From Tehelka
Senior IPS officer Sanjeev Bhatt arrested in Ahmedabad
On a complaint by constable
KD Pant that Bhatt coerced him to sign a false affidavit supporting
Bhatt’s claim that he was present at a meeting convened by Modi after
the Godhra incident.
Senior Indian Police Service
(IPS) officer Sanjeev Bhatt, who had submitted an affidavit in the
Supreme Court in April saying Gujarat CM Narendra Modi had asked the
police to be indifferent to rioters attacking Muslims during 2002-riots,
was arrested in Ahmedabad on Friday afternoon. He has been arrested on a
complaint by constable KD Pant that Bhatt coerced him to sign a false
affidavit supporting Bhatt’s claim that he was present at a meeting
convened by Modi after the Godhra incident. Bhatt has maintained that
at this meeting Modi instructed senior police officials to allow Hindus
to “vent their anger” in communal clashes in which over 1200 people
died.
“Bhatt’s statement is being
recorded at the Assistant Commissioner of Police’s office; he has been
arrested under Indian Penal Code 341, 342, 189, 193, 195,” said Sudhir
Sinha Police Commissioner Ahmedabad. The sections described pertain to
wrongful restraint, wrongful confinement, giving or fabricating false
evidence.
Bhatt who was Deputy
Commissioner Intelligence in Ahmedabad in 2002 was suspended this August
by Gujarat government for not reporting to work for 10 months. “It is a
common practice in Gujarat to try instil fear in whistleblowers, and
subvert the criminal justice system. They issued a chargesheet against
IPS officer Rahul Sharma earlier to achieve the same ends,” said RB
Sreekumar who was Additional DGP Intelligence from April to September
2002 .
Bhatt had earlier filed a plea
in the Supreme Court to get this criminal case of asking his
sub-ordinate to file a false affidavit transferred outside Gujarat. He
had filed a petition in Gujarat High Court for relief in another case of
1990 in which he and six other police officers have been accused for
being responsible for custodial death of one person in Jamnagar. On 27
September, Gujarat government opposed this plea in the High Court saying
Bhatt was trying to delay criminal proceedings against him.
‘I was there. Narendra Modi said let the people vent their anger’
DIG Sanjeev Bhatt knows the terrible truth about Gujarat 2002. ASHISH KHETAN has his explosive revelations. Will the Supreme Court take it on record?
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CHIEF MINISTER Narendra Modi’s
interrogation by the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team
(SIT), published in TEHELKA last week, (The Artful Faker), was a class
act in tactical evasion. But Modi made one slip. On the evening of 27
February 2002, after the terrible Sabarmati train carnage in Godhra,
Modi had called a ‘law and order meeting’ at his residence, at which, in
an unforgivable act, he is infamously reported to have told his
officers, “Let the Hindus vent their anger.” The signal was sent. The
mayhem that followed is history.
In March 2010, when asked by SIT inquiry
officer AK Malhotra about who was present at this meeting, Modi named
seven bureaucrats and officers. Then, he singled out one police officer:
Sanjeev Bhatt, deputy commissioner of internal security in the State
Intelligence Bureau (SIB).
Malhotra had asked Modi who was present at the
meeting, not who was absent. But curiously, after he had listed the
names of those present, Modi volunteered this unnecessary and unprompted
piece of information: Sanjeev Bhatt, DC (Int) was not at the meeting,
he said, because it was a “high-level meeting”.
It is significant that Modi unilaterally tried
to disown and discredit Bhatt’s presence at the 27 February meeting
because two months earlier, as officer after officer had pleaded amnesia
about the proceedings at the meeting, just one officer had told the SIT
team that if the Supreme Court were to summon him, or if a criminal
case were to be registered, he would testify and tell the truth of what
he heard at that meeting. That officer was Sanjeev Bhatt.
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It is also significant that neither Modi nor
others refute the fact that Bhatt was present the next morning at
another highlevel law-and-order meeting called by the chief minister (at
which no infamous thing was said). Or, indeed, at several other lawand-
order meetings chaired by the chief minister in the weeks to come. If
he was not too junior to attend a meeting on 28 February then, why was
he too junior to attend one on 27 February?
