Elections, after all, are the great leveller. Nine months after the Best Bakery carnage that claimed 14 lives, both the Congress and the BJP are bending over backwards to promise help to families of the accused. And none has time to re-assure survivors that justice will be done. The reason is simple: the advantage of numbers lies with the accused.With their family members threatening that unless their boys are released from jails by December 12 (election day), they won’t vote, both the major political parties are offering legal help and advocates. Ironically, the survivors of the carnage have laid down no condition — like seeking justice by December 12 — apart from asking that the polling booth be shifted from Hanuman Tekri, where the bakery was located, but still nobody has approached them.The BJP candidate from Wadi, Bhupendra Lakhawala, says the accused stay in his jurisdiction and so he has every right to help them. While Congress candidate Chandrakant Shrivastava justifies, ‘‘Mere pass jo aata hai woh khali haath to nahin jaata hai (I can’t let anyone who approaches me go empty-handed.’’Congress city president Bhikhabhai Rabari is hard-pressed to justify Shrivastava’s stand. He claims his party is on the side of the victims, but when told that Srivastava has also been helping the accused, parries the query by saying the latter helped anyone who came to him.The politicians’ stand has only increased the bitterness of survivors like Zahira Sheikh and Sehrunnisa Sheikh. Zahira was a key witness to the carnage, which claimed one of her elder sisters and left one of her brothers seriously injured. She has just reached voting age and, along with elder sister Sahera and their mother, she has been hoping that their votes count enough for the government to hear their appeals to shift the polling booth from Hanuman Tekri. To no effect.Along with Sehrunnisa and her son Nafikullah, they live in a rented house in Yakutpura and are planning to shift to Ektanagar on Ajwa Road. They are unaware about provisional arrangements made for riot affected like them by district officials.But family members of the accused say they have more to complain about. They say they have been running from pillar to post — from municipal councillors to police officers to social workers and election candidates — since the arrests, and that only one of the 21 accused has been released on bail. Incidentally, the VHP has been sending monthly rations to these families, and has also assured them that they would try to get them released as soon as possible.‘‘Now we are tired,’’ says Savita Gosain, whose two sons Haresh and Pankaj are behind bars. ‘‘No one from Hanuman tekri is going to vote if our boys are not released before December 12. They were the only earning members in our family of eight. What do we eat now?’’Tejalben whose husband Pratap Ravji is also behind bars adds: ‘‘We have met Lakhawala and Shrivastava. But they have given only promises. They say they would get them released, but it has not happened yet. We would vote only for the person who is going to get them out of jail before elections.’’
