Khalistan Calling newsletter dated July 02, 2003

to a friend, opinion maker, Think Tank & / or newspapers in your area

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India trying to prove that last year's anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom

never happened

just like the November 84 anti-Sikh Delhi massacres did not happen!

Gujarat Kangaroo court acquits all the accused

in the infamous 2002 Best Bakery massacre in Gujarat

a la the Delhi Kangaroo courts which found no one guilty

for the November 1984 Delhi Sikh massacres

BY

Dr. Amarjit Singh

Khalistan Affairs Centre

956-National Press Building, Washington DC 20045 USA

Tel: 202-637-9210 :: Fax: 202-637-9211

It was perhaps too much to expect justice in an Indian state run by a morally repugnant, Hindutva-fundamentalist, Neo-Nazi, BJP government. A premonitory sign was available on May 17, 2003, when the main complainant, Ms. Zaheera Habibullah Sheikh, along with her family members, was escorted to the fast-track court by Madhubhai Babubhai Shrivastav, the BJP MLA from Waghodiya. Zaheera Sheikh, the key witness, who had been a brave voice calling for justice, and who had ben seen and heard by millions on TV had gone on to retract her statement that had led to the arrest of 21 accused from the Hanuman Tekri area. She had become a "hostile witness".

She deposed that she hadn't seen anything or known anything about the incident. She was not the only one in the 44 days of trial in this "fast-track" court. Out of 120 witnesses named, 73 deposed and 41, including Zaheera Sheikh, and her entire surviving family, refused to identify the accused or identified them as their "actual saviours". The fate of the case was sealed. One more cold statistic in the long-list of high-profile cases where the killers get away with murders because witnesses to the crime "turn hostile".

It is a moot question whether these witnesses are intimidated or paid-off or whether they are persuaded or coerced to "buy" peace with their "magnanimity". "The dead won't come back," goes the reasoning. "Vengeance never got any body anything. It is past. Take care of the present, the future. Of the community." Exactly the same spiel which was heard by the witnesses of the state-sponsored November 1984 Delhi Sikh massacres in which over ten thousand Sikh men, women and children were done to death after a 'wink and a nod' from Rajiv Gandhi who had just inherited the Prime Minister's chair from his mother who had inherited it earlier from her father Pundit Jawahar Lal Nehru.

The main socalled witness Ms. Zaheera Shaikh was not present in the jam-packed fast-court, nor her relatives, when the Hindu judge, H. U. Mahida delivered his judgement: "It's not safe to convict the accused. There's not an iota of evidence for that." The 24-page judgement, after calling the massacre a "blot on the cultural city of Vadodara", goes on to say: "It was proved beyond doubt that a violent mob had attacked the bakery and killed 12 persons and was also involved in arson and loot. However, there was no legally acceptable evidence to prove that any of the accused presented before the court had committed the crime". "It seems the police fabricated the statements and got them signed from the injured," it adds. But one just needs to look at the rest of the judgement to get an idea of the role played by the prosecution: "Even though the doctors deposed that the injured had clearly narrated the details of [the] incident to them, the prosecution has submitted before the court that the injured were not in a position to do so. This is unacceptable to [the] court," wrote the judge. Indeed. Where is Zaheera Sheikh? It is not known.

This is the first verdict in a trial court in BJP-run Gujarat - after the Nanavati-Shah commission hearings, which started on June 16 - on one of the most gruesome episodes of last year's state-sponsored pogrom in the world's largest socalled democracy, India. The tone of the 'What can I do there is no evidence?' judgment was typical hypocracy and repeat of the judgments in Delhi where culprits of the anti-Sikh progrom were let off scot free. Like Delhi all the 'witnesses' in Gujarat too had turned hostile, deposing in favour of the accused, even gushing on about the goodhearetedness of the accused who they said actually saved Muslims from being raped and slaughtered. According to media reports the sudden change of version was initiated by Ms. Zahira Sheikh, daughter of the bakery's owner, whose entire family was massacred in front of her eyes and who is now incommunicado. The Hindu judge made some noises about dubious police procedure and about people losing faith in the judiciary but in the absence of 'legally accepted evidence' he let the accused off.

The 21 million Sikhs, captive in the Indian map, should have no doubt that they are next in line for genocide in the world's largest fundamentalist-Hindutva, Neo-Nazi state - India. They better keep their eyes and ears open and their powder dry and take note of what is going on in Gujarat run by Hindutva-fundamentalist BJP. What is happening in Gujarat has already happened to us in November 1984 when frenzied Hindu mobs, mustered by the ruling Congress party leadership carried out a pogrom, with police help, against Sikhs just because they looked like the two Sikh assassins (nay martyrs) who were rumoured to have dispatched Prime minister Indira Gandhi of the Nehru dynasty.

It is obvious that there is a crisis of evidence in India - both in the technically legal and in the general sense of the word. Every form of legally recognized evidence has been undermined in Gujarat - as it was in Delhi - by the police, the civic bodies and the state administeration: first information and post-mortem reports and police transcripts of witnesses accounts have been tampered with a 'wink and a nod' from the state and central government both run by the fascist Neo-Nazi Hindutva-fundamentalist BJP, a offspring of the fascist RSS whose apparatchiks murdered India's founding father Gandhi in 1948.

Most of the witnesses in Gujarat are poor, illiterate, dispossessed and powerless and belong to the oppressed Muslim trading minority. The systematic abuse of power at every level of a brazenly communalized law and order machinery in Gujarat has not only subverted the evidentiary process but has also fostered a regime of fear and intimidation among the minorities in general and montheistic Christian, Muslim and Sikh minorities in particular. In India gory events - Delhi, Bhagalpur and Bombay massacres and pogroms and many before and since - have over time 'unhappened' and are not discussed despite the existance of witnesses, reports, photographs, video-footage, recorded testimonies and every other forms of evidence to prove that they did happen.

Any Sikh who tries to discuss on any forum, or private meeting, the November 1984 Delhi pogrom. (in which ten thousand innocent Sikh men, women and children were butchered for no reason and for which crime no one has been charged despite passage of nearly twenty years) with any educated Hindu in authority or wealth, only gets silence as an answer! No repentance! No sympathy! No empathy! It is obvious that we Sikhs should remember, and we should always let our Hindutva-fundamentalist interlocutors know that we remember, the two famous sayings that, "He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend" and that, "Revenge is a much more punctual paymaster than gratitude."

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