[Reader-list] Fwd: Gujarat Carnage 2002: Some Excertpts

[saraswati]

    IIV.
  http://tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107Editor'sCut.asp
   
  Editor’s Cut
               
  Lest We Forget Our Shame
  HARINDER BAWEJA 
  FOR ALL of us at TEHELKA, Gujarat 2002: The Truth is the most important investigation of our time. Some may argue against this but in so many ways, it is more urgent than Operation West End. Exposing corruption in the procurement of arms was critical. That the gravy chain ran long and deep — through top political echelons — was a revelation in the national interest.

But unlike West End, which dealt with greed and avarice, Gujarat is about our fundamentals. It is about ourselves. It is important because the hopelessly one-sided perpetration of violence on hapless Muslims is one of the biggest ruptures of recent times. A corrosive rupture. A nation’s shame.

We all knew that the State had conspired in the events of 2002. That the rioters — or is assassins the right word? — had political protection. But we had no faces. The perpetrators were part of large amorphous mobs. We didn’t know the details. We had no idea of the extent to which the masters and their men plotted and executed the genocide.
              
  This investigation lays bare the anatomy of the rioters. The groundbreaking exposé — entirely the work of one gutsy, truth-hungry journalist, armed with nothing but two buttonsized cameras — takes the lid off all that was known but never established. The chilling details come first hand, from the accused themselves. The accused damn themselves — they tell us how everything, every last thing was planned and thought through. How bombs were manufactured in factories owned by members of the Sangh Parivar. How arms were smuggled in from other states. How, for the men in uniform, the colour saffron meant more than khaki. How Narendra Modi, custodian of the law, volunteered to let his state resemble a killing field.

The revelations are important because they are entirely voluntary. They were not made under any inducement. Wads of notes were not brandished to elicit them. Extraordinary stories need extraordinary methods, we often say. This extraordinary investigation, in fact, is an account of what the killers willingly narrated to the reporter who approached them as a student researching Hindu resurgence. What they said was checked and cross-checked — through field visits, through other accused.

Some were cautious, but most were willing to talk with a little bit of goading. They gave out horrifying details without batting an eyelid. Their testimonies are not just an insight into their mindsets — they are accounts that should have been in official police records — in FIRs and chargesheets. Accounts that fit different sections of the IPC. Accounts that lend themselves to the criminal procedure code. Babu Bajrangi, the Bajrang Dal zealot, confesses to how he slashed open a pregnant woman’s womb and wrenched the foetus out. 

Suresh Richard, an accused in the Naroda Patiya massacre, confesses to rape. He tells you he is not lying, because he is admitting to it in the presence of his wife. He tells also of how he and his fellows killed Muslims when they heard that some of them were hiding in a gutter, hoping to escape the marauding mobs. Haresh Bhatt, a sitting MLA, similarly needs to be questioned, to be proceeded against because he reveals how rocket launchers were assembled in a factory owned by him. In over 40 hours of tape, none, save one of the protagonists, expressed any remorse. Frighteningly, they all said they would like to kill many more.

THIS INVESTIGATION is important for so many reasons, the two most important being that the Police and the Judiciary — the two pillars that ordinary Indians bank on — stand naked. Two public prosecutors are on camera acknowledging allegiance to their faith over their profession — paying homage to a warped sense of religion over nobility of duty. Details of how they are actually working to help the guilty escape the law. How they have even turned brokers and have already helped an accused — who had used a sword to cut a man to pieces — by offering money to the victim’s family.

This story is about the subversion that continues at different levels, political and judicial. The Gujarat government’s own counsel casts aspersions on the two-member Nanavati-Shah Commission. It took us six months to unearth the startling truth behind Gujarat 2002. Five years since, it is clear why the government in the state is not interested in delivering justice to its own victims.

