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.

Poor material conditions, the shifts in national politics and a common agenda against neoliberalism result in the formation of a new United Left Bloc featuring the three largest communist parties in Bihar. The dichotomy between the “social justice” agenda and the economic struggle has blurred in a conjuncture in which the electoral battle and the political struggles of the three left parties have finally found a meeting point to cement the material basis of the ULB in Bihar – a scenario that had been impossible less than four years ago.-Argues Chirashree Dasgupta in an article in EPW,March 7, 2009

Saibal Bishnu and Chirashree Das Gupta argue that the attempts to build a 'coalition of the willing' by the opposition in West Bengal, despite its motley hues, is bound together by the common agenda of anti-communism.