Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

One last hope for justice

Luckily, the high court has been largely spared all this. Yes, the elevator shaft is an eyesore, but at least it is not visible from the outside. And if you use the broad, sweeping staircase with its dozens of too-high steps to reach your courtroom, you can't help feeling some of the breathtaking awe a court of law is meant to instil in you.

It's a good thing the building remains imposing and awe-inspiring, because it houses one of the last institutions that is capable of and sometimes willing to check criminal activity in the city. So spare a thought, as you read this, wherever you are, for one man and the work he is doing in that edifice since June 24.

Nothing earthshaking about either, nothing spectacular, nothing new. It's just Justice BN Srikrishna, resuming, after five months, his inquiry into the riots in Bombay in 1992-3.

He must resume the inquiry because the Maharashtra government terminated it last January. Oh, Chief Minister Manohar Joshi of the ruling Shiv Sena party certainly had his excellent reasons for doing so. He reeled them off for the press: the inquiry had taken too long; it would serve no purpose; there is no need to open old wounds and rekindle tensions; Bombay has returned to normalcy.

Of course, this normalcy includes looters, rapists and murderers of over 1000 people during the riots, all of whom remain free and unpunished. Joshi had not stopped to wonder what kind of normalcy this is and why the city should be subjected to it. Or had he? I'll return to that.

Several organisations filed petitions in the same high court, asking for the inquiry to be reinstated. In May, it was clear that the high court was going to do just that. In addition, then prime minister for 12 days, Atal Behari Vajpayee, suddenly anxious to brush up his Bharatiya Janata Party's secular credentials ahead of a vote of confidence in Parliament, wrote to Joshi, asking him to reinstate the inquiry as well.

Whatever the motivation was, Joshi and his cabinet colleagues conferred one sunny Tuesday morning and decided to send Justice Srikrishna back to work. Finish the inquiry by January 1997, they told him.

But the high court had the final word on that. While dismissing the petitions - now inapplicable because the inquiry has been reinstated - the court passed an order severely critisising the government for the January termination; it also said that Justice Srikrishna could ask for as many extensions as he liked beyond January 1997 and they would have to be granted.

Why should you care about all this? For two reasons. The first is that this inquiry is the only faint hope left that the law will be applied to those who so brazenly spat upon it - those thieves, rapists and murderers and the men who egged them on - during the riots in the city three and a half years ago. The second is that the antics of the government and the Shiv Sena in and about the inquiry speak loud enough already of their guilt in the riots.

By the government's own admission, 872 Indian citizens were slaughtered during the riots. Unofficial estimates are, of course, much higher. But whatever the real toll was, it contrasts quite dramatically with the number of riot-related cases that have resulted in convictions in the intervening years. Also by the government's own admission that number is: four.

"We have not been told who the accused were in these four cases, what their crimes were, what their sentences are. But they must consider themselves singularly unfortunate, because - by the government's own admission once more - hundreds of other cases have been closed or withdrawn. In fact, more than 60 per cent of the 2,267 criminal cases filed in connection with the riots have been closed.

Even among the cases which have actually reached the courts, the convictions in those four must be viewed as unfortunate. For 17 others have resulted in acquittals. We know what the crime was in at least one of those acquittals. On January 13, 1993, a 19-year-old girl was stripped, raped and murdered by nine Shiv Sainiks in Borivali, a northern suburb of Bombay. Her mother, who was also stripped and assaulted by the men, managed to escape. She identified eight of them for the police. All have been acquitted. Their lawyer summed up succinctly what had happened: "My job was to find loopholes in the prosecution's argument, which I have done."

Given such clear reluctance to put criminals where they belong, Justice Srikrishna's inquiry is really the only hope this will ever happen. When he submits his report, we will have to demand that it be made public and that those it names as guilty are punished. Going by history, this will be an extraordinarily difficult task: Governments are adept and experienced at ignoring inquiry commission reports. But in a situation where there is simply no other effort to punish the guilty, this one is all we have left.

There's enough that's happened with the inquiry already that paints a clear picture of guilt. For example, take just this allegation Manohar Joshi made that the inquiry is taking too long. Fair enough, but why is it taking so long?

According to Niloufer Bhagwat, an advocate who has been appearing before the commission since it began work, the Shiv Sena alone has asked for 25 adjournments so far. What else can we make of such attempts to waste time except that the Sena wants to delay the inquiry as much as possible?

Then there's Madhukar Sarpotdar, now a Shiv Sena MP. During the riots, he was seized by the army in a riot-hit area, carrying guns, knives, sticks and a (super gang-lord) Dawood Ibrahim hitman in his jeep. Criminal cases against him are pending in the courts.

He appeared as a witness before Justice Srikrishna in the last few months of 1995. Before he could be examined, Sarpotdar filed an application, claiming immunity from being questioned about those crimes. He reasoned that since there were cases pending about the crimes, questioning him violated his fundamental rights.

He held up the inquiry for several months while his claim was argued: one more reason the inquiry has taken so long. But soon after Justice Srikrishna ruled that no rights were being violated and Sarpotdar could certainly be questioned about his riotous activities. But then Sarpotdar's Shiv Sena bosses shut down the inquiry. What does that tell us about Shiv Sena's guilt?

Besides, consider the specious argument that "so much time has passed" and thus "old wounds should not be opened" By this reasoning, every crime must be forgotten. Yes indeed! So why have over 150 people in the city's serial bombings case been arrested and kept in jail for almost three years as their trial rambles on? Why do two brave young cops chase and catch two murderers on Malabar Hill on June 22, a feat that has them splashed all over the front pages of the newspapers? What is the point of all this effort when the police and the government could have simply let several months go by and then announced that old wounds should not be opened?

The answer, if you need it spelled out, is that it is only one kind of wound Manohar Joshi does not want to open today: the kind the Shiv Sena and its friends inflicted during the riots.

Any inquiry into the riots will reveal the crimes of these people then, and in fact several independent inquiries have already done just that. Manohar Joshi would rather stifle such revelations than see all those looters, rapists and murderers removed from our streets, see that those who spurred them into their crimes get what the law says they should get.

When the highest elected official in one of the country's largest states is so obviously, unashamedly, willing to bypass the law, there's just one last hope left for justice.

That last hope is still grand and awe-inspiring. May it always be so.

Dilip D'Souza, who lives in Bombay, will contribute a fortnightly column to these pages.