Why justice for Gujarat 2002 riots seems elusive today

Bilkis, who was five months pregnant when she was gang raped by neighbours on March 3, 2002, after witnessing the murder of 15 members of her family including her three-year-old daughter, had tried to lodge a complaint the following day for rape and murder. While recording her complaint, the police only mentioned seven of the deaths, claiming that the bodies of the other people could not be found, and refused to record her complaint for rape. The case was closed in January 2003 for lack of evidence.

Bilkis, with the support of several NGOs, including Janvikas and the National Human Rights Commission, petitioned the Supreme Court (SC), which ordered the government of Gujarat to reopen the case in September 2003. The police then began a campaign of moral harassment, even waking her in the middle of the night to return to the location of the rape and murders to re-enact the events. In December 2003, the SC directed the CBI to reopen the case. It finally arrested 12 people for rape and murder and six police officers for obstruction of justice. Facing threats, Bilkis sought the transfer of the case in July, to which the SC agreed and a public prosecutor was appointed by the Centre in August 2004. Eventually, the case was tried in Mumbai and in 2008, 13 of the 20 accused were convicted, with 11 of them being given life sentences.

The SC did not stop there. The Best Bakery Case, named for a bakery in Vadodara where 14 people were burnt alive on March 1, 2002, had persuaded the apex court that, in this case too, victims would not get justice in Gujarat. On April 12, 2004, invalidating the High Court decision, the Court ordered a retrial outside Gujarat and took the government, police and High Court of Gujarat to task: “When the investigating agency helps the accused, the witnesses are threatened to depose falsely and the prosecutor acts in a manner as if he was defending the accused, while the Court was acting merely as an onlooker, there is no fair trial at all and justice becomes the victim…”

A retrial was held in Mumbai starting in October 2004. In February 2006, based on incriminating evidence gathered by the CBI (which was finally charged with the investigation), nine of the 17 accused were given life sentences.

At the same time, the SC considered that 1,594 cases should be reopened. Over 600 accused were thus arrested. This action, however, did not take the judicial process very far due to the obstructionist practices of the Gujarat government. Therefore, in March 2008, the Supreme Court appointed a Special Investigation Team whose terms of reference, outlined by the court in May 2009, restored the victims’ hopes, even though this new body was called on to concentrate on only a half-dozen cases, which amounted to admitting that full justice was impossible: Naroda Patiya, Naroda Gam, Gulbarg Society, Sardarpura, Dipda Darwaja, Sabarkantha, Ode and Godhra.

However, the SIT refused to make use of recordings of the telephone conversations that took place during the riots between police officers, senior civil servants and Sangh Parivar leaders. Secondly, it left the vast majority of the accused out on bail and made no systematic effort to protect the witnesses who, subjected to alleged intimidation, turned hostile in large numbers.

The SC called the SIT to order and attempted to put the investigation back on track. A few trials could finally take place. The first one concerned the burning of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra: 31 accused were found guilty and 11 of them — a record — were sentenced to death, while 20 others to life imprisonment. The second trial concerned the Sardarpura case, in which a special court sentenced 31 persons to life imprisonment, and acquitted 42 others in 2011. In the two Ode cases, in 2012, 27 of the accused were found guilty of murder and criminal conspiracy and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the Naroda Patiya case, in 2012, a special trial court acquitted 29 people and convicted 32 others of murder, criminal conspiracy and rape. And 22 were sentenced to a minimum of 14 years of imprisonment, seven to a minimum of 21 years; Maya Kodnani – a former member of the first Modi government in Gujarat — to 28 years (including 18 years under the charge of murder) and Babu Bajrangi — a VHP leader — to life imprisonment.

In the Gulbarg Society case, after receiving the SIT report in May 2010, the SC submitted it to an amicus curiae, Raju Ramachandran, who submitted a 10-page report, which led the Court to direct the SIT to investigate further. In 2011, in its judgment regarding the petition by Zakia Jafri, the Court, while it decided to cease monitoring the case, directed the trial court to decide whether the 63 persons mentioned in the petition — including Narendra Modi — had to be probed. This judgment was celebrated by the BJP as a clean chit, whereas, for some other people it meant that “trial court is now to ‘begin’”. Indeed, when a closure report was submitted to it, the SC did not close the case and in September 2013 Zakia Jafri made a final submission.

Things changed a few months later, not only because the Government of India changed, but because the Supreme Court’s approach appeared to have changed too. Many people who had been sentenced to heavy penalties — including Kodnani and Bajrangi — were liberated, like the 11 convicts of the Bilkis Bano case. The Supreme Court, which is not seen to oppose the government anymore, kept all these balls in its court.

(The writer is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s India Institute, London, and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)