What does Sanjeev Bhatt know that Modi would like to discredit?
When Sanjeev Bhatt was summoned by the SIT in January 2010, he deposed for two days before them.
“As I was surveying the torched building and
the compound, alongside the heaps of charred remains, what looked like a
mix of household objects and decomposing bits of human flesh, I came
upon a half burnt Encyclopaedia Britannica. I picked it up and wiped off
the soot deposited on it with my handkerchief. Inside the book, at the
top on the first page, the name Ahsan Jafri was written with a flourish.
For a few moments I kept staring at the name, admiring the stylish
handwriting. Though I had never known or met Jafri in my life, in his
handwriting I could see that he must have been a cultured and learned
man,” Bhatt, 47, told the SIT.
Bhatt was describing the heartrending scene he
saw on his visit to Gulberg Society two days after a Hindu mob had
killed 69 Muslims in this building. Among the dead was former Congress
MP Ahsan Jafri. He was 64 at the time and his body and the bodies of 37
other victims were hacked and burnt beyond recognition and thus could
never be identified: they were all buried en masse. The bodies of only
31 victims were identified, some by their mangled remains, some through
the few discernible pieces of clothing that had remained unburnt.
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“My thoughts immediately went back to my
childhood,” Bhatt continued. “In those days there was no internet and
for any reference material I would have to cycle to the nearest library.
As a student it was my desire to own a copy of Encyclopaedia
Britannica. And here it was lying half burnt, in a heap of charred human
remains before me.” After a moment, he added, “The stench was
nauseating. In many parts the soil was crusted with a thick charcoal
like paste, perhaps a mixture of burnt human flesh and sundry other
things. The soles of my shoes got plastered with that substance. I
haven’t worn those shoes since neither have I cleaned them.”
Bhatt had other things to tell. It was
agonizing, he said, to see the impunity with which violent mobs had gone
about the city unleashing terror.
“Two days after the Godhra train incident,” he
told the SIT, “I was passing by Saraspur area. To my right I saw a mob
trying to demolish a masjid known as Mancha Masjid. I told my driver to
stop. The moment I stepped out of the car, the mob started dispersing.”
Police and mobs don’t sit well together, Bhatt
added. But during the 2002 riots that’s exactly what happened. As
sections of the Gujarat police morphed into a cheering crowd on the
sideline, Hindu mobs went on a killing spree. “It takes decades for a
building to be reduced to ruins. The Gulberg Society was turned into
wreckage in a span of few hours,” he said.
Some of what Bhatt told the SIT was recorded in
a typed statement, a copy of which is now before the Supreme Court. But
it’s what Bhatt told the SIT cops offthe- record that paints the true
picture of the Gujarat riots.
IN ITS cover story last week (Here is the smoking gun, 12 February),
TEHELKA had exposed how the SITwas unwilling to prosecute Modi and
other senior officials and ministers, despite recording an overwhelming
body of evidence that showed that both Modi himself, and his government,
had behaved in a dangerously communal manner at the peak of the riots,
had illegal positioned politicians in police control rooms, persecuted
neutral officers, appointed Sangh members as public prosecutors and
destroyed police wireless messages and minutes of crucial law and order
meetings. Yet, the SIT had concluded, all of this was not sufficient
grounds to investigate Modi further “under law”.
The SIT team had also reported that the most
serious allegation against Modi — his alleged instruction to senior
administrative and police officials that Hindus should be allowed to
vent their anger — could not be substantiated. Inquiry officer Malhotra
reported that such a meeting had indeed been held on 27 February, but
none of the officers present, save Sanjeev Bhatt, would testify about
what had transpired at the meeting. (Curiously, two claimed amnesia;
four denied Modi had made such a statement; one denied he had been part
of the meeting.) Malhotra also noted that most of these officers did not
seem to be speaking their minds, either because they had been rewarded
by the Modi government with choice postings, or because they were still
in its service and feared the fall-out.
However, in an explosive detail that can have
far-reaching consequences if the Supreme Court decides to pursue it, on
page 149 of his report, Malhotra also noted that “Sanjeev Bhatt, the
then DC (Int), has claimed off-the-record that the CM did utter these
words.”
