PUBLIC MEETING and Leaflet on Double Standards for Riots and Blast Verdicts

Public meeting

Riots in Bombay, Maliana, Hashimpura, Gujarat...Why No Justice for the Victims? Why is Srikrishna Commission Report Buried?

Gautam Navalakha consultant editor,EPW

On ’93 Mumbai Riots and Srikrishna Commission Report

Uma Chakravarti noted historian,

On ’89 Bhagalpur Riots

Vrinda Grover Supreme Cout Lawyer,

On Hashimpura ( Meerut) Riot Victims’ Continuing Struggle For Justice

Javed Naqvi Noted Journalist

On The Double Standards Of Our Justice System

Tapti Mess 14 Aug (Tonight) 9.30pm

Justice Turning a Blind Eye?

The convictions of around 100 people in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case has been accompanied by much euphoria by the Indian establishment. But the loud self-congratulations have only served to make the silence on the 1993 Mumbai riots all the more deafening. Those who unleashed the communal carnage that paved the way for the blasts continue to flaunt their freedom.

Few can deny that the 1993 blasts are irrevocably linked to the Mumbai riots of 1992 December and 1993 January. Many of the people recruited by terror groups to undertake the bomb blasts were those whose families had suffered heavy losses and were scarred by the experience of the 1992-93 communal riots. Yet, 15 years later, they stand convicted by the courts while those who conducted the genocide that turned them into terrorists go scot-free.

The riots in Mumbai claimed 900 lives — 275 Hindus, 575 Muslims (incidentally, three times the number of blast victims). Apart from these, 356 others — mostly Muslims — were killed in cold-blood by a communalised police force with the active support of several Shiv Sena and BJP leaders.

The trials in the blast case were conducted by the prestigious TADA Court while the riot investigation was consigned to a Commission with no powers of prosecution. The Srikrishna Commission indicted 31 policemen for involvement in the riots – most were not even prosecuted; and were even promoted to plum posts. Joint Police Commissioner R.D. Tyagi, according to the Srikrishna Report, shot dead nine young Muslim boys in the Suleiman Usman Bakery operation “point-blank and in cold blood”. Yet, Tyagi and his accomplices have been acquitted by a sessions court. The Srikrishna Report also indicted Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray and BJP leaders Gopinath Munde, Madhukar Sarpotdar and Ram Naik for inciting riots and possessing illegal weapons. Cases against all these were dropped by the Shiv Sena-BJP Maharashtra Government in 1995 – and subsequent Congress Governments have done nothing to revive the cases.

In January 1996, the Sena-BJP Government had disbanded the Srikrishna Commission but was forced to revive it in May 1996 in the face of public outrage. The Congress, when it came to power in Maharashtra declared that it “disagreed with the conclusions of the Srikrishna Commission,” and refused to take any action based on the Srikrishna Report for “fear” that it might “re-open old wounds”.

Following the blast verdict, Maharashtra’s Congress Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh has responded to accusations of bias by promising yet another Committee – this time to “identify the alleged lapses” in the implementation of the Srikrishna Commission’s report. The Congress, by shielding the communal perpetrators of riots – both during and after the riots – has been rewarded by Sena support to Pratibha Patil on the post of President.

And Mumbai is no exception: planned communal pogroms sponsored or condoned by the state and political outfits inevitably evade justice. In the rare riot cases where judgements are delivered, they are highly unsatisfactory. In the Bhagalpur riots of 1989, 166 people were brutally massacred by a VHP mob, and buried in a mass grave which was covered with a vegetable field. This massacre was directly instigated by BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani’s communal calls during the ‘Ramshila Procession’ in the Mandir campaign. In the recent judgement in the Bhagalpur riots case, the Court refused to give any of the offenders a death sentence – saying that it was not a “rarest of the rare” case. In the 1993 blasts case, though, 12 men have got a death sentence – possibly the highest number of death sentences in a single case. What double standards!

The Indian media and establishment was smug in its outrage at the Australian Government’s arrest and detention of the Indian Dr. Haneef on flimsy and exaggerated charges of involvement in an aborted terror attack in Britain. Not long after the Haneef episode, Abdul Nasser Madani of the Kerala-based party PDP was acquitted of all charges of involvement in the 1998 Coimbatore blasts. But not before the ailing Madani had spent eight long years in prison – despite the fact that there was absolutely no evidence to suggest any role in the blasts. That an innocent man was forced to spend eight years in prison is a stark reminder on the Haneefs galore on India’s own soil – and a contrast, again, with Sanjay Dutt who received bail in the Mumbai blast case despite evidence of his illegal possession of arms.

The differential treatment of the blasts and riots of Mumbai 1993, and of terror-accused and riot-accused in general smacks of a dual justice system – that is a blot on Indian democracy.

