence of India Rules. Of these MISA was the most notorious. Mr
Advani in his turn had no need for the multiplicity of laws, so
he
reduced them to just one, POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act).
Mrs
Gandhi had manipulated the provisions of parliamentary democracy
to
push her way past the opposition. Mr Advani used parliamentary
loopholes to reach there. He got Prime Minister Vajpayee to summon
a
joint session of parliament after the Congress blocked the passage
of
POTA in the Rajya Sabha. Mr Advani got the bill passed.
Nowadays, Mr Advani's allies are using POTA freely to fix their
rivals. The chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are
prime
examples of this abuse, not to speak of Gujarat. If Mrs Gandhi
used
her political power to tame the Supreme Court, Mr Advani used
the
street power of his hordes to reduce the apex court to a
helpless
bystander. That is how the mosque was demolished in Ayodhya. Of
course there is not a trick in the legal armoury that he has not
apparently used to delay and deny justice in the matter. He is one
of
the accused in the demolition trial.
Mrs Gandhi's minions used the Emergency to harass their rivals.
Mr
Advani's cohorts are so brazen they do not need the cover of an
emergency. Nor do they stop at mere harassment. They rape, burn,
kill
in the name of saving democracy as they did in Gujarat. They
then
seek shelter under the law of the land. That is how a day after
Mr
Advani took his ritual walk down memory lane inside a jail, a
local
court in Baroda allowed 21 men accused of mass murder inside a
bakery
during the February-March pogroms in Gujarat last year to walk
free.
The reason? The key witness, a Muslim woman, had turned hostile
because she was reportedly too frightened to stand by her
charge.
This was the first case among several that are dealing with the
carnage. They are all hanging fire. The outcome is cynically
known.
When Mr Advani was imprisoned, he had been a leading participant
in a
nationwide campaign to topple Mrs Gandhi. She accused the press
also
of collusion against her and therefore jailed several journalists
and
imposed strict censorship. But Mr Advani says he believes in
democracy. So he allows two hapless journalists, Iftikhar Gilani
and
Kumar Badal, to rot in prison over allegations that they had
abused
their privilege as free citizens under his dispensation to harm
the
interests of the state. Iftikhar was picked up in June last year
on
fake charges of espionage and Kumar was next in July for
allegedly
poaching animals. They were freed earlier this year.
Mr Advani's experiment with his peculiar form of democracy is
not
over yet. His government has caused the closure of the Tehelka
website, the only news medium that dared to expose the
government's
corrupt ways with hard evidence. Offices of the Outlook magazine
were
raided ostensibly to discipline the editor. And so the
experiment
trundles on. And it has lasted more than Mrs Gandhi's 19 months.

_____


#7.

The Hindu (India)
July 01, 2003

Fixing witnesses?

THE ACQUITTAL OF all the 21 accused in the Best Bakery fire,
which
was part of the post-Godhra Gujarat carnage, is the culmination of
a
sloppy prosecution marred by interference from members of the
ruling
establishment. After crucial witnesses turned hostile during the
trial in the fast-track court in Vadodara, the Best Bakery case
was
perhaps fated to fail. But the intervention of a BJP member of
the
Assembly, Madhu Shrivastava, who escorted the main complainant,
Zahira Sheikh, to the court on the day she went back on her
charges,
raises apprehensions about intimidation of witnesses having played
a
decisive role in the outcome of the trial. Mr. Shrivastava, who
claimed he was only "protecting" Zahira Sheikh and her family
 from
anti-social elements, was present in the court through the
trial.
Indeed, he showed a more than ordinary interest in clearing the
accused of the charges originally made by those in his
"protection".
The trial took on a farcical character with some of the
witnesses
describing as "saviours" the very same persons whom they had
initially identified as the perpetrators of the crime. The facts
and
circumstances of the fire, which claimed at least 12 human
lives,
were well documented with the survivors recounting their ordeal
before the National Human Rights Commission, the
Government-appointed
Commission of Inquiry, the Concerned Citizens Tribunal and the
national media. However, everything changed the moment Mr.
Shrivastava came on the scene and took the witnesses in his
"protective" custody.

The acquittal aside, what is disconcerting is that the sessions
judge, H.U. Mahida, made no comment about the conduct of the
witnesses. The prosecution was faulted, not for its inability to
fix
the charges on the accused, but for "fabricating" the accounts of
the
witnesses. Investigation of any riot case is difficult, as the
police
have to rely almost entirely on the accounts of the witnesses. In
the
Bakery case, Zahira Sheikh had voluntarily deposed against the
accused in several public fora before retracting her deposition
in
court. That should have been sufficient cause for suspecting
manipulation of the judicial process. To add to the intrigue,
Zahira
Sheikh was not immediately traceable after the verdict. In an
already
terrorised atmosphere, as in post-Godhra Gujarat, the witnesses
are
no doubt susceptible to intimidation and influence.
Unfortunately,
this aspect does not appear to have received the required
attention
during the trial stage.

If such a high-profile case can collapse so easily, there is
reason
to believe that other cases registered in connection with the
Gujarat
riots might go the same way. If anything, the interference of
the
ruling establishment would be more in cases on the Naroda-Patiya
and
Gulmarg Society incidents, in which ruling party MLAs and VHP
and
Bajrang Dal leaders have been listed as accused. As the former
Union
Minister and National Conference leader, Omar Abdullah, has
pointed
out, the acquittal contrasts sharply with the detention, under
the
Prevention of Terrorism Act, of the accused in the Godhra
train-burning case. In the end, the verdict in the Bakery case
has
only contributed to scepticism about a free investigation of the
riots followed by a fair trial of the accused. Thus, it is
imperative
for the Government legal department to take steps to appeal
against
the acquittal. Otherwise, allegations of State complicity in the
post-Godhra pogroms will stand confirmed, and the Bakery case will
be
a dangerous precedent for witnesses and investigators.




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