In this country and particularly in Jammu and Kashmir, we always take refuge under euphemism whenever encountered with ugly situation may it be political or social. We are never tired of telling the outer world boasting of ours being peace living and tolerant society despite facing the black chapters of 1990 in Kashmir or odd incidents of communal overtones.
Keeping in view the recent incidents of communal tension in the hands of few miscreants at Roop Nagar, Nanak Nagar and later at Poonch village, we held back our comments of the last week court judgment Gulbarg Society killings during communal riots in Gujarat that followed the Godra massacre. To keep our readers abreast of the Special Court's decision and its findings on one of the worst communal riots, we will failing if we do not share our views which is relevant in our state.
The elusive justice finally seems to have been delivered in the case of killing at the Gulbarg Society during the 2002 Gujarat riots which had shattered India after many worst communal riots. Last Friday, a special court sentenced 11 of the 24 convicts to life imprisonment. Twelve others were given seven years in jail for arson and rioting while one was given a 10-year sentence for his role in the riots in Ahmedabad following the carnage at the Godhra Railway Station.
Nearly 60 pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were charred to death when miscreants set the stationary compartment on fire. The resulting anger spiraled into State-wide riots, though the carnage was the worst in and around Ahmedabad. Sixty-nine people were killed at the Gulbarg Society complex. Among them was a former Congress MP, Ehsan Jafri.
After the Godhra outrage, in which nearly 60 of their co-religionists were burnt to death, a wave of shock and anger had swept across the State. The resulting protests erupted into rioting in several places, including at the Gulberg Society. Here, the court order is an eye-opener. The judge said the mob that gathered at the Gulberg complex was not “really interested in causing deaths” but it turned murderous once Jafri opened fire at it.
In the judge's words, the motley group was “largely involved in stone-throwing and attempting to burn and damage the vehicles and properties of members of the minority community outside Gulbarg Society”. However, “private firing on the part of the deceased Shri Ehsan Jafri, which resulted in some deaths from amongst the members of the mob and injuries to a few others infuriated the mob who saw persons belonging to the majority community falling to the bullets being fired…” It is the death of a few among the protesters that turned the situation ugly, making the mob indulge in a killing spree. The court dismissed the testimony of witnesses who claimed that Jafri was “immobile and could not move out of his bungalow” as a case of “selective amnesia”.
Of course, no sensible person can condone the orgy of violence and death in the riots, be it Gujarat or anywhere else. But the way the foreign-funded NGOs, aided and abetted by the self-styled secularists, went on and on about the Gujarat riots being a premeditated anti-Muslim pogrom, ignoring the fact that nearly 300 out of a total toll of 1,000-odd were Hindus, and that Godhra was a huge provocation, it would seem such killings were the first and last in free India. What is more shocking is that in the one-sided narrative the fact that Jafri had virtually triggered the killings by gratuitously opening fire at the mob-maybe to defend his self-assumed position as a most important resident of the Gulbarg Society-was virtually left out. It was being made out that the Gulberg killings were unprovoked. If the media-driven frenzy still obliges the widow of Jafri to cry injustice at the convictions in the Gulbarg case, there is nothing that anyone can do or should do.
The lesson one draws out of all this is that communal frenzy will bring only pains, agony, death and destruction for one and all – particularly innocents, children and women for whom lif-long sufferings never ends.
