The acquittal of Faheem Ansari and some questions

The trial court in Ahmedabad created history of sorts by convicting a senior BJP leader and former minister in the Narendra Modi government, Mayaben Kodnani, and a former Bajrang Dal convener Babu Bajrangi along with 30 others for the massacre of innocent Muslims in Naroda Patiya. This is the first case in which political leaders, if one can call them that, have been found guilty. The tears streaming down the faces of the survivors of this terrible terrible massacre was indication of the suffering and trauma they have gone through in all these years.

The Supreme Court, while convicting Kasab, acquitted two Indian Muslims, Farheem Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed, who had been accused by the Mumbai investigators of being co-conspirators. The lower courts had acquitted them, but clearly the authorities had gone in appeal to the apex court that has upheld the acquittal. Significantly, except for a few newspapers no one even bothered to speak of this important acquittal, and even the sections of the media that reported the facts did not dwell on the trauma that the two men and their families must have gone through.

Who is going to compensate them? Rehabilitate them and their families? There isn’t even a hint of an apology from the state government and all those responsible for keeping two innocent men in jail for a crime they clearly had no part in. In fact more and more reports from Maharashtra suggest that such arrests have become a common practice with the police and the politicians totally unaccountable for the numbers of innocent people they arrest, torture and jail without any proof whatsoever. So while the nation exults over the death sentence for Kasab, it should also pause to pay some thought to the two innocent men whose lives have been ruined in the process.

The second case of Naroda Patiya also has an untold story, of the 97 victims who were brutally raped and killed by a 5,000 strong mob on February 28,2002 of whom 32 have been convicted by the courts. But what about the rest? Where are they? Why have they not been arrested? This along with the trauma and the suffering of the victims is a story that needs to be tracked down, and told. For, while justice has been dispensed, the country needs to assess whether it has been enough, whether there are several loose ends that need to be tied so that the secular and just foundations of India are not just strengthened, but protected against future assault.

The investigating authorities seem to be falling short in more ways than one. Innocent persons are arrested, tortured, jailed and released only after the court’s intervene. Guilty persons are able to evade the investigators and walk free as the investigating agencies fail to collect sufficient proof, or at times, even find the accused even though they are giving interviews to the media. The point here is that while the higher judiciary at least is trying to do its job with a modicum of responsibility and honesty, politicization and corruption has hit the police and the investigating agencies to a point where fiction often replaces facts.

Seema Mustafa in DNA. Here

But how can I forget...! : A poem on Gujarat genocide

But how can I forget

I should be ashamed
of raising issues that divide
-they say.

But how can I forget
those they killed
mutilated and those they left
still hiding their nakedness.

I will shout from the rooftops
make memorials of poems
I will draw from the eyes
of the killers
not blood, but tears.

Run Amina Run
The dead are never at rest, especially at night
Sometimes, I hear him moving upstairs
bolting doors, moving furniture
against the doors to make a barricade
I cannot sleep
Other days there is a heavy silence
Orange silence with only a crackling sound
and an acrid smell
Suddenly he cries out aloud

Run Amina Run!

I tell him that the crowds have gone
years ago
I no longer hurt
and he is dead
but he keeps screaming
They are coming !

Run Amina Run !

Written by Ashok Gupta in the memory of 2000 men women and children killed in the state led genocide of Gujarat in 2002 and 200,000 who lost their homes and dignity.
Ashok Gupta can be contacted at ashok1082@yahoo.co.uk. 

Gujarat Genocide 2002 and the spirits of Shah Alam Camp

The days pass somehow in Shah Alam Camp, but the nights are an endless nightmare. God alone can save us from this hellish torment. And what a terrible, terrible cacophony! You can barely hear your own voice. Such shouting and screaming, raving and ranting, moaning and groaning, sighing and sobbing…

After midnight, the spirits come to meet their children. They caress their orphans, stroke their heads and gaze into their lifeless eyes with their own wasted and vacant eyes, as though trying to convey something. Then they clasp their children to their breasts and the air is rent by the same gut-wrenching screams that had escaped them when they were being burned alive like so much kindling.

1

"Amma, can I become like you?"

When the rest of the camp is asleep, the children stay wide awake. They are waiting to see their mothers, to have dinner with their fathers.

"How are you, Siraj," the mother’s spirit asks, fondling his hair and caressing him.

"How are you, Amma?"

