The Hindu : Investigation as collusion

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 31, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Investigation as collusion — I

By Brinda Karat & Subhashini Ali

The National Commission of Women gives little importance to the most disturbing dimension of the Gujarat violence — the targeting of Muslim women and children.

VASUDHA DHAGAMVAR'S two-part article in The Hindu (May 22 and 23) is concerned less with the conditions of the women in the Gujarat camps than with a justification of why the NCW (National Commission of Women) brought out, two months after the violence, a report that does a whitewash job on the state-sponsored carnage. The NCW had already compromised its autonomous character by its deafening silence on Gujarat and later by its statement that the "reports of sexual violence against women in Gujarat were highly exaggerated". This prompted women's organisations in Jaipur, where the statement was made, to protest strongly. If one was concerned with not becoming a sarkari voice, those who agreed to be part of the NCW team should at the very least have extracted a public assurance that the team would be free to exercise its constitutional mandate to interrogate the role of the State Government and official agencies in the continuing violence. Yet, Ms. Dhagamvar says, "we (the members of the committee) had decided that the Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, was not our direct concern". This one sentence negates the hard struggle of women's organisations to ensure that the NCW mandate included its power as a watchdog body to look into all cases of dereliction of duty in implementing and defending the provisions of the Constitution by any Government or official agency. Gujarat was and is surely the most appropriate case for the assertion of such power as is vested in the NCW.

In the second part of her article, Ms. Dhagamvar writes: "The report has condemned the police for their role. It is a fact of politics that the police are the bonded servants of the politicians, especially of the Government. We had collected no direct evidence of the Government's complicity, but we could perhaps have stated this inference. What we could have said with certainty was that no Government that could not control the riots in 72 days had any business to be in office. After all, the anti-Sikh riots were quelled in four days. To that extent the report is wanting.''

If she and the rest of the team had tried to find out why the violence was continuing even after 72 days they would have had to "directly concern" themselves with Mr. Modi. It is not because there was no evidence against the State Government available, but because the team deliberately — and by its own admission — did not seek it.

It is precisely because of this decision that the team could not hear what the women in the camps were saying. They could not, for instance, hear what the traumatised and terrorised survivors of the Narodia Patia massacre, now in the Shah Alam camp, said about the complicity of BJP leaders in the terrible massacre, the burnings and killings and rapes of women. They could not hear what the women in the Bapunagar area said about the role of the Home Minister, who also happens to be an office-bearer of the VHP, and his brother. They could not hear the weeping of the women in Juhapura who described and named the VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders who led the mobs that killed and maimed their loved ones. In camp after camp the women are speaking, naming names. But the NCW report does not so much as mention the identity of the criminals identified by the women as being responsible for the violence.

There are many women, more so in the rural camps, who have been victims of sexual assault. The police have refused to file FIRs in cases of rape. Thus, volunteers from women's organisations are having to document the testimonies that are essential if justice is to be done and criminals are to be punished. This should have been the job of the NCW. Instead, shockingly, it gives little importance to the most disturbing dimension of the Gujarat violence — the targeting of Muslim women and children, including cases of sexual assault. Ms. Dhagamvar says the report did not include descriptions of atrocities because these had been recorded by so many other reports. Would that mean then that the NCW accepts that the atrocities have taken place and that the reports are not exaggerated? Ms. Dhagamvar writes that the team met only three such victims. Is it a coincidence that the number of FIRs of rape victims that the Gujarat police have deigned to record is just three? Did the NCW team rely on the police to get information of rape victims?

The NCW team visited the Godhra camp. In that camp is a young women who had been gang raped. Six other women family members with her had also been raped. But she is the only one who survived to tell her story. Hers is a case in which an FIR has been filed because her medical report corroborated her statement. There is a group case filed of the murder of the other women with her that does not mention rape. The police logic of not including rape charges is that the aggressors are being charged for a bigger crime of murder. This is a way to conceal the savagery and bestiality of the criminals.

The defence being peddled of the Gujarat carnage as being a "spontaneous reaction after Godhra" would hold little credibility if it is accepted that in a large number of cases where women were burnt or killed they were first subjected to sexual violence. The NCW team must have met the young woman in question. Did they then use their powers to find out from the police why charges of rape in the other cases had not been filed? Unlikely. Ms. Dhagamvar says: "That every woman who had been raped was also killed seems a little difficult to accept." This is not only misleading, since no one has said that every woman who was raped was killed, but also underlines the dishonesty of the earlier defence that the NCW report does not mention atrocities since other reports have done so. Going by this insensitive statement it is clear that the silence of the NCW is because it prefers to accept the official position of discounting the testimonies, some extremely detailed, of the survivors.

While expressing sympathy with the suffering of the women in the camps, Ms. Dhagamvar blames the NGOs for viewing the camps as a permanent feature instead of trying to find alternatives for the women, particularly those who have been widowed. At no point are we told that the camps in Gujarat are not being run by the State Government (except for three or four camps that house Dalit families in Ahmedabad). This is unlike the camps established for Kashmiri migrants in Jammu and Delhi or at other places for victims of communal violence, where camps are established and maintained by State and Central Governments. This is the very least that Governments can do for those whom they have failed to protect from violent attacks. Amenities such as water, toilets, sanitation, health and food are also provided by the Governments concerned. Gujarat, however, tells a different story. Camps that house more than one lakh Muslims are run by members of their already battered community. The Government has been providing, most sporadically, inadequate quantities of grain, monetary assistance and water. Most of the camps have not even been provided with latrines by the State Government. While Ms. Dhagamwar does describe the conditions of women who are giving birth to babies in the camps, she does not tell us that, in fact, there are no women doctors visiting the camps. The Government has made no effort at all to treat the large numbers of mutilated, burnt, sick and pregnant women there.

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