Sidhartha Varadarajan: "Skip the apology, Modi Saheb, and tell us about Maya Kodnani"

If there are other potential interviewers in the queue after Madhu Kishwar, ETV, India TV and TV9 got their chance to serve us some rather tepid fare, please remember, the question to ask Narendra Modi is not ‘why won’t you apologise for the 2002 violence?’ but this:

‘How could you make Maya Kodnani a minister in 2007 when it was well-known that she had led the murderous mobs which killed dozens of innocent citizens in the Naroda-Patiya locality of Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002?’


Kodnani’s name came up in witness testimony immediately after the massacre ended. The fact that she was eventually convicted 10 years later came as no surprise to anyone in Gujarat. Even if the evidence required for the chargesheet was only gathered by 2009 thanks to the Supreme Court-monitored SIT, the facts about her involvement ought to have been known to Modi in December 2002, when he gave her a ticket to fight from the Naroda constituency, and in 2007, when he brought her into his cabinet. If they were not, this shows, at best, that his administration lacked basic administrative and intelligence gathering skills. And if they were, he needs to explain why he chose someone for the job of Minister for Women and Child development whom he knew had blood on her hands....

Now consider this. In Godhra, 58 people were killed “yesterday” and Modi described the perpetrators as “cannibals” and said they would be punished and made an example of. Nobody can argue with that. But he says nothing about what he will do to the perpetrators of “tit for tat” riots, “ashanti” and “indiscipline”. For the killers of Naroda-Patiya and Gulberg Society — who committed their crime the very day he was speaking – he only issues an appeal for restraint, making no reference to these or other specific incidents. Had Modi also called them cannibals and warned that they would not only be “appropriately punished for the crime they have committed” but that his government “will set an example so that in future no one will dare dream to commit such a heinous act” a very different message would have gone out. The fact that the Godhra train attack was a single incident but what the state was now witnessing was a series of retaliatory attacks made it all the more necessary for his appeal to have threatened the strictest punishment for anyone rioting. The closest Modi got to saying this was that riots “cannot be tolerated by any civilised society.” But any talk of “punishment” was confined to “this crime”, i.e. the Godhra carnage alone. Could that be why the rioters took no heed of his appeal?

In any case, it turns out the omission of any threat of punishment was not accidental. Yes, 170 people were killed in police firing but as the Hindustan Times‘s Ahmedabad reporter, Mahesh Langa, pithily summarised matters recently, the Gujarat government itself says the police killed more Muslims than Hindus. In May 2002, the HT’s reporter, Vinay Menon cited confidential police figures which showed a similar skew. “The statistic substantiates the allegation,” he wrote, “that not only did the local police not do anything to stop the mobs, they actually turned their guns on the helpless Muslim victims.”

As for the large number of people arrested, most of them Hindu rioters (many of whom were affiliated in one way or the other to extremist Hindutva outfits), the Modi government’s failure to credibly prosecute them led to a series of speedy acquittals. If today, many of the criminals, including Ms Kodnani, have been convicted, this is all thanks to the Supreme Court which wisely concluded Narendra Modi could not be trusted to provide justice and handed charge of major cases to courts outside the state or an external SIT.

Manoj Mitta’s excellent book, The Fiction of Fact-Finding, provides a lot more information about the manner in which the same SIT eventually came to draw the line at Modi’s culpability. It emerges, sadly, that the CBI’s questioning of Modi was as incompetent as the exertions of some of the journalists who have interviewed him recently.

http://svaradarajan.com/2014/04/16/skip-the-apology-modi-saheb-tell-us-about-kodnani/

CONmen and their paid journalists are wasting their time. It is time that they recognized that the people of India are becoming smarter. They won't put up with corruption and the BS. If CONartists persist with their ways, Chauchesku and Marie Antoinette will be given instant nirvana.

Vakavaka Pakapaka wrote:CONmen and their paid journalists are wasting their time. It is time that they recognized that the people of India are becoming smarter. They won't put up with corruption and the BS. If CONartists persist with their ways, Chauchesku and Marie Antoinette will be given instant nirvana.

Is that what Godfather-Modi's planning for, upon taking up PM kursi, his act as PM will have to beat 2002 riots given his elevation to national level.