The investigation begs attention. We need police reforms urgently. Thousands of victims — eyewitnesses to the genocide — are looking for justice to courts outside Gujarat. A Delhi High Court bench recently took suo motu notice of reports that pointed a finger at YK Sabharwal, the former chief justice of India. This investigation deserves all the attention the judiciary can pay it. It is a nation’s shame. Our collective shame.
  Nov 03, 2007
   
  II/IV.
  http://tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107Overview_Conspirators.asp
   
    Conspirators & Rioters
  
  Overview
   
    NARENDRA MODI visited Godhra on the day of the burning of coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express. His outburst provided the first sign to Sangh workers that the time to corner the Muslims had come 
  THAT VERY NIGHT, top BJP and Sangh leaders met at Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Godhra, and gave the green signal for an all-out assault on Muslims across the state
  A STRATEGY was devised on how to shield the attackers from the law after the riots. Prominent lawyers were briefed and senior police officers taken into confidence. The cadres were told Modi was squarely behind them
  THE MOBILISATION of the under castes, something the Sangh had been engaged in for years, dovetailed into the deep penetration Hindutva already had among Gujarat’s higher castes. Godhra provided the perfect spark to fuse them together
  FROM THE very outset, the police played partisan, often joining the mobs. Officers who tried to do their duty found their hands tied. The complicity was led by then Ahmedabad Commissioner PC Pandey, who ensured compliance by a swathe of junior officers
  WEAPONS, FROM BOMBS to guns to trishuls, were either manufactured and distributed by Sangh workers themselves, or smuggled through Sangh channels from all over India. The Bajrang Dal and the VHP already had a large cache of firearms and daggers 
  BJP AND SANGH LEADERS led the bloodthirsty mobs through Ahmedabad’s bylanes, Sabarkantha’s villages, Vadodara’s localities. The police stood guard to the mayhem 
  BJP MLA MAYABEN KODNANI drove around Ahmedabad’s Naroda locality all day, directing the mobs. VHP leaders Atul Vaid and Bharat Teli did the same at the Gulbarg Housing Society. None of them ever went to jail
  FIRE WAS THE MOST FAVOURED weapon in the rioters’ hands. That cremation is considered un-Islamic fuelled their frenzy to burn. Petrol and kerosene were lavishly used, as were the victims’ own gas cylinders
  BABU BAJRANGI reveals he collected 23 revolvers from Hindus in Naroda Patiya. He called VHP general secretary Jaideep Patel 11 times and informed Gordhan Zadaphia, the then minister of state for home, about the death toll 
  GOVERNMENT COUNSEL before the Nanavati-Shah Commission, Arvind Pandya, himself worships Modi and describes Justice Shah as “our man”. Nanavati’s own report on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots is gathering dust till today
   
  III/IV.
  http://tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107RoleOfPolice_Overview.asp
   
    Role Of The Police
  
  Overview
   
      POLICE COMMISSIONER PC Pandey (recently removed from the post of Gujarat DGP by the Election Commission) ordered that the 700-800 dead bodies at Naroda Patiya be clandestinely picked up and dumped all over Ahmedabad to reduce the toll of the massacre
  BAJRANG DAL LEADER Babu Bajrangi says he surrendered when Narendra Modi asked him to do so. Joint Commissioner (Crime Branch) PP Pandey and his men arrested him, and told him it was all part of a show 

ON PAPER, District Superintendent of Police ND Solanki sent a local Sangh leader to judicial custody, but in reality he sent him to stay in a VHP office 
  DCP GADVI promised VHP’S Kalupurzila mantri Ramesh Dave that he would kill “at least four-five Muslims” if Dave pointed them out to him. Dave took him to a house from where a group of Muslims could be seen. “Before we knew it, he’d killed five people,” Dave said
  INSPECTOR KG ERDA told the mob gathered outside the Gulbarg society it had three hours to do its work. The mob went berserk. One man was hacked to death in front of Erda
  ERDA told VHP workers to set fire to a vehicle carrying Muslims. He said that the police constable accompanying the vehicle would run away. “The whole episode will end here itself and there will be no question of framing a case against anyone,” he said
   
