09Jul02dch1


DECCAN HERALD		Tuesday, July 9, 2002

Role of police in Gujarat carnage By ASGHAR ALI ENGINEER

The role of the police in communal riots in general and in the Gujarat riots in particular has been far from desirable. I have been investigating communal riots in India since the Jabalpur riots of 1962. The Jabalpur riots were of such a magnitude that they shocked the then Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The role of police in the Jabalpur riots was quite shocking.

Apart from helping the rioters, the SRP men were accused of snatching gold bangles and mangalsutras from the necks of women. They broke into the houses of riot victims and beat up women. They took whatever they could lay their hands upon. As it was my first investigation of communal violence, I could not believe that the police could do all this. It was unbelievable indeed.

After Jabalpur, in riot after riot, I saw the role of the police was strongly biased against the minorities. In the Meerut riots twice I witnessed the role of the police: in 1982 and 1987. In both these riots the role of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) was worse than that of rioters. In the 1982 Meerut riots the PAC killed at pointblank the only son of a Dr Shabbir and made the doctor load his dead body on the truck. Going ahead, the PAC also destroyed Dr Shabbir’s dispensary completely.

The same force killed several others who were hiding in their houses. Some women told me they had hidden their husbands in large trunks and they were pulled out of them and shot. Justice Krishna Iyer also visited Meerut after this incident and was so shocked at the behaviour of PAC that he wrote an open letter to Mrs Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, urging upon her to hold an inquiry into the role of the PAC.

Anti-minority bias
Then again the PAC repeated its role in Meerut riots of 1987. PAC Commandant Tripathi was accused of having pulled out 23 young boys from their houses in Hashimpura, loaded them on a truck, took them near a canal outside the city, shot them dead and dumped their bodies in the canal. Two boys miraculously survived to tell the tale. Again nothing happened. It was a few years after the incident that an FIR was recorded during the chief ministership of Mulayam Singh Yadav. But nothing again moved beyond the recording of the FIR.

The role of the police during the Mumbai riots of 1992-93 came under severe criticism by various non-government organisations (NGOs) and above all by the Srikirshna Commission, which named 32 officers as guilty of anti-minority bias. And also Mr Tewari, a high police official, was accused of being instrumental in killing some young Muslim boys in Suleman Bakery, near Minara Masjid.

The authorities took no action and Tewari was symbolically arrested and released immediately after a great deal of criticism by human rights activists. All this is bad enough and sufficient to shake the confidence of minorities in the police.

The same story was repeated in the Gujarat carnage after the Godhra incident of 27th February 2002. Again the police in Gujarat aided and abetted the rioters. This time, the role of IAS officers also came under severe criticism. Harsh Mandar, an IAS officer of Madhya Pradesh cadre working in Gujarat with Actionaid India at a time, was so enraged by the role of IAS officers of Gujarat and their total surrender to the political authorities that he did not think it fit to continue in such service and resigned in sheer disgust.

Creating terrorists
Harsh Mandar wrote in his article, “Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days after the terror and massacre that convulsed the State. My heart is sickened, my soul wearied, my shoulders aching with the burden of shame and guilt”. He further writes: “The unconscionable failures and active connivance of the State police and administrative machinery is also now widely acknowledged. The police are known to have misguided people straight into the hands of rioting mobs. They provided protective shields to crowds bent upon pillage, arson, rape and murder and were deaf to the pleas of these disparate Muslim victims, many of them women and children.

There have been many reports of police firing directly mostly at the minority community, which was target of most of the mob violence." It is not Harsh Mandar alone who writes about such a role of the police in the Gujarat carnage. Several others including some top police officials themselves have also condemned the police for what they did in Gujarat. Mr Julio Reibero, former Director General of Police, Maharashtra, even called them “eunuchs” for having attacked helpless people including old men, women and children.

Even after the riots the police were not recording correct FIRs either under pressure from political authorities or because of their own communal leanings. Mr Ribeiro said in an interview: “Apart from the usual complaints of inaction, people said that police were recording absolutely incorrect FIRs. I met a respectable Hindu gentleman who said that the police did not take down the names of the rioters he had seen and wrote that it was a group of unidentified people. If people who have seen their mothers and sisters raped and burnt before their eyes have no hope of getting justice they will all turn into terrorists”.
And then Ribeiro asks: “Why are we talking about the ISI and Pakistan when we are doing their job for them by creating terrorists?”

(To be concluded)