People's Democracy

EDITORIAL

IT IS OFFICIAL NOW

Godhra An Accident, Genocide A Design

IT is entirely predictable that the RSS/BJP should cry foul at the interim report on the fire in the Sabarmati Express at Godhra submitted by Justice U C Banerjee.  This interim report has nailed the RSS/BJP’s lie that the fire at Godhra was a criminal conspiracy by the Muslims against ‘karsevaks’. It was such a diabolic reasoning propounded and nurtured by the RSS/BJP which was used for triggering the State-sponsored communal genocide that was unleashed from the very next day in Gujarat.  With its very basis for engineering the worst communal holocaust in independent India falling to pieces, the RSS/BJP are clutching at straws and are seeking to undermine the credibility of the judge and the  inquiry committee.

The BJP has set out ten questions that supposedly puncture the impartiality of the interim report. All of them are so flimsy that it does not require even mediocre intelligence to debunk them as desperate acts of a culprit whose crimes have been exposed. 

First, the timing of the submission of the interim report is being questioned as being aimed at helping the anti-BJP forces in the coming elections to the state assemblies. The railway minister, with his stakes in Bihar elections, is being portrayed as having deliberately orchestrated the release of this report at this particular juncture.  What the RSS/BJP deliberately ignore is that the commission, whose term is expiring in March 2005, was mandated to submit an interim report by January 15.

Further, it is being questioned as to why the railways had constituted this high level enquiry committee when the Nanawati Commission is already inquiring into the incident. It is a different matter that in the three years of its functioning, the Nanawati Commission has not been able to establish that there was any conspiracy nor to come to any conclusion about the incident.

In this context, it must be noted that the power of the central government to set up a fact finding inquiry on any public issue is given by the Constitution. Flowing from the Constitution itself, this power is over and above the statutory powers and provisions under the Commission of Inquiries Act. While the central government’s power to hold an inquiry is extensive, the state government may not enter into the  arena of subjects under the union’s list. It is not only well-settled in law but equally well-settled in practice that the fact finding inquiry ordered by the executive has a different purpose than a criminal trial arising from the same set of facts and the two may well co-exist.  The essence of fact finding is to arrive at the truth and the essence of a criminal trial is person specific, i.e., whether the person brought before the court is guilty or not.

In fact, the U C Banerjee Commission has noted that there has been failure on the part of the Commission of Railway Safety and railway administration to conduct a statutory inquiry into this accident.  This was in breach of the Railway Act as well as the Accident Manual of the Zonal Railway.

It has further noted that the railway administration has also not made any concerted effort to preserve clues of the incident. In particular, the committee has criticised the onward travel to Ahmedabad of S-7 coach despite some damage to it and despite it being a crucial piece of evidence. In fact, the damaged portion of S-7 has been disposed off as scrap.  It has severely criticised the entire hierarchy of western railway in pre-judging the issue by describing the incident of fire as a miscreant activity without conducting even a preliminary inquiry.

Much of the BJP’s effort was to prove that a violent anti-Hindu Muslim mob had poured petrol on coach S-6 and set it on fire, thus, deliberately torching the karsevaks. This conspiracy theory fabricated by the RSS/BJP is completely exposed as preposterous by the committee.  The interim report states: “There has been a preponderance of evidence that the fire in coach No. S-6 originated in the coach itself without any external input. Moreover, the possibility of an inflammable liquid having been used is completely ruled out as there was first a smell of burning, followed by dense smoke and flames thereafter. This sequence is not possible in case the fire was caused by inflammable liquid thrown on the floor of the coach or an inflammable object thrown from outside the coach.  The ‘inflammable liquid theory’ also gets negated by the statement of  some of the passengers who suffered injuries on the upper portion of the body and not the lower body and who crawled towards the door on elbows and could get out without much injury.”

The Forensic Science Laboratory has confirmed this by scientifically corroborating  the absence of any trace of any petroleum hydrocarbon found in the burnt coach. 

The interim report has negated all the concocted theories propounded by the RSS/BJP, viz., ‘inflammable liquid theory’, ‘petrol theory’, ‘miscreant activity theory’ and ruled out the possibility of an electrical fire.  It has, thus, come to the conclusion that the fire could only be the result of an accident.

If at all proof were necessary, it has now come on the basis of scientific enquiries by Forensic laboratories as well as other investigations that the horrendous accident at Godhra was the excuse to unleash the State-sponsored communal genocide. That the RSS/BJP were prepared for such a pre-planned pogrom became clear in the systematic manner in which the Muslim minority community was targetted.  A section of Indian citizens were rendered homeless, their loved  ones brutally murdered, women violated and children made orphans as a result of these systematic and preplanned attacks.  It clearly shows to what extent the RSS/BJP can go to transform the secular democratic Indian Republic into their project of a fascistic “Hindu Rashtra”.

This interim report, once again, confirms that there are no limits that check the RSS/BJP’s effort to tear asunder the syncretic social fabric of our country  in pursuit of their political/electoral ambitions.  For the sake of India, i.e., Bharat, these forces must be politically defeated and kept as far away from the reins of State power as possible.