Against Attack on Taslima Nasreen and ABVP's Fake Concern

Poster Against Fatwa on Taslima

Condemn the ‘Fatwa’ and Death Threats Against Taslima Nasreen!

By issuing death threats against the feminist writer Taslima Nasreen, a certain tiny fundamentalist fringe in the minority community is playing into the hands of the Hindutva fundamentalists.

Taslima Nasreen is a writer who has resisted every brand of communalism and patriarchy. She is critical of the hypocrisy and double standards of all religions towards women. Devout Muslims may have differences over her views on Islam – but despite these differences, Taslima is in fact an ally in the struggle against RSS’ communalism and genocide in India. Instead of mobilizing people to strengthen the resistance to communal assaults, fake encounters and state terror faced by minorities, the fundamentalist leaders with their ‘fatwas’ are trying to whip up hatred, violence and frenzy against this lone woman who wields no weapon but her pen and her strong sensibility for gender justice. Shame on them! By doing so, they are doing great injury, not only to the cause of women’s freedom and freedom of expression, but also to the anti-communal movement in the country.

11 August Leaflet

If Taslima Had Been Born In Gujarat, ABVP, RSS And Co. Would Have Raped And Killed Her…As They Have Done With Hundreds Of Other Muslim Women in the 2002 Genocide !!!

ABVP piously defending ‘freedom of expression’ and condemning the attack on Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasreen by MIM MLAs in Hyderabad. Pot calling the kettle black, indeed!

ABVP and the Sangh Parivar to which it belongs, uses force and violence to ‘ban’ women from wearing jeans, celebrating Valentine’s Day, and marrying outside the caste or community. They themselves recently assaulted a young student of Baroda University for his paintings which, according to them, ‘insulted Hindu sentiments’. Be it the freedom of women or the freedom of artistic and creative expression: who can be a worse enemy to these sentiments than ABVP and its Hindutva fundamentalist brothers?

Taslima Nasreen is a novelist who has been the victim of a witch-hunt – both in her native Bangladesh as well as in India – for her bold writing against every hue of fundamentalism. She is familiar with the many ways in which religion is used to silence women – and she is outspoken in her scathing critique of fundamentalist attacks on women’s freedom by any and every religion. It is indeed a shame that India’s UPA Government has been vacillating on giving Taslima citizenship, and that even the CPI(M) Government of West Bengal which swears by the rights of women and freedom of expression, banned her novel Dwikhandita. Taslima’s fiction and autobiography does not slander Islam as a religion – it critiques the hypocrisy of patriarchal society. Dwikhandita too exposed the patriarchal attitudes of many prominent Bengali male writers – and it is these writers who prevailed on the WB Government to ban the novel. The physical attack on her by AP MLAs from MIM in a public function deserves the highest condemnation.

Women who have written boldly of their sexuality and have dared to expose patriarchal hypocrisy have always borne the brunt of bans no matter in what society they live. Just as women who marry outside the community are accused of violating the ‘honour’ of the community, women who write about the patriarchal double standards of their own society or community towards women are attacked as being enemies of the community. Akka Mahadevi, the 12th century woman poet-saint who wandered nude and declared “People/male and female,/blush when a cloth covering their shame/comes loose…/

To the shameless girl/wearing the White Jasmine Lord’s/light of morning,/you fool,/where’s the need for cover and jewel?”; Kate Chopin, the American novelist who died young after facing social ostracism for her novel The Awakening; the courtesan Muddupalani’s poem Radhika Santwanam which was banned by British colonial rulers and Indian nationalists alike for its explicit expression of woman’s desire…the list is endless. British writer Virginia Woolf spoke of how every woman writer has to grapple with and kill the ‘Angel in the House’ within herself, which is a self-censoring voice that tries to stop her from telling the truth about society and about men in particular. Taslima Nasreen is a proud member of this community of women writers who have dared to refuse self-censorship.

But Taslima can well do without defenders like the ABVP! Will ABVP tell us what they have to say about VHP women’s wing leader Krishna Sharma who defended wife-beating in the following words: “Don’t parents admonish their children for misbehaviour? ...a wife must act keeping in mind her husband’s moods and must avoid irritating him...if she learns to stifle her screams, the matter will remain within the four walls of the house. Otherwise every house will become a ‘Mahabharat’.” (Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia ed. Women and the Hindu Right, 1995, p. 332-3)

Will they tell what they have to say about VHP leader Babu Bajrangi who has abducted 900 Hindu women who married Muslims or Dalits, and forced them to remarry within their community?

What about the Gujarat genocide of 2002 in which hundreds like Bilkis Bano were raped, their unborn children dragged from the womb and killed?

If Taslima Nasreen had been born in Gujarat rather than in Bangladesh, isn’t there a good chance she too would have been raped and massacred by the RSS? If ABVP has the guts, they should call Taslima Nasreen to a public meeting and ask for her views on BJP-RSS and the Gujarat genocide!