This opens up space for some urgent questions.
What exactly did Sanjeev Bhatt tell the SIT “off-the-record”? Why did he
choose not to put it on record? And what impact will it have if it is
put on the record? First, read what Bhatt told the SIT.
“There is a lot of anger in the people. This
time a balanced approach against Hindus and Muslims will not work. It is
necessary that the anger of the people is allowed to be vented.” These,
according to Bhatt, are the exact incendiary words Modi had spoken at
the meeting and which Bhatt later scribbled down in a personal notepad
he maintained during the riots.
When Bhatt made this revelation, Malhotra had
jumped out of his chair. “You are the first man who has dared to speak
the truth,” he said and took Bhatt by his hand to the cabin of his
senior officer Paramvir Singh, a former special director of the Central
Bureau of Investigation, who was supervising the probe against Modi at
the time. Singh, too, was reportedly delighted to find a witness ready
to stand his ground and speak the truth.
Bhatt then described the ground floor room
where the meeting occurred. He also told Malhotra and Singh that though
the then BJP MLA Haren Pandya was not part of the meeting, he was
present in one of the adjoining rooms in the CM’s bungalow while the
meeting was going on.
(About two and a half months after the riots,
on 13 May 2002, Pandya had deposed before two retired judges — Justice
PB Sawant and Justice Hosbert Suresh — that ‘he had attended a meeting
on 27 February 2002 night at the residence of Modi in which the latter
had made it clear that should there be a backlash from the Hindus the
police should not come in their way.’ Pandya was murdered mysteriously a
few months later.)
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Both Justices Sawant and Suresh have testified
before the SIT confirming Pandya’s deposition before them, implicating
Modi. Now, Bhatt’s version of events coupled with the existing evidence
pointed towards a strong possibility that on the night of 27 February,
Modi had convened two meetings — one administrative and the second
political — and on one hand gave VHP and BJP leaders a fatal signal to
mobilise riotous mobs and on the other hand instructed the police
machinery to turn a blind eye.
(In 2007, in another corroborative detail, the
then Godhra BJP MLA and a rabid Bajrang Dal leader, Haresh Bhatt had
also told this reporter in the course of an undercover investigation
that Modi had given rioters approval to run amok for three days. Arvind
Pandya, the Modi government’s special prosecutor in the Justice
Nanavati- Shah Commission, was also captured on a spy-cam saying it was
Modi’s strong leadership that had made the post-Godhra pogrom possible.)
Bhatt told the SIT officers everything that
transpired at the meeting but declined to put it on record because the
ongoing SIT probe was merely a preliminary enquiry and not a criminal
investigation under the Criminal Procedure Code of India.
“He has stated that he attended this meeting in
his capacity as an intelligence officer, and as per his belief, it
would not be professionally appropriate on his part to divulge the exact
nature of discussions that took place during the said meeting. However,
he would be duty bound to disclose the same to the best of his
recollection and ability, as and when he is required to do so under
legal obligation,” Malhotra noted in his report. (Bhatt is presently a
DIG with the State Reserve Police Training Centre.) The understanding
was that if an FIRwas filed later, Bhatt’s initial statement could be
expanded into a full disclosure, recorded under Section 161 of the CrPC.
Though this one statement, if proved, should be
enough indictment against Modi, there are other damning things Bhatt
told the SIT team off-the-record.
In a damaging written statement, which is now
with the Supreme Court, Bhatt had recorded how the SIB was flooded with a
deluge of intelligence after the Sabarmati tragedy, indicating that the
VHP, Bajrang Dal and other Hindutva organisations could incite communal
violence in Ahmedabad and other districts in Gujarat. He had also
recorded that all the while mobs were mobilising at Meghani Nagar and
surrounding Gulberg Society, the SIB was consistently receiving and
passing on field intelligence to the office of the then DGP K
Chakravarthi and then Commissioner of Police of Ahmedabad, PC Pande
about the dangerous build up.
But what Bhatt told the SIT off-therecord is even more shocking.