  IV.
  http://tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107Reporter'sDiary.asp
   
    Reporter’s Diary
               
  Voyager Between Two Worlds

Having been undercover on the shadow lines between sanity and mayhem, ASHISH KHETAN retraces a quest for truth   I HAD JUST finished breakfast and was settling down to the newspaper when my cellphone rang in the next room. Before I could reach it, the caller had disconnected and left an SMS. Call me, it read. The sender was Tarun Tejpal, my editor. I had returned from Gujarat only a couple of days ago, having completed a sting operation on Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s involvement in a spate of fake encounter killings. The story had exposed, fairly conclusively, that the Gujarat cops — more hitmen than cops — had made quite a practice of killing Muslims in these “encounters”. I wondered why Tarun wanted to talk to me so early in the morning (it was almost 11, but that, for most journalists, is an early hour). Maybe it was about the story’s fallout. Maybe those exposed had sent a legal notice. 

I dialled Tarun with questions crowding my mind. “Ashish, have you heard about the vandalism in Baroda”, asked Tarun. Of course I’d heard. For years, Gujarat had been in the news for all the wrong reasons — this was one more instance of a few lunatics, doped out on “Hindutava”, going on a rampage. This time their target was the Fine Arts Faculty of Vadodara’s Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU). “It’s appalling,” said Tarun. The hooligans had already been on more than one TV channel, articulating their twisted ideology, announcing loudly to the world how the “obscene” portrayal of Hindu deities had hurt their religious sentiments. But there seemed a larger motive behind the targeting of a few Fine Arts students and professors, Tarun argued. Find out who these people are, what they do and above all what their views in private are as opposed to their public postures. 

As I put the phone down, I felt a sense of melancholy enveloping me. Three back-toback investigative reports (we had also exposed Sanjay Dutt for his involvement in the 1993 serial bombing and Maharashtra DGP PS Pasricha for his illegally-gotten wealth) had made me a bit battle-weary. I had repeatedly failed to honour my promise to take Chris, my wife, on vacation. It had been a while since I’d spent time with my nine-month-old daughter. But there I was, within a few hours of that call, packing my bags to leave for Gujarat, a place that evoked foreboding every time I went there.

      My first visit to Vadodara had been in the winter of 2004, after Zaheera Sheikh — the prime witness in the Best Bakery massacre — had made yet another retraction in court, playing yet again into the hands of her tormentors. As the autorickshaw took me from Vadodara airport to Alkapuri, the city centre where all the hotels are, I passed places I’d visited then — the station, the roundabouts, the restaurants. I remembered how incredible that visit was. But the familiarity of the place, half-blackened by shadow, half illuminated by streetlights, only made me the more sombre. Now, as in 2004, I had set out for a story, armed with nothing more than a couple of spycams and some daredevilry. 

Now, as then, the biggest question was where to start? And, now as then, I knew nobody, not a soul in this alien land. A magic, perhaps divine intervention had seen me through my 2004 visit — within a fortnight of my arrival, I’d been sitting right before Zaheera’s chief tormentor, BJP MLA Madhu Srivastava, the local ganglord, in his own front garden, he on a swing, I on a shabby plastic chair, with a spycam on my lap. Then, as now, my brief was simple. Nothing was adding up in the Zaheera episode, Tarun had said. I was to join together the scattered pieces and complete the picture. And when completed, it added up to a nice round figure: Rs 18 lakh. The sum Srivastava had paid Zaheera to buy her silence. But that was then. Miracles don’t happen everyday, I told myself. Still I had to give it a shot.