The mother looks visibly happy. She says, "I am a spirit now, Siraj… no one can burn me alive any more."

"Amma, can I become like you?"

2

A mother in search of her infant son

One night, a woman’s nervous, agitated spirit reaches Shah Alam Camp well past midnight. She is looking for her son, who is not to be found — neither in the other world, not here. The mother’s heart is close to breaking with grief and terror. Other women help her look for her son. They look all over the camp, then they go to the mother’s old neighbourhood. The whole street is up in flames, houses burning like stacks of firewood. Since they are spirits now and able to come and go at will, they enter these raging infernos with complete ease. They search every nook and smoke-filled cranny, but they cannot find the mother’s little boy.

In despair, the spirits go to the homes of the rioters. There, the lumpen are making petrol bombs, cleaning their guns and polishing their weapons. When the mother asks about her missing son, they laugh and say, "You madwoman, when scores upon scores of people are being burned alive, who can keep track of one little boy? He must be lying buried under a mound of ash and rubble somewhere."

The mother says, "No, no, I’ve looked all over… I can’t find him anywhere!"

Then one of the rioters remembers: "Hey, is she the mother of that boy we left dangling from the trishul?"

3

Let us make this INDIA

The spirits come to Shah Alam Camp after midnight. They bring food, water, clothes and medicines from Heaven. That is why you won’t find any sick, naked, hungry or thirsty children in Shah Alam Camp. And that is also why Shah Alam Camp has become so famous. Its fame has spread far and wide among the dead. A certain dignitary from New Delhi who had come to inspect the camp was so pleased at what he saw that he announced: "This is a very fine place… all the Muslim children from all over India should be brought here."

4 

I want to come home, Ma..!

The spirits come to visit Shah Alam Camp after midnight. All night long they stay with their children, gazing at them with love and longing, worrying about them, fretting over their future, talking to them…

"Siraj, you should go home now," a mother’s spirit says to her son.

"Home?" Siraj whispers, and his eyes glaze over with terror.

"Yes, home. After all, how long can you stay here? I promise I shall come and see you every night."

"I won’t go home, never, never, never." Smoke. Fire. Screams. Noise.

"Amma, I want to live with you and Abba."

"Darling Sikku, how can you live with us…"

"But Bhaijaan and Aapa live with you."

"That’s because they were also burned alive, along with us."

"Then I shall return home, Amma."

5  

Bravery..!

A child’s spirit comes to Shah Alam Camp in the wee hours, like a firefly burning brightly in a dark night. He flits and flies all over the camp, scampers and gambols, plays little mischievous tricks on everyone. But he does not lisp; he speaks clearly. He runs and hides in the folds of his mother’s clothes. He holds his father’s finger and traipses along.

Unlike all the other children in Shah Alam Camp, this child looks amazingly happy.

Someone asks, "Why are you so happy?"

"Don’t you know… I thought everyone knew."

"Know what?"

"That I am the Evidence."

"Evidence? Evidence of what?"

"I am the Evidence of Bravery."

"Whose bravery are you the evidence of?"

"Of those who ripped open my mother’s womb, tore me out and hacked me in two."

6  

Bhaiya...! Bhaiya...!

The spirits come to Shah Alam Camp after midnight. A sister’s spirit comes one night, looking for her brother. She looks everywhere and finally spots him sitting on the step of a staircase. The sister is delighted and runs to meet him. "Bhaiya," she cries out. The brother hears her, but pretends as if he doesn’t. He just sits there, mute and unmoving like a stone statue.

The sister speaks again, "Bhaiya, listen to me."

Again, the brother gives no sign of having heard her, nor does he look at her.

"Why won’t you listen to me, Bhaiya?" the sister says loudly. This time the brother’s face flames like fire. His eyes shoot sparks. He rises in a fury and begins to beat his sister mercilessly. A crowd gathers and someone asks the girl what she has said to enrage her brother so.

The sister says, "I only called out to him, ‘Bhaiya’."

An old man speaks up, "No, Salima, that was very wrong of you. Why did you say that? That was absolutely the wrong thing to say." And the old man starts crying like a baby. The brother starts beating his head against a wall.

7

Brilliant Muslim

A political leader asks a spirit who has come to visit Shah Alam Camp: "Do you have a father and mother?"

"No, they were both killed."

"What about brothers and sisters?"

"No."

"Any other relatives alive?’

