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Journalism of Courage
Three years after the pogrom, justice is on the run. This is not a new game in town, of course, it wasn8217;t invented by Narendra Modi8217;s deeply compromised administration in Gujarat. Riot cases in this country are traditionally guided by implicated administrations into dead ends when they are not simply left to languish until it is too late, as has happened to the cases from Delhi 1984. Certainly, something needs to be done to break this unending and awful cycle. We need to ensure that justice is not a lonely fight conducted with diminishing intensity by lonely individuals and fringe groups gifted with exceptional determination and fortitude. Justice, especially for the crime of communal violence, needs to be secured at the centre of the system. Is the draft Communal Violence Suppression Bill 2005 8212; some of its provisions were excerpted in this paper on Saturday 8212; the way to do this? That question immediately demands wide and informed debate.
Any discussion must begin at the beginning: do we need a special law to break the cycle of injustice? After all, there are enough laws on paper to deal with riot situations 8212; at last count, 15 different laws made the grade. Would yet another law on paper have prevented Gujarat 2002? The problem, as has been pointed out so many times, is not the law, but the lack of political will. The proposed legislation deals with this problem by leapfrogging over it 8212; it hands overweening powers to the Centre to deal with such situations in the states. But a question still remains. What if the situation we are talking about is not Gujarat 2002 but Delhi 1984, in which it was the government at the Centre that was seen as being complicit in the unchecked violence against the capital8217;s minority Sikh community? In this context, it is still worth debating whether the UPA needs to go back to the idea of having the Centre draft a model law, which is then used as the starting point by different states to frame their own laws with their own checks and balances, instead of the Centre framing a uniform federal law applicable to all states.
