The Nanavati
Report And After
By Praful Bidwai
16 August, 2005
Kashmir Times
'The
charred and hacked remains of the dead eloquently described a horrible
and heart-rending tragedy. Women, children and a handful of [men], hiding
under dead bodies. were rescued by reporters . They were emotionless.
They had no tears to shed. A three-year old girl, stepping over the
bodies of her father, three brothers and countless others lying in the
street, clung helplessly to a reporter, pleading for help. "Please
take me home," she said..' -Newspaper report form Trilokpuri, East
Delhi, Nov 3, 1984, where more than 350 Sikhs were gorily killed in
the preceding 36 hours. Yet, a police officer told the reporters filing
the story, "Nobody has been killed in Trilokpuri". Shortly
thereafter, a Sikh youth, his stomach slashed, collapsed in their arms.
The contrast between
reality and the official version of the horrific massacre that followed
the killing of Indira Gandhi by a Sikh guard could not have been starker.
As organised violence raged through bustee after poor bustee and colony
after middle class colony of Delhi, the police stood by and watched.
Worse, in many cases, they participated in the bloody carnage and looting.
The higher authorities had enough warning of trouble within a few hours
of Indira Gandhi's assassination on October 31, but did nothing to prevent
it.
This writer had
just flown into Delhi from Bombay that morning and witnessed the events
from a vantage point. By the early afternoon, tension was palpable in
the air. False and malicious rumours flew thick and fast about how "thousands
of Sikhs" had celebrated the assassination by distributing sweets.
"They must be taught a lesson", it was whispered. President
Zail Singh's car was stoned as he left the All-India Institute of Medical
Sciences.
By the evening,
systematic killing and arson had begun-at the behest of Congress le,
who mobilised mobs crying for "revenge". Columns of smoke
rose all over the city. Cars and two- and three-wheelers were stopped
to check the identity of the passengers. All bearded men were threatened.
Soon, Sikh truckers started being "necklaced": lorry tyres
containing kerosene were hung around their necks and they were burnt
alive. According to official accounts, as many as 2,733 people were
killed in the worst orgy of communal violence in Independent India,
barring Gujarat.
Twentyone years
and nine enquiry commissions later, the perpetrators of the carnage
have still not been brought to book. Not a single politician or policeman
has been convicted. A small fraction (only 13 people) of the thousands
who killed, raped and burned have been held guilty. All hopes that the
Nanavati Commission, appointed five years ago to inquire into the orgy
of killing, rape and pillage, would spur adequate corrective action
now stand belied. The government's Action Taken Report (ATR), tabled
six months after the Commission submitted its own report, is yet another
black mark in this prolonged cover-up of the state's collusion with
premeditated killings and its repeated betrayal of the victims.
The Nanavati report
is far from perfect, indeed shoddy in parts. It recognises that the
violence was "systematic", "organised", and conducted
under "instructions", but fails to fix culpability, especially
at the apex level. The judge was working within the narrow confines
of the evidence presented to him and did not demand fresh investigations.
Evidence in cases of serious communal violence can often be manipulated:
testimonies can be withdrawn or changed. Key witnesses can be bribed
or bludgeoned into changing their statements to weaken the case against
powerful individuals. This is how those who instigated the violence
to "teach the Sikh community a lesson" tried to escape the
law's net.
The role of Congress
politicians in plotting and organising the carnage has been well-documented.
They took their cue from the moral ambiguity of Rajiv Gandhi who infamously
said: "When a big tree falls, the earth shakes." The coterie
around Rajiv Gandhi, including Messrs Jagdish Tytler, H.K.L. Bhagat,
Sajjan Kumar, Arun Nehru and Kamal Nath instigated or condoned a campaign
of mayhem and killing. Some of this was carefully recorded by citizens'
groups like Nagarik Ekta Manch, which interviewed thousands of victims'
families and eyewitnesses and produced a booklet entitled "WhoAre
the Guilty?" It's truly regrettable that nine official commissions
couldn't achieve even this much despite all the authority, time and
resources at their command.
