The State, Democracy and Anti-Terror Laws in India by Ujjwal Kumar Singh

Author:Ujjwal Kumar Singh [Kumar Singh, Ujjwal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2007-01-10T18:30:00+00:00

Significantly this paragraph in the chargesheet resonated the public statements made by BJP leaders in the state, justifying the post-Godhra violence as a reaction to the Godhra events. It was, moreover, consonant with the way in which cases of communal violence against the Muslim community were being presented by the police, whereby the Godhra incident became the invariable starting point, taking away the impact of the criminal act of violence on the Muslim community. The First Information Report (FIR) in the Naroda Patia case, for example, recounted the incident during a bandh call given by the VHP on 28 February 2002, in which a mob of ‘15 to 17 thousand people led by active workers of the BJP and VHP’ some of whose names were listed in the FIR, set on fire a mosque, Muslim residential areas and shops, and killed ‘a total of 58 women, males and young children by frontal assault’. Significantly, however, the FIR prepared by the Police Inspector at the Naroda Patia police station, began stating the ‘fact of [the] complaint’, by narrating the ‘recent’ incident of the ‘murderous assault on the Karsevaks in Godhra’, laying down in the process not a fact-sheet of the killing of fifty-eight Muslim men, women and children in Naroda Patia, but a causal-sequence of events that led back to the train-burning case.

If the Godhra incident became the ground for blunting the illegality of the violence on Muslim community, it accentuated the criminality of the two other cases in which POTA was invoked. Thus the chargesheet filed by the CBI in the Haren Pandya murder and Jagdish Tewari attempted murder case where fifteen people were arrested under POTA read as follows:

The investigation revealed that on 27.2.2002 some Hindu Karsevaks while travelling in a train were set ablaze near Godhra railway station. Thereafter, riots took place in various parts of Gujarat particularly in Ahmedabad city. In these riots which continued unabated till the last week of May 2002, numerous lives were lost and many mosques were destroyed. The Muslim community felt that they had been very adversely affected in these riots. This in turn inculcated in them a strong feeling of injustice, discontent and yearning for revenge.

In this environment, Mufti Sufiyan Ahmed Patangia (A-13), a Muslim cleric used his powerful oratory skills and the ability to inspire confidence in the minds of Muslims to inflame hatred against Hindu community. He exploited the sentiments of the Muslims by showing to them video CDs and literature published by Jamat Ulema-I-Hind and other radical Muslim organisations. These CDs depicted burnt dead bodies of the victims of Naroda Patia, burnt houses, burnt pages of Quran and plundered mosques…. Further Mufti Sufiyan (A-13) during his religious discourses urged the Muslims to involve themselves in Jihadi activities like planting of bombs and targeting VHP and BJP leaders with a view to strike terror in the minds of a section of people viz., Hindus so that such riots against Muslims may not be repeated in future….70

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