Bhatt told Malhotra that he did not only pass
this information to the DGP and Commissioner: he also spoke directly
with the office of the chief minister himself.
“Initially I kept passing the reports of a mob
build-up near Gulberg Society to DGP K Chakravarthi and Commissioner PC
Pande. But I found Pande was not bothered at all,” Bhatt said.
“Then I went to the office of DGP Chakravarti
and told him to somehow prevail upon Pande to at least announce curfew
in Naroda and Meghani Nagar. After much dithering, Pande announced
curfew sometime post noon. But the order existed only on paper. On the
ground it was never implemented. The mob at Gulberg was not dispersed
until 4.30 pm,” Bhatt said.
“Since the curfew was never imposed, the crowd
at Gulberg kept multiplying,” he continued. “Finally, when I saw that
Pande was not budging at all, I made Chakravarthi speak to Pande on the
phone. But to my utter shock I found Pande was still not willing to
act,” Bhatt reportedly told Malhotra.
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“It was at this point that I called up OP Singh
(Modi’s personal secretary) and spoke to him. I explained the gravity
of the situation at Gulberg Society to him and told him to communicate
immediately to the chief minister that if the police didn’t act
immediately, the mob would set the society on fire and kill dozens of
Muslims including former Congress MP Ahsan Jafri,” Bhatt said.
According to Bhatt, after his call to Modi’s
secretary he waited a while to see if the city police would finally act.
But, terrifyingly, there was still no response. “At this point I got
convinced,” Bhatt told Malhotra, “that Modi had really meant what he had
said the night before and his message had percolated down to a large
section of the police machinery.” According to Bhatt, Chakravarthi had
wanted to act but he was helpless. The city police was under Pande and
he was not ready to do anything.
Given the way other senior officers had evaded
questions about that fateful meeting at the chief minister’s residence
(See TEHELKA story The Smoking Gun), Bhatt was the only hope for the SIT
in its quest for the truth. But between January, when Bhatt deposed
before the SIT, and May 2010, when SIT submitted its report to the
Supreme Court, things changed dramatically. In the last week of February
2010, Paramvir Singh quit the probe team citing personal reasons.
Malhotra alone drafted the 600-odd page inquiry report which he
submitted before the court in May 2010. And instead of recommending the
registration of an FIR and full-fledged investigation (as Bhatt had
thought the SITwould do), the SIT came to conclusions that contradicted
the very findings on which they were based.
Raghavan and Malhotra reprimanded Modi
for being unfair, partisan, communal and immoral but — inexplicably —
claimed this was not sufficient ground for a further and more stringent
investigation against him. They seemed to forget that non-partisan and
fair conduct from Modi could have saved the lives of hundreds of
innocent men, women and children whose only crime was that they were
Muslims in a state run by him.
THERE ARE many other questions
the SIT must answer. Why didn’t it keep a written account of everything
Bhatt told them off the record for future reference? Doesn’t the
Supreme Court have the right to know Bhatt’s full off-the-record
deposition? Why did Malhotra only mention a small portion of it?
Equally, did Malhotra follow up on the leads and inputs provided by
Bhatt? If not, what was the purpose of making him depose for over two
days? What efforts did Malhotra make to corroborate Bhatt’s version of
events besides asking the top rung of the bureaucracy and police, who
are themselves cited as accused in Ahsan Jafri’s wife Zakia’s complaint?
Why did he not go down the ladder to lower level police personnel to
know from them what was happening on the ground?
TEHELKA has managed to track down one
independent witness who has corroborated Bhatt’s claim of having
attended the 27 February evening meeting. This witness is one more proof
of the shoddiness of the SIT probe. Proof of all the unturned stones;
the work waiting to be done if there is the will for it.
But before we get to that, take a look at what
was happening behind the scenes in the corridors of power, even as
hundreds of Muslims were being brutalised on the streets of Ahmedabad.
Sanjeev Bhatt was the senior most deputy
commissioner in the State Intelligence Bureau (there were two other DCs
besides him) and was also the longest serving officer in the bureau. He
was in-charge of the internal security desk and his job involved
collecting, collating and analysing intelligence before sending it to
senior police officers, the home minister and chief minister of the
state.