After a frantic search for a reasonably priced hotel room, I checked into Hotel Aditi International, Room No 506. Except for its name, there was nothing grand about the hotel. The peeling paint and the murky light of the bare room, did little to cheer me up. Maybe a few cigarettes would bring some clarity. Then, an idea floated up, above the plume of self-doubt and nicotine. Since I didn’t know where to go, why not take a few small steps on every lane that opened up? And then see which road would lead to my goal? 

I hastily made a few calls to rights activists protesting the events at MSU; I also got in touch with a contact in Mumbai who had friends in Gujarat. I told him to put me in touch with people in the BJP’s Vadodara unit without telling them I was a journalist. “Tell them I’m Piyush Aggarwal, a research scholar from Delhi University, writing a thesis on Hindutva in Gujarat.” He said he’d give me a few references in the morning. The next day, I called him at 10am. He did not respond. I called several times, to no avail. 

I then decided to line up meetings with a few activists. Later in the day, one of them put me in touch with Prof Iftikhar, who was among the few at MSU to come out openly against the saffron hooligans. Iftikhar spoke of how the BJP had crowded the MSU senate and syndicate — its two governing bodies — with men affiliated to either the RSS or the VHP. One’s appointment, promotion, even authority in the university all hinged on which side of the ideological divide — Right against Centrist and Left — one was.

My Mumbai contact finally answered my call. He gave an excuse for not having been available earlier. I was more interested in getting the names and numbers of local BJP men. He obliged with a few. “I hope you’ve told them I’m a research scholar, not a journalist,” I said. My contact assured me this was exactly what he’d done. I called up Mr A. He was a bit probing, asking questions about the nature and purpose of my research. He didn’t sound like I’d convinced him, but he put me in touch with Mr B., who in turn put me in touch with one Dhimant Bhatt who, I was told, was personal assistant to the Vadodara BJP MP and would introduce me to the right people. 

>From the news, I already had the name of Neeraj Jain, the BJP office bearer who led the ruckus at MSU. I called up Bhatt and told him I wanted to meet Neerajbhai Jain (bhai is an essential suffix to most names in Gujarat). At the appointed time, I walked into the high-ceilinged reception room of the Vadodara BJP party office. Half an hour later, Jain walked in, a short man in his late 30s with a newly-acquired paunch. He was fixated with Muslims, whom he evidently considered the root of all evil. But his hatred for Muslims did not seem to flow naturally — it seemed more a matter of political expediency, of routine. From ordinary Bajrang Dal worker to Vadodara BJP general secretary, Jain had travelled a long enough path to know that Hate Muslims was his ticket to political success. Vandalising paintings in the name of Hinduism had only enhanced his reputation.

JAIN’S MUSLIM phobia did not make a story for me. A day passed before I decided to meet Dhimant Bhatt who, besides being a BJP man, was the MSU chief accountant. At 11:30am on May 19, I walked into Bhatt’s second floor office in an administrative block on the MSU campus. Struggling between perusing files and answering a near-incessant string of phone calls, he was most hospitable, offering me water, then tea, then showing me the way to the toilet (where I switched on the two spy cams I was wearing). Fifteen minutes into the conversation, after Bhatt was convinced I was as staunch a Hindu as he was (love for Hinduism being displayed on both sides by heaping abuse on Muslims), he uttered a few lines which would not only redefine my story but also, I believe, the way the nation sees the Gujarat riots. “I was involved in burning down the houses of Professor Bandukwala and the bureaucrat, Peerzada
 Disguised as a peacekeeper, I supplied weapons during the riots
 We should put
 the Sangh’s lathis aside and take up AK-56s instead.” 

My head began to reel. Bhatt might be an accountant by day, but his true vocation lay in tormenting religious minorities. Destroying paintings was, for him, a small skirmish. The real battle had been fought and won five years ago, in 2002. And five years ago was where the real story lay, I told Harinder Baweja, known also as Shammy, my immediate boss. Both Tarun and Shammy agreed, and told me to go after the story. Resources and time were no constraint, said Tarun. “Let your story be the last word on the Gujarat riots,” Shammy said. And thus began a sixmonth journey. A journey that would take me back in time, looking to rewrite the history of the year 2002. A journey in which my only companions would be fear and hope — hope of finding the truth and fear of being consumed by it; hope of hunting down the murderers and fear of being hunted myself. Hope, which is so rare for so many in Gujarat. Fear, a permanent shadow, almost an extension of your being, always lurking at your
 shoulder.

