PRAGOTI

August 29, 2012. Ten and a half years after the brutal carnage at Naroda Patiya, the long struggle for justice has reached the first milestone with the common judgment on  pronounced by Judge Jyotsna Yagnik Special Sessions Judge. Eight charge sheets were filed in this historic case that lasted several months. It was one of the nine cases being supervised by the Supreme Court and investigated by the SIT.In all 32 persons have been convicted. This  includes former BJP MLA and minister in the Narendra Modi cabinet, Smt Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi, Bipin Panchal, Ashok Sindhi and Kishan Korani (sitting corporator, accused No 20) Twenty-nine of the accused were acquitted. The full text of the judgment is archived on Pragoti and is available here. Here are some excerpts from the judgment which sets into context not only the heinous crimes of the BJP, the Bajrang DAl, the RSS and the VHP; but also the complicity of the police and by extension the Narendra Modi government in the carnage.

The Babri Masjid judgment epitomises a larger structural linkage between the neoliberal transformation and Hindutva, a process which is underway in Indian society for last two decades. In this framework, Hindutva manifests itself in multiple forms and affects Muslims as well as other working and oppressed people in vicious ways. Subsequently, the struggle against Hindutva has to be an integral part of social justice and modernist concerns.

“Sen, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics and a Lamont Professor of Economics and Moral Philosophy at Harvard University took an intelligent and pragmatic approach by pondering over the idea of ‘enhancement of justice’ by ‘removal of injustice’ instead of imagining an a priori perfect just society, or ‘identifying perfectly just social arrangements’ or ‘just institutions’ in his book. However, the book has several deficiencies, and in this article, we would try to point out those ontological, methodological and epistemological limits/problems of Sen’s idea of justice.”

The Khairlanji case is not a private concern of Bhotmange. It is, instead a mirror of the caste-based discrimination that continues to stalk the villages across the country and a reminder that Article 17 of the Constitution abolishing untouchability and caste based discrimination is a far cry even after almost six decades after India became a Republic.

V. Krishna Ananth, assesses the Khairlanji verdict and compares it to the judicial intervention of the Supreme Court in the Sohrabuddin-Kauserbi murder case in which Sohrabuddin and his wife Kauserbi were shot dead by a team of the Gujarat Police led by DIG D.G.Vanzara and thereafter described this act of cold-blooded murder as one of an encounter.