On 28 February, police inspectors,
subinspectors and constables posted with the SIBwere constantly sending
reports to the SIB control room about the rapidly deteriorating
situation in Naroda Gaon, Naroda Patiya and Meghani Nagar (where Gulberg
Society was situated).
According to Bhatt’s testimony before the SIT, a
SIB police inspector whose last name was Bharwad was positioned in
Meghani Nagar for collecting intelligence. (Bhatt didn’t remember his
first name but told Malhotra he could easily make an official enquiry
with the SIB and find out.) According to Bhatt, Bharwad was sending him a
ball by ball commentary of the crisis spiraling at Gulberg Society.
According to Bhatt, Bharwad told him over the
phone that local VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders kept shouting abusive anti-
Muslim slogans for several hours outside Gulberg Society, inciting and
mobilising the mob. Many VHP and Bajrang Dal members from Meghani Nagar
were part of the mob, but tempos, cars and motorcycles carrying rioters
from other localities also kept pulling in, adding to the numbers. Most
of the Bajrang Dal activists were carrying tridents in their belts, a
small number were carrying firearms. But the most preferred weaponry was
gas cylinders and cans filled with petrol and diesel.
For several hours, hundreds of Muslims who had
taken shelter in Gulberg — thinking that a society housing a Congress
leader would be safer — made desperate calls to friends, relatives and
the police, pleading to be rescued. But the local police remained a mute
spectator. At times, it even goaded the mob into committing violence.
At around 2 pm, after four hours of complete paralysis on the part of
the police, the emboldened mob finally stormed the building.
“According to Bharwad, the rioters first looted
the place. He also reported a few instances of rape. As Bharwad sent us
these field reports, we called up the Ahmedabad police control and
passed it on to them,” Bhatt told Malhotra.
“At around 2.30 pm he again called me and told
me that the mob had dragged out Ahsan Jafri and had clasped his head in a
sandsa (a contraption used in Gujarat to catch stray dogs). For some
time the mob paraded him around, his head still clasped in the iron
contraption, kicking and slashing him. Then they removed the sandsa and
hacked him into pieces. Finally they made a heap of him and set it on
fire,” Bhatt reportedly told Malhotra.
WHEN NARENDRA Modi was
questioned by the SIT, Malhotra asked him: ‘Did you receive any
information about an attack by a mob on Gulberg Society? If so, when and
through whom? What action did you take in the matter?’
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MODI REPLIED: ‘To the best of
my recollection, I was informed in the law and order review meeting held
in the night about the attack on Gulberg Society in Meghani Nagar area
and Naroda Patiya.’
Where does the truth lie? Bhatt had told
Malhotra that he had personally informed OP Singh, Modi’s personal
secretary, about the ongoing Gulberg carnage. It is also important to
remember that since October 2001, when Narendra Modi took over as
Gujarat chief minister, he has held the post of home minister of the
state. In this capacity, the Gujarat Police and state intelligence
functions directly under him.
It is also important to remember that on 28
February, as the massacre at Gulberg Society ensued, the police control
room was flooded with distress calls. Here are just a few wireless
messages that the SIT has managed to procure.
12:20 HRS: Police Inspector KG
Erda of Meghani Nagar sends a message to Ahmedabad police control room
that a mob of around 10,000 had surrounded Gulberg Society and was
pelting stones and also trying to set it on fire. Erda requested for
additional forces.
12:38 HRS: A police mobile van
stationed near Meghani Nagar sends a message to Ahmedabad police
control room that Gulberg Society had been surrounded by a mob of 4,000
to 5,000 people.
14:05 HRS: Joint Commissioner
Sector 2, MK Tandon sends a message to police control room that Ahsan
Jafri had been surrounded by a mob and additional forces should be
dispatched.
14:14 HRS: KG Erda sends
another message to Ahmedabad police control room that a mob of 10,000
people was about to set Gulberg Society on fire and ACP, DCP and
additional forces be sent immediately.
14:45 HRS: KG Erda sends yet another message that the society had been surrounded from all sides and the mob was about to set it on fire.