I set out to meet as many VHP, BJP and RSS men as I could. I asked Bhatt for a few introductions to members of the ‘Parivar’ — all the Hindu organisations are known collectively as ‘Parivar’ or one single family — in Ahmedabad. He readily agreed. And the journey continued, In Ahmedabad, one man would put me in touch with another, another with a third. A pyramid of contacts rose and kept rising. A few days later, I asked a BJP man if he could send me to Godhra — a small town that had leapt out of obscurity to become one of the most important words in the Indian political lexicon, a tragic conundrum yet to be solved. 

Next day, I was in Godhra, sitting before Kakul Pathak, a BJP man and an eyewitness to the Sabarmati Express fire. He referred me to Haresh Bhatt, former Bajrang Dal president, now a BJP MLA from Godhra. Bhatt was an extempore speaker, a man who preferred being heard to having a discussion. For a journalist, such men, particularly if they have things to reveal, are a blessing. After 45 minutes of tiring discourse on Hindutva, I edged a question in. “We” (meaning the Hindus; Bhatt was convinced I was an adherent of the militant religiosity he had preached all his life) “never keep arms. How then could we manage to kill so many Muslims in 2002?” “If I tell, do you promise it won’t be in your book?” (I had said I was writing a book to propagate the VHP’s brand of Hindutva.) “I made bombs, rocket launchers, swords, and distributed them across Gujarat. Firearms and swords were smuggled in from other states as well. It’s the first time I’m telling anyone this outside the party
 circle,” he said. For a moment, I was numbed with fear.

That was June 1, 2007. Over the next few months, I would meet many who had been charged with rioting and killing and many who had worked behind the scenes. Along the way, I negotiated dead ends, spells of despair, moments of sheer terror. I was travelling once with Bhatt in his car from Ahmedabad to Godhra. Mid-way, he received a phone call. After disconnecting it, he turned to me and said he had just been informed that a journalist from Delhi was carrying out a sting operation on the Sabarmati Express incident and that he had been told to be careful. Oh, really, I said, with a straight face.

A FEW MINUTES later, Bhatt’s driver steered the car off the main road and turned into a narrow, deserted, kutcha road. As the car stopped outside a desolate, one-storey house, another car pulled up and two men got out. Bhatt and these men went into the house and told me to wait. I had two spy-cams on me and all it needed to blow my cover was a body frisk. I prepared myself for the worst. Twenty minutes later, Bhatt returned and we set out for Godhra again. The two men went off in a different direction. Bhatt told me he’d had been doing business with them. 

On another occasion, Bharat Bhatt, a Sabarkantha public prosecutor, became suspicious about my identity. Having told me how he’d threatened and bought off Muslim witnesses, Bhatt called me as soon as I’d taken his leave and said he had serious doubts I was an RSS man. Within a few minutes, another VHP man I’d stung a few days earlier called and asked for my location. However, I survived these close shaves and kept sailing. Whenever the tension became too much, I’d make a quick trip to Mumbai, to my wife and daughter, my home, my cocoon. 

For six months, I remained a voyager between two worlds — my world, where I was Ashish Khetan, a journalist with a Catholic wife, a daughter with a French name and no fixed religion, and a host of Muslim and Christian friends. And then there was the other world, where I was Piyush Aggarwal, a member of the “Parivar”, a Hindu zealot, a religious fanatic, with only murderers and rapists for friends.
  Nov 03, 2007








  Peace is doable.


 __________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20071026/e781b889/attachment.html