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Communal crimes and punishment

IN A WAY, the acquittal of Sajjan Kumar completes the depressing chain of events in the cases pertaining to the anti-Sikh riots. Verdict after verdict has seen Congress leaders who were implicated for their role in what was one of the most horrific pogroms in Independent India being exonerated because of the lack of evidence. Three years ago, a Delhi court gave Jagdish Tytler a clean chit in a riot case after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) declared he had no role in the incident. The former Union Minister, H.K.L. Bhagat, was let off completely after being tried in three cases because the charges against him could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt. And now, another Congress bigwig, Mr. Sajjan Kumar, has been acquitted in the last case pending against him because of the prosecution's failure to present an unbroken chain of circumstantial evidence against him.

The fact that not a single person has been convicted for what was a large-scale massacre of Sikh men, women and children is a telling illustration of the failure of the criminal justice system to punish the guilty. Judicial delay, blatant political interference, the prosecution's tardiness and its inability to prevent the accused from exploiting the loopholes in the legal process are some of the reasons that have contributed to this sorry outcome. In Mr. Sajjan Kumar's case, his acquittal was secured after the court found serious contradictions in the version of the eyewitness, who had claimed that he had led a mob which killed her husband. In order to prevent any miscarriage of justice, it is the duty of the Judiciary to strictly follow the procedure laid down by law while determining a person's guilt. For the widows and relatives of those who were massacred, the string of acquittals must be particularly painful and disheartening. It will hardly be of much comfort to them that acquittals in such contexts are not badges of innocence, merely acknowledgements of the inability to pin conclusive guilt. All the same, a large number of people will continue to regard many of those who were freed by the courts as beneficiaries of a (sometimes subverted) legal process rather than recipients of a moral exoneration.

Communal riots, particularly if they are protracted, are invariably connected with politicians and their squalid little games. This is one of the probable reasons why those who are involved in communal rioting are rarely, if ever, punished. It is another matter that commissions of inquiry and independent probes into communal conflagrations invariably speak of official complicity in one degree or another and the involvement of politicians of one hue or another. But, as experience has shown over and over again, although a riot may result in a damning indictment by an inquiry commission of those who enjoy power and influence, it never results in their being found guilty by a court of law.

The anti-Sikh riots were probed by a number of panels. The Ranganath Mishra Commission, the first official probe constituted into the pogrom, minced no words when it spoke about the extreme reluctance of the police to chase up evidence or record complaints against those who enjoyed power and influence. The Srikrishna Commission's report on the Mumbai riots, which is a strong condemnation of organisations such as the Shiv Sena, collects dust with successive State Governments unwilling to take action on it. The manner in which those who participated in communal riots were allowed to go scot-free raises the obvious questions in the present context. Will the victims of Gujarat ever receive justice? Will those who were responsible for the orgy of bloodshed and violence be booked for their crimes? The lessons of Delhi in 1984 and those of Mumbai in 1992-93 ought to teach us that it would be unforgivable if the killers, the arsonists and the rapists of the Gujarat carnage are allowed to go unpunished. A country that permits communal rioters to get away is a country that will render itself more and more vulnerable to more communal riots and conflagrations.

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• Communal crimes and punishment
• More friendly in tone
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• Gujarat experience
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