15:45 HRS: Tandon sends a
message to control room enquiring if there was any incidence of violence
at Gulberg Society (by this time the carnage was in full swing).
Just this tiny sample of messages is proof that
the police were fully aware of what was going on but did little to
disperse the mobs, except exchange messages. It is also important to
note here that the SIT report says that the original police control room
records are missing and that ‘the Gujarat government has reportedly
destroyed the police wireless communication of the period pertaining to
the riots.’
Isn’t just this — the destruction of official records — sufficient grounds for further investigation?
From 12.30 pm to 3.45pm, no reinforcements were
sent. Tandon only reached the spot around 4:30 pm to clear the bodies.
Erda has already been booked by the SIT in the Gulberg Society case. SIT
has also accused Tandon and the then DCP of the area PB Gondia of
willfully allowing the carnage and is investigating their role further.
But, inexplicably, the SIT has not indicted PC Pande, the Commissioner
of Police, Ahmedabad at the time.
Yet, here’s the obvious question: what did
Pande do about the constant stream of reports, both from the local
police and the SIB, about the mob build-up? (A few wireless messages
that the SIT has managed to procure and quoted in its report show that
Pande had apparently instructed a few officers to reach the spot but he
never followed up on his own orders to find out if they were complied
with.) This, coupled with Bhatt’s account that Pande deliberately did
not pay any heed to his intelligence inputs, nails Pande’s culpability.
There is also the plain, bald fact: why did no senior officers or
reinforcements reach the spot?
Pande was one of the officers present in the
infamous February 27 meeting at the CM’s residence. He also received
around 15 calls from the chief minister’s office around the time the
massacres at Naroda and Gulberg were underway. The natural question that
arises is what did Pande discuss with the chief minister and his aides
while these terrible massacres were on? In a constitutional state, the
chief minister would have asked Pande what he was doing to ensure the
safety of citizens and instructed him to take urgent measures. If Modi
claims, as he has done in his interrogation session with the SIT, that
he didn’t even know about the massacres till later that night, should
one accuse him only of a communal mindset or also add plain inefficiency
and incompetence?
In an interesting codicil, after his retirement
in 2009, Pande was appointed as chairman of the Gujarat Electricity
Regulatory Commission — a post-retirement benefit he continues to enjoy.
ACCORDING TO SIT sources,
besides narrating his first-hand account, Bhatt also submitted a few
intelligence reports prepared during the riots to the SIT.
A few reports, dated February 27, soon after
the Sabarmati train carnage news broke, show that the state government
had a mountain of intelligence which clearly showed that VHP and Bajrang
Dal leaders and cadres were preparing for communal violence on February
28.
A report named DIR/2/COM/Precaution/ 72/2002
dated 27.02.2002 said: Information has been received that in respect of
the Godhra incident, VHP has called for Gujarat bandh on 28.02.2002. In
that respect the VHP has called for a meeting at its Ahmedabad office to
chalk out future activities and strategies. In this regard necessary
watch needs to be kept and any information so received must be
transmitted.’
In another message to all district police the
SIB said, ‘The situation arising out of bandh call needs a strict vigil
from the police units to avoid any untoward incident.’
Yet another message, numbered D-1/9- HA,
alerted all police commissioners and district SPs that after the Godhra
incident the people of minority community travelling by public transport
and cars may be targeted to take revenge.
Bhatt also submitted a few reports which had
warned the government very early on the morning of February 28 about the
mobilisation of mobs by Hindutva organisations. Again, the reports were
sent to the chief minister’s office.
For instance, a report named C/Precaution/
177/2002, dated 28.02.2002 and marked to the CMO and MOS (Home), states:
‘Some members of Bajrang Dal and VHP have been found to be part of the
mobs at different places. They are moving on motorcycles and are
attacking autorickshaw drivers who belong to the minority community.
They are also attacking poor people of other professions from the
minority community and thereby causing serious injuries. It is hereby
directed that police must take extra precautions in respect of such
vehicles and people.’