"No, they’re all dead."

"Are you comfortable here?"

"Yes, I am."

"Do you get enough to eat?"

"Yes, I do."

"Do you have clothes on your back?"

"I do."

"Do you need anything else?"

"No, nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

The leader is pleased. He says to himself, "The lad is bright. Not like other Muslims."

Written in Urdu by Asghar Wajahat

Translated by Rakhshanda Jalil in Little Magazine. Here

Gujarat is the battle for the idea of India

Among the human debris scattered around the courtyard of the Shah-e-Alam relief camp in Ahmedabad, the largest with over 10,000 survivors, are Saira (age 12), Afsana (age 11), Naina (age 12), Anju (age 12), Rukhsat (age 9), Nilofer (age 10), Nilofer (age 9), Hena (age 11). They are all survivors from Naroda Patiya. And they have seen things no child should see. They know words no child should have to learn.

“Balatkar” (Rape) — they know this word. “Mein bataoon didi?” (Shall I tell you?), volunteers a nine year old. “Balatkar ka matlab jab aurat ko nanga karte hain aur phir use jala dete hain” (Rape is when a woman is stripped naked and then burnt). And then she looks fixedly at the floor. Only a child can tell it like it is. For this is what happened again and again in Naroda Patiya — women were stripped, raped and burnt.” (The Survivors Speak, fact-finding by a women's panel, April 16, 2002. P. 13)

Nothing was left of these mutilated women — no bodies, no evidence, no justice. Nothing but the scars on this little girl's mind. I still remember her face, and today 10 years later, I wonder where she is, how she is making her way through life, scarred by this macabre, twisted image of rape. I wonder where those men are, the ones who butchered so many childhoods and got away with it. I wonder, again and again, at the State, whose constitutional duty it was to protect, that colluded in the massacre of its own citizens.
Remains a wound

Ten years to the pogrom in Gujarat, I try to look back. But for me, like for thousands of survivors and activists, it is impossible. How does one look back at something that is so much a part of one's present? And so, Gujarat remains a wound that stays with me always, deep and continuous. I cried often in 2002. I still cry. And I guess that is all right. Because Gujarat should make us collectively weep. And make us truly ashamed of ourselves as a nation.

What happened 10 years ago is the kind of upheaval that refuses to be historicised. That cannot be consigned to the pages of any history book with a full stop at the end. In part because the violence of Gujarat continued for long after February-March 2002, and is continuing today in the frightened little lives lived by scores of destroyed Muslim families; in the lives of thousands of men, women and children still languishing in ‘resettlement colonies' relegated to the margins of Gujarat's seemingly flourishing towns and cities. In part, because many battles for justice are still being bravely waged in the courts, and the narrative is still unfolding. But in greatest part because the ‘meaning' of what Gujarat did to India remains contested.

People say — “move on, get a life, why do activists keep raking up this ‘unpleasant' past? It's been 10 years.” Why? Because if we settle for the past as some would like it scripted, we threaten the meaning of our present, and endanger our future. These contestations are not just about many battles in courtrooms that must be waged. The contestation is about the meaning of citizenship. It is about the relationship between citizen and State. It is about challenging State impunity. Gujarat is the battle for collective memory against forgetting because it is ultimately the battle for the idea of India.

In 1950, India made a constitutional promise to protect the rights of its minorities to live with dignity and with full rights of citizenship. Time and again, that sacred promise has been violated — in Delhi, Nellie, Meerut, Bhagalpur, Hashimpura, Kandhamal, Gujarat and most recently in Gopalgarh (Sept. 2011). In each case, innocents were murdered, maimed, sexually assaulted, burnt out of hearth and home, scattered to the winds, simply because of their minority identity, because of who they were. In each episode of targeted violence, the officers of the State acted in a biased manner, failing in their duty to protect, to prosecute, and to give justice. How long can this go on? How long will those in political power use the might of the State, the guns, and the police, and sirens against one group of citizens and get away with it? Institutional biases of the State machinery cannot be acceptable in any civilised democracy — that is the lesson of Gujarat.

The challenges

The massacre in Gujarat poses many challenges to us as a nation, exposing holes in our hearts, in our social fabric, as well as in our criminal justice system, laws and jurisprudence. Now we cannot legislate against communal prejudice and hatred in the hearts and minds of people. That is a battle that we as a society and a people must wage in a million different ways at a million different moments in our collective and individual lives. But we can and we must legislate to ensure justice to the weak.

