The Tehelka newsmagazine Thursday released sensational footage made by an undercover journalist, in which leaders of Hindu groups alleged that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had sanctioned the communal violence of 2002.
Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal said the investigation was carried out over six months beginning May during which the journalist, Ashish Khetan, went around talking to Hindu activists with a hidden camera.
He said prominent representatives of the Vishwa Hidnu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal admitted in their conversations that Modi sanctioned the killings in the wake of the Feb 27, 2002 train burning in Godhra in which 59 Hindu passengers were killed.
Replying to a query on Modi's alleged involvement in the violence, Tejpal told reporters here: "There was a strong and tacit approval of what was happening. His sanction was there."
Reacting to the Tehelka revelations, Gujarat's ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) termed it as "a political stunt on the eve of assembly elections in the state". The opposition Congress said there was nothing new in the findings but expressed concern that they could polarise the Hindus and Muslims ahead of the December polls.
The communal violence left more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead and thousands injured and homeless.
Tehelka's investigative report, telecast on private television channel Aaj Tak and to be published in the magazine Friday, shows Haresh Bhatt, the BJP legislator from Godhra, saying that Modi had given rioters a free hand for three days.
"He had given us three days time...to do whatever we could. He said he would not give us time after that. He said this openly. After three days he asked (us) to stop and everything came to a halt," Bhatt, a senior VHP functionary then, was quoted as telling the tehelka reporter.
An accused in the Naroda Patiya massacre - in which more than 80 people were killed on the outskirts of Ahmedabad - told the journalist that Modi had come to the locality and had thanked the rioters saying "Aap dhanya ho" (you have done a great job).
Describing the expose as the "most important story of our time", Tejpal said the investigation has brought out irrefutable evidence in several horrific incidents that have remained contested so far.
These include piercing out of a foetus from the womb of a woman with a sword and killing of Muslims hiding in a gutter.
Tejpal said that Tehelka also had a first-hand account from an accused in the Gulbarga Society massacre in Ahmedabad, explaining how former MP Ehsan Jaffri of the Congress was hacked limb-by-limb and burnt.
The expose also contains details based on the "confessions" of how dozens of Muslims hiding in a pit and clinging together in fear in Naroda Patiya were doused with kerosene and burnt alive.
Tejpal said: "For the first time, this investigation brings confirmation that the murder of Muslims was not a spontaneous swelling of anger but a planned genocide strategised and executed by top functionaries of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and state authorities, with the knowledge and sanction of Modi."
He claimed the investigation revealed that the train bogey burning incident at Godhra was the result of a spontaneous mob fury by some Muslims in that town and not a pre-planned conspiracy as held by the state government.
"Two BJP members, who claim to be eyewitnesses and have identified many of the 'accused', admit that they were not even at the Godhra station that day. They say the police filed statements on their behalf and they colluded to further the cause of Hindutva," said Tejpal in a statement.
The Tehelka footage also points to the manufacturing of bombs in factories owned by senior Bajrang Dal and VHP activists.
"Arms were smuggled from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Punjab and then distributed to execution squads led by MLAs and senior members of the Sangh Parivar," said Tejpal.
The expose also claims to reveal "the elaborate legal subversion" executed to save those accused for their role in the communal violence.
"There were the cool strategists - leaders, officials, ideologues. And there were the foot soldiers who actually raped, killed and looted. To help these foot soldiers escape the law, the strategists had constituted a panel of lawyers sympathetic to the 'Hindu cause'," said Tejpal.
He said two public prosecutors admitted to the Tehelka reporter how, contrary to their public office, they were secretly defending the "Hindu accused" and how they try and settle deals between the accused and the survivors.
Asked about the timing of the revelations before the Gujarat elections and whether they would lead to communal polarisation, Tejpal said: "We are not politicians. It has been a journalist's work and his duty was to bring forward the truth."
Indo-Asian News Service Tahelka Reports
NARENDRA MODI visited Godhra on the day of the burning of coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express. His outburst provided the first sign to Sangh workers that the time to corner the Muslims had come
THAT VERY NIGHT, top BJP and Sangh leaders met at Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Godhra, and gave the green signal for an all-out assault on Muslims across the state
A STRATEGY was devised on how to shield the attackers from the law after the riots. Prominent lawyers were briefed and senior police officers taken into confidence. The cadres were told Modi was squarely behind them
THE MOBILISATION of the under castes, something the Sangh had been engaged in for years, dovetailed into the deep penetration Hindutva already had among Gujarat’s higher castes. Godhra provided the perfect spark to fuse them together
FROM THE very outset, the police played partisan, often joining the mobs. Officers who tried to do their duty found their hands tied. The complicity was led by then Ahmedabad Commissioner PC Pandey, who ensured compliance by a swathe of junior officers
WEAPONS, FROM BOMBS to guns to trishuls, were either manufactured and distributed by Sangh workers themselves, or smuggled through Sangh channels from all over India. The Bajrang Dal and the VHP already had a large cache of firearms and daggers
BJP AND SANGH LEADERS led the bloodthirsty mobs through Ahmedabad’s bylanes, Sabarkantha’s villages, Vadodara’s localities. The police stood guard to the mayhem
BJP MLA MAYABEN KODNANI drove around Ahmedabad’s Naroda locality all day, directing the mobs. VHP leaders Atul Vaid and Bharat Teli did the same at the Gulbarg Housing Society. None of them ever went to jail
FIRE WAS THE MOST FAVOURED weapon in the rioters’ hands. That cremation is considered un-Islamic fuelled their frenzy to burn. Petrol and kerosene were lavishly used, as were the victims’ own gas cylinders
BABU BAJRANGI reveals he collected 23 revolvers from Hindus in Naroda Patiya. He called VHP general secretary Jaideep Patel 11 times and informed Gordhan Zadaphia, the then minister of state for home, about the death toll
GOVERNMENT COUNSEL before the Nanavati-Shah Commission, Arvind Pandya, himself worships Modi and describes Justice Shah as “our man”. Nanavati’s own report on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots is gathering dust till today
A Cold Eclipse
THERE WAS no spontaneity to what happened in Gujarat post- Godhra. This was no uncontrived, unplanned, unprompted communal violence. This was a pogrom. This was genocide.