There are other glaring crevices between
official statements and the truth. Contrary to the Modi government’s
claim that there were no funeral processions of the victims of the
Sabarmati train carnage paraded in Ahmedabad, the intelligence reports
submitted by Bhatt show that funeral processions were indeed taken out
in Ahmedabad. This lends credence to the allegation that Modi
deliberately had the bodies brought from Godhra to Ahmedabad to fuel the
communal frenzy.
A REPORT named C/Dir/ Shamshan
yatra/ 176/2002 dated 28.02.2002 and marked to Modi’s office and senior
police officers states: ‘In respect of the incident at Godhra in which
the funeral procession of identified bodies of dead karsevaks is likely
to be taken out from the Sola Civil Hospital. In this procession a large
number of people are expected to participate and during and after the
processions there is a likelihood of disturbances.’
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Bhatt also gave the SIT a series of
intelligence reports suggesting that a large number of bodies were
dumped in a well at Naroda Patiya then covered with debris so nobody
would get suspicious. His reports also show that when an SIB inspector
tried to probe further, somebody planted a dead pig in the well as a
decoy for the foul stench and derailed the search. (It is significant to
remember that one of the prime conspirators of the Naroda Patiya
massacre, Babu Bajrangi had told this reporter during TEHELKA’s
undercover story that many bodies were disposed off in wells to bring
down the official death toll.)
Human rights activists like Teesta Setalvad
have been petitioning the government and the courts for eight years to
excavate the well at Naroda Patiya. When the probe was transferred to
the SIT, these activists reiterated their plea but the SIT bought the
Gujarat government’s explanation without further probing.
All of this emerges from just a few reports
that Bhatt managed to procure. In a move that can only be construed as a
cover- up, the Modi government did not provide the SIT with any
documents related to intelligence or law and order meetings pertaining
to the riots. The government also refused to share the security logs of
the chief minister and other senior officials which would have shown
their movement during the riots.
Apart from Bhatt, there are only two other
police officers who have provided the SIT with crucial documents that
could nail the Modi government.
Former ADGP (Int) B Sreekumar gave the SIT a
huge volume of intelligence reports on how arms and bombs were smuggled
in Ahmedabad during the riots and how the Modi government didn’t take
enough security measures for the karsevaks before the Godhra train
incident. Both Bhatt and Sreekumar were shunted out of the SIB by the
same order on the same date: 18 September 2002. Sreekumar was superseded
and had to fight a case to get his pension; Bhatt has not been given
one executive posting for the past eight years.
IPS officer Rahul Sharma who gave the SIT
cellphone data records of senior ministers, bureaucrats and police
officers for the period pertaining to the riots was served a show cause
notice by the Modi government last week for producing these records
before the SIT without its permission. (See box)
The SIT report has recorded many instances of
how upright officers were persecuted by the Modi government after the
riots. Clearly, that intimidation continues.
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The SIT report – under whatever compulsion it
may have felt – has tried to deflect Sanjeev Bhatt’s claim that he was
at the February 27 meeting and that he had gone there on the insistence
of DGP Chakravarthi. But TEHELKA managed to track down Tarachand Yadav,
50, a Gujarat police head constable, who was Bhatt’s driver during the
riots. Yadav told TEHELKA that on February 27, 2002, Bhatt left office
at around 8 pm, after which he drove Bhatt to his home at Drive-In Road,
Ahmedabad.
‘Sahab went jogging and returned after an hour
or so. I had finished my dinner when sahab again came out and told me
that we had to go back to Police Bhawan at Gandhinagar. When we reached
DGP sahab’s car was already parked outside. Sahab got into DGP sahab’s
car and told me to follow. We drove to CM Bungalow in Gandhinagar. DGP
sahab and Bhatt sahab went inside. There were other cars also parked
outside the bungalow. After about half an hour Bhatt sahib came out and I
drove him back to Police Bhawan. Sahab must have worked in the office
for another hour or so after which I drove him back home.’
TEHELKA is ready to provide the SIT and, if asked, the Supreme Court a copy of Yadav’s recorded version of events.
But the moot question is, if a newsmagazine can
make the effort to cross-check and verify Bhatt’s claims, why didn’t
the SIT — mandated by no less than the Supreme Court of India — take
more trouble to get to the bottom of one of the most violent ruptures in
our nation’s recent history?