Justice Nanavati,
for incomprehensible reasons, found the Delhi authorities collectively
guilty, but individually innocent-a contradiction in terms. He also
held that top Delhi administration officials, including Lt Governor
P.G. Gavai and Police Commissioner S.C. Tandon, should not be prosecuted
because they have retired. This makes no sense. You can't accuse the
police of "colossal failure" to maintain law and order and
of "collusion" and "ineffectiveness" in stopping
the looting and killing-and yet let them off the hook. Mr Tandon may
have retired, but he is liable for actions committed while holding a
high office. As for Mr Gavai, he took his orders from the Union home
ministry, as the Lt Governor of any Union Territory must. He seems to
have been made a scapegoat.
It's recorded that
Mr Gavai ordered Mr Tandon to call in the Army in the morning of November
1. However, the Army arrived in all six police districts of Delhi only
on November 3, by which time hundreds of lives had been lost. Mr Gavai
now says even Chief of Army Staff Arun Vaidya was
indifferent when he asked him about the delay in deployment. Gen Vaidya
said: "These things take time." And Home Minister Narasimha
Rao was worse. He was only interested in protecting his friends; and
he "hid like a rat" for three days after the violence broke
out. Clearly, there was no political will to stop the violence, and
later, to punish its perpetrators. The Congress party is also trying
to pretend that only "local-level" leaders had a hand in instigating
the violence. This simply won't do.
Even more disgracefully,
the Centre failed to commit itself to taking action even where the Nanavati
report warrants it. It's only under the Left's and his UPA allies' pressure
that Dr Manmohan Singh asked Mr Tytler to resign, and Mr Sajjan Kumar
too made his inglorious exit. But there was "credible evidence"
that he "very probably" organised anti-Sikh attacks. The government
originally tried to dilute the observation as amounting to "probabilistic"
evidence. But all criminal cases are registered
on probabilistic evidence! It's only conviction that needs proof beyond
doubt.Similarly, the ATR rules out prosecuting Mr Bhagat because of
his poor health and Mr Kamal Nath because of a changed affidavit by
a key witness. Poor health can justify a lighter sentence, but not the
absence of prosecution.
Thus, Chilean dictator
Pinochet is being tried today for his horrendous crimes of the 1970s
and 1980s-despite his advanced age. Similarly, it's for a trial court
to evaluate the worth of the evidence against Mr Nath. But the ATR drops
their prosecution on flimsy, unconvincing grounds.This is a travesty
of justice. Not only will it alienate most Sikhs; it will horrify the
public at large and announce to the world that impunity for grave crimes
is the rule in India: the powerful cannot be brought to book; the rich
rarely go to jail. The law is only applied against the underprivileged
and powerless. The UPA must not vacillate over fulfilling its "solemn
promise" to pursue investigations against all specific individuals
named by Mr Nanavati. It must formally charge them and rehabilitate
the victims. It must set up special courts to try all the accused who
figure in the reports of earlier commissions, including 72 policemen.
A higher principle
is involved here. If India is to live up to the great democratic aspirations
of its people, it must establish and affirm the rule of law-systematically,
painstakingly and impartially. This is a precondition for democracy
and political legitimacy. The anti-Sikh pogrom presents a special challenge-and
an opportunity to do justice to the victims of a gruesome massacre by
applying the law to the powerful people who caused it.
In a sense, taking
prompt and serious action on the Nanavati report will be a prelude to
the Ultimate Test the nation faces: namely, denying impunity to the
perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Gujarat. The Gujarat pogrom
was even greater in scale and brutality than the Delhi carnage, especially
in the bestial quality of the killings and the sexual violence. It was
also more directly instigated by the state. The global public has not
forgotten what happened in Gujarat and who was responsible for it.
India's claim to
high stature in the world does not lie in a Security Council seat or
in nuclear weapons, and not even in economic might. It lies in democracy
and pluralism. This is where our people's interests and their greatest
achievements are also located. That claim will be reduced to a farce
if heinous mass-level crimes and barbaric forms of collective victimisation
go unpunished. That would be a tragedy not just for Delhi's Sikhs or
Gujarat's Muslims, but for all Indian citizens.