Elusive justice

Unlike any other violent episode in India's recent history, Gujarat 2002 tested the strength and resilience of many of our democratic institutions to the fullest. The National Human Rights Commission, the honourable Supreme Court, and the National Commission for Minorities. Each came forward and acted. And yet somehow, that thing called justice still eludes the victims of Gujarat. These victims and survivors call upon us to restore equality in the working of the law for all citizens; to create a legal remedy for institutional bias by the State; to fill the lacunae in our laws and our jurisprudence that has failed time and again to ensure criminal culpability for those in command, those who are never caught with the knives in their hands, but who instruct others to lie, and kill and misuse the law for electoral gain. These are not very tall orders. For, if we get this right it will help realise, better than we have so far, the constitutional promise of justice and equality before law. And without justice, we cannot move on.

A survivor's courage

On January 18, 2008, Bilkis Bano, a Gujarat survivor who had the courage to speak of the unspeakable, withstanding over 20 days of gruelling cross-examination, found a little justice, when 12 accused who had gang-raped her, murdered and raped 14 members of her family, and smashed her three-year-old daughter to the ground during the horrifying days of 2002, were finally awarded life sentences by a Mumbai Session court.

On January 21, 2008, at a press conference in Delhi, Bilkis made this statement:

“For the last six years I have lived in fear, shuttling from one temporary home to the other, carrying my children with me, trying to protect them from the hatred that I know still exists in the hearts and minds of so many people. This judgment does not mean the end of hatred but it does mean that somewhere, somehow justice can prevail.

This judgment is a victory for not only me but for all those innocent Muslims who were massacred and all those women whose bodies were violated only because, like me, they were Muslim. It is a victory because now, hereafter, no one can deny what happened to women in Gujarat in those terrible days and nights of 2002. Because now it will forever be imprinted on the historical record of Gujarat that sexual violence was used as a weapon against us. I pray that the people of Gujarat will some day be unable to live with the stigma of that violence and hatred, and will root it out from the very soil of a State that still remains my home.”

We give up on the battle for justice in Gujarat at our own peril. For in giving up on Gujarat, we give up on hope for a better India — an India that is by right home to each one of us.

Farah Naqvi in The Hindu. Here

Delhi, 1947, Gujarat 2002 : A disturbing book on Indian Muslims by Anis Kidwai

As you read one chilling account after another of perfidy and deceit, of official connivance with the killers, of doctors’ refusal to treat Muslim patients, of government offices telling their Muslim employees, even those who had chosen to stay, to leave and go to Pakistan, of pre-teen girls speared through their vaginas, of infants being chopped to pieces, of pregnant woman being stabbed through their wombs, of women, in their tens of thousands, on both sides of the blood-soaked border, kidnapped, raped and sold off, again and again and again, rioters, policemen, army men all joining in this macabre act of desecration of womanhood, your blood begins to run cold.

And all this in the capital of a nation that had announced to the world that she was home as much to the Muslim as it was to the Hindu, the Sikh, the Parsi and the Christian. Those upon whose shoulders had fallen the responsibility of steering its fate, were people who were either not capable or did not care and some, many of them were almost at the top, were complicit in the violence.

As you read all this, your mind begins to be flooded with images and reports of the recent past, events, pogroms, genocides – Nellie, Bombay, Gujarat begin to flood your mind. The same barbarities, the same callousness, collusion, protectors turning perpetrators, doctors refusing to treat patients, suckling infants being beheaded, neighbours killing neighbours and all this amidst claims of a faith that was inherently tolerant, open, welcoming.

You also think of this frail woman, a woman who has lost her husband to these killers and who still went out every day, trying to save one more life, unite one more family, buy sweets for a girl with half her skull stitched up, supervising rations for the refuge seekers, begging for blankets, setting up schools for children, organizing joint processions of Hindu and Muslim children, getting their parents together, getting into communally charged localities and asking people to stop the dance of death, if not for anything, then at least for the life of the fasting Mahatma, who had vowed not to eat as long as peace did not return to Delhi.

As you read you see this unsure, scared, confused, hurt, lonely woman, grow up in stature and with her rises your hope and your faith in the victory of the Human spirit.

