People's Democracy

           Remove Modi Forthwith

THE  Supreme Court has delivered a historic judgement on the Best Bakery Case. The Court has ordered a fresh investigation and retrial of the case. The case concerns the burning alive of fourteen persons inside a bakery in Vadodara during the anti-minority pogrom in 2002. A lower court had acquitted all the 21 accused and the high court had upheld the acquittal.

The Best Bakery case had become symptomatic of what happened in Gujarat during the State-sponsored violence against the Muslim community and how the course of justice was perverted with State connivance to protect all those responsible for the heinous crimes.

The judgement delivered by Justice Arijit Pasayat and Doraiswamy Raju is a severe indictment of the way the legal process was conducted by the lower courts in Gujarat and the role of the state government. The judgement condemned the Narendra Modi government in the following words: "The modern-day Neros were looking elsewhere when Best Bakery and innocent children and helpless women were burning, and were probably deliberating how the perpetrators of the crime can be saved or protected."

Referring to the way the trail was conducted the judgement concluded that: "the justice delivery system was allowed to be taken for a ride, abused, misused and mutilated by subterfuge. The investigation appears to be perfunctory and anything but impartial, without any definite object of finding out the truth and bringing to book those who were responsible for the crime."

The Court has denounced the role of the public prosecutor appointed by the state government, citing that he has acted more as a defence counsel and one whose duty is to present the truth before the court.

The judgement also sets right an aberration in the Gujarat high court’s disposal of the case. The high court had made unwarranted criticism of Teesta Setalvad who had assisted Zaheera Sheikh, the key witness, to appeal against the lower court’s judgement. The high court had observed that "there is a definite conspiracy to malign people by misusing her". The Supreme Court has expunged these observations.

The judgement is unique in many ways. It has ordered a retrial and stated that it should be conducted in Maharashtra; the public prosecutor has to be changed and the bench has said that the "affected persons" should be consulted about the new public prosecutor.

The Supreme Court had already entrusted the CBI with the investigation in the Biklis case involving mass murder and rape. It will be necessary to transfer all the major cases cited by the National Human Rights Commission for trial, outside Gujarat, if justice is to be rendered.

The judgement has struck a blow against the BJP-led state government and its chief minister Narendra Modi who have arrogantly interpreted their victory in the assembly elections as a mandate to pervert the course of justice. The Supreme Court judgement is significant as it has intervened at a time when even sections of the judiciary in Gujarat is getting affected by the prevailing Hindutva mores. The session’s judge who initially acquitted the twenty-one accused had provided a bizarre account about why communal violence occurs in India.

After such an indictment by the highest court of the land, it would be obligatory on the part of the BJP leadership to remove Narendra Modi from the chief ministership. Instead of doing so, the BJP leadership has sought to dismiss the judgement as a legal inter-vention affecting a single case which in no way reflects upon the chief minister. That the BJP leadership is not prepared to remove Modi exposes the hypocrisy of all its recent gestures towards the minorities. The BJP’s election manifesto has made an effort to portray the party as a well-wisher of the minorities and pledges to work for their social and economic advancement. Prime Minister Vajpayee has been asking the Muslims not to be misled about the BJP and held out assurances that they will not be discriminated under the BJP government.

All those claims and assurances will be put to the test of how the BJP leaders like Vajpayee and Advani respond to the Gujarat situation. It is not enough for them to express regret about what happened when questioned by the media. Advani after saying that the violence was a blot proceeded to share the platform with Modi during his rath yatra silently endorsing Modi’s vituperative rhetoric.

The central government is duty bound under the Constitution to intervene in a state where the provisions of the Constitution are violated or challenged. It is crystal clear that, in Gujarat under Narendra Modi, the rule of law and the Constitution does not work. Neither the administration, the police or the legal process work as per the provisions of the Constitution. The Supreme Court in a number of observations leading upto the final judgement in the Best Bakery case has confirmed the alarming state of affairs.

Nothing more is required as evidence that the Hindutva philosophy when put into practice is antithetical to democracy and secularism which are the cornerstones of the Constitution. The BJP which seeks to camouflage this hard truth will come up, time and again, with the reality which Gujarat has exposed.