In a planned, coldly strategic manner, Muslim neighbourhoods across both urban and rural Gujarat were targeted. Large sections of Hindus were united under a single objective: to kill Muslims, wherever and by whatever means, preferably by first stabbing and mutilating them, and then by setting on fire what remained, whether dead or alive. During the course of the TEHELKA sting, many accused said they preferred burning Muslims alive over other forms of death since cremation is considered unacceptable in Islam.
For three days after the February 27 fire on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, Gujarat’s BJP government receded from public view and let the armed mercenaries of Hindu organisations take over. For three days, absolute anarchy reigned. Execution squads were formed, composed of the dedicated cadre of Hindu organisations — the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Bajrang Dal, the Kisan Sangh, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Masjids and dargahs were destroyed across the state. Seventy-three Muslim religious places were torched in Ahmedabad alone, 55 in Sabarkantha, 22 in Vadodara.
The architects of Gujarat’s greatest shame were of two sorts. There were the coolheaded strategists, the conspirators, who plotted the carnage from behind the scenes. And there were the foot soldiers, the members of the saffron army, drugged on the vicious agenda of so-called Hindutva, who went out and looted, raped and killed. On occasion, the planners were also sometimes emboldened to go out and participate in the massacres.
Ahmedabad: Carnage Capital
THE MOST horrifying massacre of the Gujarat riots was the one at Naroda Gaon and Naroda Patiya localities in Ahmedabad. A local Bajrang Dal leader, Babu Bajrangi, was one of the main conspirators. He started planning the massacre soon after the news of the Sabarmati incident broke. Starting in the evening of February 27, firearms and inflammable material were collected; Bajrangi also formed a select team, drawn from the cadre of the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. Members of the Chhara community, a denotified criminal tribe, were also roped in. TEHELKA spoke to two of them, Suresh Richard and Prakash Rathod. Both believed, and were made to believe, that by killing Muslims they were doing a great service to Hinduism.
On February 28, 2002, Bajrangi marshalled a murderous mob through the narrow bylanes of Naroda Patiya and Naroda Gaon. Egging the mob on was also local BJP MLA Mayaben Kodnani, who is also a doctor. Both Richard and Rathod have been recorded on TEHELKA’s spycam saying that Kodnani drove around Naroda all through the day, urging the mob to hunt Muslims down and kill them. Kodnani’s trusted lieutenant, BJP member Bipin Panchal, was also present with his own small band of followers, armed to the teeth. All through the massacre, Bajrangi and VHP state general secretary Jaideep Patel were on the phone with each other. Bajrangi did not reveal whether Patel was also involved in the planning. However, he did say that the death toll was being communicated to Patel at regular intervals. Several survivors from Naroda Gaon have identified Patel as the leader of the Naroda mob.
At the end of the day the total “score” — as Bajrangi chose to term estimates of the number of Muslims killed — in Naroda was well over at least 200. This figure has not been acknowledged by the state government; officially, 105 people were killed at Naroda Patiya and Naroda Gaon. Naroda, however, was far from the only Ahmedabad locality to be turned into a mass incinerator. A few kilometres away, VHP leaders were leading a frenzied mob at Meghaninagar. The target was a housing society called Gulbarg, a building inhabited by Muslims.
TEHELKA stung three participants in the carnage — Mangilal Jain, Prahlad Raju and Madan Chawal — all three local petty traders and all three with cases against them for their part in the riots. They said they and other members of the mob had been led by VHP leaders Atul Vaid and Bharat Teli, both of whom were named as accused in the FIR but were subsequently cleared of all charges when the police filed the chargesheet. Chawal gave a graphic description of how he and his accomplices first hacked former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri apart limb from limb, and then made a heap of his body parts, which they set on fire.
