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Journalism of Courage
SEPTEMBER 24: Adolf Eichmann belongs to an another era and culture but the perpetrator of Nazi crimes in Hitler’s regime was remembered on a balmy Sunday morning by thousands of victims of the bloody 1992-93 riots to send a message to the state government: it’s never too late to punish the guilty.
At a jam-packed public hearing organised by the magazine Communalism Combat, prominent citizens, organisations and individuals who have spent the last eight years rehabilitating the victims, along with the victims themselves, demanded the government stop paying “mere lip service” to the issue. There has been no concerted effort to prosecute the guilty; rather there has been a massive endeavour to cover up for these people, they lamented.
Abdul Ansari, whose case is the only one in which proceedings have begun against two police officials, summed it up: “We don’t want help. We only want justice. After almost eight years, is that too juch to ask?”
Speakers like ad guru Alyque Padamsee drew a parallel from a 1961 New York Times editorial that quoted the trial of Eichmann, who was prosecuted for his role in the Holocaust, 16 years after World War-II. He was tracked down to Brazil at the time, tried and found guilty.
There is no reason why those guilty of the Mumbai riots should go scot free because seven years had elapsed and “it was best to forget everything”, various speakers said at today’s public hearing, which was moderated by lyricist and poet Javed Akhtar. “Murder is murder, whether it is committed seven years ago or seven days back; the perpetrators must be punished.”
The messages between police controls and patrolling jeeps in 1992-93 indicated the blatant communal bent of mind of the police, who had ordered the indiscriminate killing of Muslims in the riot-torn areas, the speakers said. They included editor Nikhil Wagle, Aktar and Justice (Retd) Hosbet Suresh; they insisted that the then police commissioner R D Tyagi be the first to be prosecuted. As the official in charge of protecting the people, he had turned a blind eye to the communal carnage and allowed the Hindu fundamentalist to continue their bloody campaign.
However, the present NCP-Congress government had given him a clean chit saying he had done everything “in discharge of his duty.” Not only that, the present Congress-led government was not taking enough action despite making it an election issue and promising to book the guilty in the election manifesto, they pointed out.
Many victims themselves insisted that the horrors of the riots be kept alive in public memory and the guilty be prosecuted, if we are to pride ourselves as a democracy. They asked the public to pressurise the government to implement the Srikrishna Commission Report and give compensation to all who had lost their kin in the riots. If the law said that the case was time-barred, then the law was not fair, was the unanimous belief among the speakers.
They particularly decried the attitude of the police in bringing the perpetrators to book. Those who had gone to police stations to lodge complaints had themselves been booked for criminal activities and, even today, had to report regularly at the police stations to “assure the police that we are behaving properly.” .
Victims, still running pillar to post to get justice, gave eyewitness accounts of the frenzied communal horror that had been unleashed in Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993. Large-scale looting, arson, bloody murders had been carried out with military precision under the very nose of the police who remained indifferent, they recounted. Film excerpts and wireless messages that had been part of the evidence during the Srikrishna inquiry, were played in the meeting.