Can a lax probe of this nature – which has
itself listed all that it has not done — ever hope to unravel the truth
behind the killing of over 2,000 innocent people? Will Gujarat remain a
festering wound, providing extremists in both the Hindu and Muslim
communities a pretext to indulge in more horrific acts of violence? Will
no corrective lesson go out to all those leaders and officers who
failed in their duty? Or will the Supreme Court intervene forcefully in
the riot victims’ despairing quest for justice?
All eyes are now on the three judge bench which will convene on March 3 and deliver its much anticipated verdict.
LAST MEN STANDING
|
The persecution of upright officers continues even now, finds ANUMEHA YADAV
A KEY POINT of the SIT report
on the 2002 riots was that it affirms that the Narendra Modi government
persecuted police officers who tried to stop the violence. Their
persecution is still on.
On 5 February, the government issued a notice
to senior IPS officer Rahul Sharma asking how and why he submitted phone
records of senior politicians and bureaucrats during the riots to
inquiry commissions without approval. In its notice, nine years aer the
riots, it asked Sharma why action should not be taken against him.
“The government is trying to discredit Sharma
and intimidate him. It destroyed all original evidence and now it is
trying to discredit the records Sharma has submitted,” says lawyer Mukul
Sinha of Jan Sangharsh Manch.
The Modi government did not keep any records or
minutes of the crucial meetings it held during the riots, something the
SIT has raised a question over.
Sharma, a 1992 batch IPS officer now posted as
DIG Rajkot, was DCP (control room), Ahmedabad, in April 2002.
Investigating the violence at Naroda Patiya and Gulberg Society, he
collected data from AT&T and CelForce mobile service providers of
all calls received and made in Ahmedabad during this period and handed
over these to the Crime Branch. These CDS containing phone records of
senior ministers, police officers, and members of RSS and VHP to each
other were subsequently “lost”. But while deposing before the Nanavati
Commission set up in March 2002 to inquire into the riots, Sharma
submitted a copy of this CD that he had preserved.
|
These phone records have been one of the most
significant pieces of evidence in nailing the guilty, including the
arrest and the cancelling of anticipatory bails of Gujarat VHP president
Jaideep Patel and minister Maya Kodnani in 2009, and in the
investigation into the killing of Congress ex-MP Ahsan Jafri and 30
others at Gulberg Society. The CDS are vital pieces of evidence in the
Naroda Patiya violence in which 105 Muslims were killed by official
count.
But scuttling any effort for fair investigations seems to be the norm in Gujarat. A week before Sharma received his notice, another
senior IPS officer, Satish Verma, member of a separate SIT set up to
inquire into the 2004 Ishrat Jehan encounter, flagged that he was being
restricted from pursuing leads in the case. Verma, one of three police
officers probing this encounter allegedly carried by Gujarat police
officers to please their political bosses, submitted an affidavit citing
instances of interference.
In an 80-page affidavit in the Gujarat High
Court on 28 January, Verma described how obvious forensic evidence had
been ignored by a previous SIT set up by the Gujarat government in 2009,
including bullets in Ishrat’s body that did not match the weapons the
police claim were used in the encounter. Verma described how Mohan Jha, a
Gujarat cadre officer, who was also a member of the previous SIT, and
Karnail Singh, a Delhi cadre officer, deliberately forwarded the
retraction of a key witness to the HC without any comments to create
doubt and ambiguity. Verma disclosed how Jha, who is the current JCP,
Detection of Crime Branch (DCB), tried to put 26 police officers
directly under himself in the Special Operations Group last month,
claiming they were needed for security in the Vibrant Gujarat summit.
All 26 were with the DCB on the day of the encounter.
“Verma says he had started maintaining an
official note on what is going on in the SIT in December, 19 days aer
the SIT began work. This shows he saw the need to put the irregularities
on the record and anticipated that his efforts for a fair investigation
would be obstructed. It shows how twisted this attempt to investigate
these fake encounter killings is,” says a senior police officer,
requesting anonymity.
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