The official death toll of the Gulbarg massacre stood at 39, but the accused told TEHELKA that the actual number of those killed was much higher. Apart from the housing society’s residents, the dead also included Muslims who lived in nearby slums who had taken shelter in the building. TEHELKA also spoke to VHP leaders Rajendra Vyas and Ramesh Dave, who planned attacks on Muslims in Kalupur and Dariyapur, among Ahmedabad’s most communally sensitive areas. Ahmedabad city VHP president Rajendra Vyas, who was also in charge of the ill-fated Sabarmati Express, said that on the day of the fire on the train that killed 59 karsevaks, he had told the VHP cadre that “the Muslims had played a one-day match and given us a target of 60 runs. We shall now have to play a test match and we won’t stop until we score 600.”
Vyas, who lives in Kalupur, was recorded on the TEHELKA camera stating that he himself had shot dead five Muslims and had burned down nine Muslim houses. Ramesh Dave was the VHP’s point man in Dariyapur. He said he and his fellow planners had targeted and killed Muslims who had been in their sights for over 20 years — “chun-chun ke maara is baar (we specifically hunted them down)”. Dave also claimed that along with a friend, he had arranged for about 10 small firearms.
Tehelka fallout: clamour for Modi's ouster, BJP on defensive
The Tehelka exposИ into the Gujarat 2002 communal violence Friday saw strong demands for the ouster of Gujarat chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s poster boy Narendra Modi as well as for his arrest and a fresh Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the carnage.
The Congress party, which was cautious in its initial reaction fearing a Hindu polarisation in the election-bound Gujarat, Friday demanded Modi's resignation for his alleged role in "sanctioning" the communal violence in the state.
"If the constitution of India is to be upheld, if we still call ourselves a civilised society, if the right to life has any meaning at all, if human rights are to be upheld, Narendra Modi should immediately step down from public office," Congress spokesperson Jayanti Natarajan said.
An undercover operation conducted by Tehelka weekly caught Hindu activists, accused in the sectarian violence, as alleging that Modi "sanctioned" the 2002 riots, in which more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.
"The BJP needs to come clean on this issue and explain its position to the nation," the Congress party said.
The BJP put up a brave face to the charges, and declared that the exposИ would in no way affect its prospects in the state assembly elections due in December.
BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters in the national capital that the BJP has asked the Election Commission to check the attempts at aggravating communal polarisation in the state through the exposИ.
Among others who attacked Modi was Congress ally and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad. He demanded immediate arrest of Narendra Modi and BJP leader L.K. Advani for "orchestrating the mass murder" in the state after the Godhra train inferno.
"The sting operation by Tehelka aptly christened 'Operation Kalank' (disgrace) has exposed Modi's deep involvement in the post-Godhra Gujarat riots. People now know the real faces involved in the crime against humanity," Lalu Prasad told reporters in Patna.
He added: "Since Modi enjoys the patronage Advani, the opposition leader in the Lok Sabha, the latter cannot escape culpability for the mass murder."
However, the railway minister echoed the apprehensions of the Congress leaders, who said Modi might use the sting operation and its fallout to polarise the voters. He said the BJP could utilise the sting operation to once again whip up passions in the state with an eye to the elections.
Communist Party of India (CPI) general secretary A.B. Bardhan wanted the Election Commission to stop Modi from contesting the state elections. "The Election Commission should ensure that all those involved in the incidents should not be allowed to contest the elections," he said.
The state goes to elections on Dec 11 and 16.
Both the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and the Congress pleaded to the Supreme Court to expedite the cases pending against the culprits in the Gujarat genocide.
"The Tehelka tapes should be taken as prime facie evidence and the Supreme Court and the central government should move expeditiously to see that all those guilty are brought to justice.
"The central government and the law enforcement agencies have a special responsibility in this regard," the CPI-M politburo stressed.
In a statement, Congress leader and Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said: "We hope and pray that the Supreme Court will decide on the long pending requests before it expeditiously, to meet the ends of justice and to uphold the majesty and supremacy of law."
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati wrote a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, asking him to order a fresh Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the Gujarat violence.
"The manner in which the direct involvement of the Gujarat government and some close allies of the ruling BJP has been brought to light in the sting operation ... clearly shows how the massacre of members of a particular minority was undertaken with evident state patronage," the chief minister noted.
BJP spokesperson Prasad questioned the timing of the operation, saying: "Has Tehelka done any sting operation against any Congress government, whether at the state or central levels?"
He charged Tehelka with acquiring benefits during the Congress regime and said one of Tehelka's investors, Shankar Sharma, had got heavy tax relief.
He said a judicial process was already underway in Gujarat to punish those guilty of violence. "Court trials are on and a commission of inquiry is trying to come out with the truth about what happened there."
In Ahmedabad, the BJP maintained a cool faГade with state party chief Purushottam Rupala saying the expose would not impact on the party during the elections.
"These issues were the same as those raised during the 2002 elections. The outcome of that poll showed that they did not cut any ice with the electorate. If they did not have any impact then, it can hardly have any effect five years later," Rupala told IANS.
He said the sting had no "evidentiary value" under the Indian laws. "The various matters raised were already before different courts. The allegations now will certainly have no impact," he said.
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Indo-Asian News Service