It’s an irony of the times we live in that a section of the media still uses terms such as “social activists” and “defender of human rights” to describe those who have been charged with having an “ulterior design” to keep the pot boiling in the 2002 Gujarat riots cases for the past 16 years. And by no less than the apex court of the country.
A Supreme Court bench comprising Justices A.M. Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari and C. T. Ravi Kumar, delivering a judgment on June 24, observed: “At the end of the day, it appears to us that a coalesced effort of the disgruntled officials of the state along with others was to create sensation by making revelations which were false to their own knowledge. The falsity of their claims had been fully exposed by the SIT…Intriguingly, the present proceedings have been pursued for (the) last 16 years…including with the audacity to question the integrity of every functionary involved in the process of exposing the devious stratagem adopted (to borrow the submission of learned counsel for the SIT), to keep the pot boiling, obviously, for ulterior design…All those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with law.”
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Subsequently, the Ahmedabad crime branch registered an FIR against Teesta Setalvad—masquerading as a “human right activist”—accusing her specifically of “conjuring, concocting, forging and fabricating facts and documents, including witnesses testimonies, and influencing and tutoring witnesses”.
The FIR lodged by inspector D.B. Barad of the Ahmedabad city crime branch against Setalvad and the two ex-IPS officers alleges that they fraudulently passed off forged documents as genuine “with intent to procure conviction of capital punishment”.
Dismissed IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt has been accused of making false claims in 2011 that he was present at a meeting at Narendra Modi’s then residence on February 27, 2002. He alleged that the erstwhile CM asked bureaucrats to go slow on rioters.
The FIR also charges Bhatt with furnishing forged documents “in order to implicate various persons”. The complaint states that the SIT probe revealed he colluded with people who had vested interests, and NGOs and political functionaries who wanted to settle scores by “framing innocent individuals”. Bhatt allegedly received incentives for this, the FIR states, while making a case for a detailed investigation. Sreekumar is accused of making false claims in his affidavits before the Godhra inquiry commission.
What the SIT discovered, and was recently endorsed by the Supreme Court, is the tip of an iceberg of a deep-rooted conspiracy by the Left-liberals pack to destabilise institutions, push India into a vortex of a civil war and finally balkanise the country. To achieve its objective, the pack—financed by foreign powers—wears various masks. Its commissars masquerade as journalists, NGOs claiming to work for the poor, human right activists, social workers and so on. There is a global ecosystem which, besides extending material help, also guides and provides them with a ‘toolkit’.
The ‘toolkit’ used by this ‘hate India’ pack frequently resorts to half-truths and total lies to push its divisive agenda. Way back in 2002, when the Gujarat riots broke following the burning of 59 kar sevaks coming back from Ayodhya, Arundhati Roy wrote a long article, giving a vivid description of the horror of riots. Here are the excerpts (Outlook dated May 6, 2002).
“Gujarat, the only major state in India to have a BJP government has, for some years, been the petri dish in which Hindu fascism has been fomenting an elaborate political experiment. Last month, the initial results were put on public display. Within hours of the Godhra outrage, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal put into motion a meticulously planned pogrom against the Muslim community. Officially, the number of dead is 800. Independent reports put the figure at well over 2,000. More than a hundred and fifty thousand people, driven from their homes, now live in refugee camps. Women were stripped, gang-raped, parents were bludgeoned to death in front of their children. Two hundred and forty dargahs and 180 masjids were destroyed - in Ahmedabad the top of Wali Gujrati, the founder of the modern Urdu poem, was demolished and paved over in the course of a night. The tomb of the musician Ustad Faiyaz Ali Khan was desecrated and wreathed in burning tyres. Arsonists burned and looted shops, homes, hotels, textiles mills, buses and private cards. Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs. A mob surrounded the house of ex-Congress MP Iqbal Ehsan Jaffri. His phone calls to the director-general of police, the police commissioner, the chief secretary, the additional chief secretary (home) were ignored. The mobile police around his house did not intervene. The mob broke into the house. They stripped his daughters and burnt them alive. Then they beheaded Jaffri and dismembered him.”
Subsequently, I penned a rejoinder, published in Outlook (May 27, 2002). Here are excerpts:
“That was the Goddess of small things, Arundhati Roy, painting the big picture of Gujarat in Democracy: Who’s she when she’s at home? Roy sums here nearly almost all the charges against the Sangh Parivar. When a reputed weekly like Outlook publishes a Booker Prize-winner, it is meant to be serious commentary. And concomitantly, Roy has put her brilliant linguistic skills to the service of “truth”. Read her graphic details: “The mob broke into the house. They stripped his daughters and burnt them alive”. Roy speaks with the confidence of an eyewitness. Alternatively, she must have access to an eyewitness. Anyway, it reads heartrendingly honest.
Heartrending, yes, but honest, no. Jafri was killed in the riots but his daughters were neither “stripped” nor “burnt alive”. T. A. Jafri, his son, in a front-page interview titled ‘Nobody knew my father's house was the target’ (Asian Age, May 2, Delhi edition), says, “Among my brothers and sisters, I am the only one living in India. And I am the eldest in the family. My sister and brother live in the US. I am 40 years old and I have been born and brought up in Ahmedabad”.
So, Roy is lying, for surely Jafri is not. But what about the hundreds of media lies that haven’t been exhumed as yet? Her seven-page-long (approximately 6,000 words) hate charter against India and the Sangh Parivar is woven around just two specific cases of human tragedy, one of which—by now, we know for sure—is a piece of fiction.
The rest is hyperbole, punctuated with venom and vitriol to demonise the Parivar. Precisely, this type of demonisation had resulted in the macabre incident at Godhra. The vicious propaganda unleashed by the secularists for over a decade had made ordinary and gullible Muslims see the innocent Ram sevaks as demons who deserved to be burnt alive.
The recent Supreme Court judgment, hopefully, brings an end to this ‘hate India’ industry fuelled by foreign money and sustained by lies.
(Balbir Punj is a former Member of Parliament and a columnist. He can be reached at punjbalbir@gmail.com)
