The Godhra fake-believe

After the stinging High Court rebuke, the UPA Government
should junk the Banerjee Committee report,
and not even consider an appeal

It is a sign of our times that faith in the judiciary is becoming increasingly susceptible one's political biases. As such, the Supreme Court is "just" when it acquits SAR Geelani in the Parliament attack case; "not infallible" - to use Mr Farooq Abdullah's words - when it convicts and sentences to death Mohammad Afzal Guru in the same case; and downright unfair when, in a stinging judgement, the Gujarat High Court calls the Justice (retired) UC Banerjee Committee, set up by Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav to reinterpret the Godhra carnage, "illegal, unconstitutional ... null and void".

The juxtaposition of the Godhra and Afzal Guru episodes may seem forced. Yet central to both is a sense of denial, of unwillingness to see a terrorist attack - and one fails to see why Godhra cannot be described as such - for what it is.

Consider the facts. On February 27, 2002, coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express, a train carrying kar sevaks, was attacked at Godhra station in Gujarat. Fifty-eight people were incinerated, and the resultant anger led to a week of intense riots. The violence eventually killed, as per figures given to Parliament by the UPA Government on May 11, 2005, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus, many of the latter dying in police firing.

The riots were horrific. Slow and gradual as it may be, the law needs to take its course and punish as many as it can. Indeed, the first convictions in the riot cases began to happen over a year ago. A judicial commission was also set up to investigate both Godhra and the tumult afterwards.

Obviously, this was not enough for some people. In September 2004, shortly after he came to office, Mr Yadav appointed an "internal committee" headed by Justice (retired) Banerjee to look into the Godhra incident. As expected, Banerjee produced an "interim report" just in time for the Bihar election of early 2005. It said the train fire was accidental and, certainly, not the product of a Muslim mob outside.

After such exemplary detective work, it was open to wonder what a Justice Banerjee visitation would do to historical incidents. Perhaps his true calling was in the Human Resource Development Ministry, in charge of rewriting textbooks. Sent to Masada, he would have reported back that the besieged Jews did not commit collective suicide but died of food poisoning. Sent to Chittor, he would have denied any invasion by Allaudin Khilji, and any jauhar: Rani Padmini died in her kitchen, when a LPG cylinder burst while she was preparing Rajput delicacies for the evening banquet in honour of the visiting Delhi sultan.

Not everybody shared the UPA Government's touching faith in Justice Banerjee. On October 13, following a petition by a Godhra survivor, the Gujarat High Court rejected his "interim report" as, essentially, nonsense. It refused to sanction its tabling in Parliament. It said the very appointment of the Banerjee panel was politically "colourable", and that its so-called findings contradicted empirical evidence, including that which had been accepted by the Railways while compensating families of victims.

In response Justice Banerjee - now as laconic as he was articulate two days before the Bihar election - played the copybook professional: "I went to Gujarat, took evidence and submitted my report...Ever since I gave my report, it has been a closed chapter to me ... I am not a politician."

Just what did Justice Banerjee do in Gujarat, and what did his interim report say? Crudely put, after visiting Godhra, Justice Banerjee sought to create a myth and then present it as evidence of truth. His report insisted there was no mob attack on coach S-6, ignoring eyewitness accounts of 1,000 people with stones and Molotov cocktails.

Justice Banerjee ignored the Railway Protection Force (RPF) firing at the time - shots in the air to disperse rather than wound. He ignored the testimony of the RPF commandant who arrived after coach S-6 was set ablaze and ordered his men to fire at a mob that launched a second attack at about noon. Does Justice Banerjee know where these bullets are?

Next, he ignored the 15 arrests made at the station itself; almost all of those arrested are still in prison. He ignored reports of an attempt to set fire to coach S-2, also crowded with Hindu activists. Does he believe coach S-2 too saw an accidental fire - two LPG cylinders, going off simultaneously, in a cosmic coincidence?

It is this kangaroo report that the Gujarat High Court has justifiably rubbished. A day after it did so, the Prime Minister was asked about the verdict while on the flight back from Finland. Mr Manmohan Singh said, "There are higher courts, we will explore the mechanism of taking recourse to a higher court."

What was that about defending the indefensible?