Read this book if you want to understand where we went wrong and to see the fault lines, to see how we need a secular state and not sarv dharm sambhav. Read this book also if you want to understand the falsity of the self image that we have created of ourselves and of our nation, but read it most importantly to understand the fragility of the premise upon which is built the idea of India and the need to protect and nurture this premise and to make it real. Because this premise is India and it is people like Anis Kidwai that made it possible.

Sohail Hashmi in Kafila. Here 

Would Chidambaram help Sanjiv Bhatt?

Indian secularism has more affinities with multiculturalism

In contrast to most South Asian countries, modern India has always been officially “secular,” a word the country inscribed in its constitution in 1976. Secularism, here, is not synonymous with the French “laïcité,” which demands strong separation of religion and the state. India’s secularism does not require exclusion of religion from the public sphere. On the contrary, it implies recognition of all religions by the state. This philosophy of inclusion finds expression in one article of the constitution by which all religious communities may set up schools that are eligible for state subsidies.

India’s secularism, therefore, has more affinities with multiculturalism than with “laïcité.” Its emphasis on pluralism parallels the robust parliamentary democracy and federalism that India has been cultivating for 64 years.

But today, secularism is in jeopardy in India. The main threat comes from the rise of Hindu militancy and its consequences not only for electoral politics, but also for the judiciary and society at large.

The 1980s-90s were a turning point in the India’s secularism. This period could have been a parenthesis, since the Congress Party regained power in 2004, but India has never returned to the balance of religious co-existence and compromise that prevailed in its first three decades of independence.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid and the communal clashes that accompanied the BJP’s rise to power has never been addressed properly by the policy and judiciary. Muslims were massacred in numbers unprecedented since India’s 1947 partition; about 1,000 were killed in Bhagalpur in Bihar State alone in 1989, and violence rose to the level of pogroms in Gujarat State in 2002 when about 2,000 Muslims were killed after 59 Hindus burnt them alive in train coaches in Godhra, Gujarat. Inquiry commissions prepared reports that were either never made public or not followed by serious action. In most democracies, the kind of violence Gujarat experienced in 2002 would have resulted in at least a “Justice and Reconciliation” commission.

And minorities must cope with marginalization. Christian Tribals are victims of violence, especially in Orissa and Gujarat, where they are requested to reconvert to Hinduism. Muslims face discrimination in the job and housing markets, and Muslim ghettoization is increasing in northern and western India. On the political scene, Muslims are marginalized with less than 6 percent of MPs in the lower house of parliament while representing 13.4 percent of the population. In 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh commissioned a report on the status of India’s Muslims by a committee named after its president, Justice Rajinder Sachar. But none of the Sachar Committee’s key recommendations to improve Muslims’ situation has been implemented perhaps from political fears that the BJP will again denounce “pseudo-secularism.”

India is gradually moving away from multiculturalism toward a type of democracy exemplified by Israel and Sri Lanka, known as “ethnic democracy,” where minorities are treated as second-class citizens. With this transformation, India may well lose one of the key pillars of its soft power, the quality of its multiculturalism, and more alarmingly, perhaps also its adherence to the rule of law.

Christophe Jaffrelot in Daily News & Economic review. More Here.

Godhra : The Verdict analysed

A judgement has branded the Muslims of Godhra "Hindu killers" by tradition. The 27 February 2002 train fire, it declares, was a conspiracy to kill "karsevaks". Ignoring the plain record that the source of the fire was inside the train even before it suddenly stopped after leaving Godhra Station, the judgement holds that the train was stalled by the Muslims to break into a coach brimming with belligerent karsevaks, pour petrol, and start a fire, and to do so all unnoticed. The half-truths of forensics and the machinations of the police have succeeded in the trial, and 31 men, unfairly made to bear the burden of proof and denied vital witnesses, have been sentenced either to death or life imprisonment.

Nitya Ramakrishnan in EPW. Read the pdf version of the whole article Here

Waiting for Justice in Gujarat

It’s nine years since many districts across Gujarat were swept by a tornado of hate. Innumerable lives were snuffed out, women and girls brutally raped and killed, and homes and livelihoods destroyed. Thousands of people fled their homes in mortal fear. But nine years is a long time. Nature equips the human body and spirit with extraordinary capacities to heal from great injury. Yet, there are some wounds that don’t mend even after a lifetime. I encounter such unhealed suffering among survivors of mass communal violence in Nellie of 1983, Delhi of 1984 and Gujarat of 2002. There is something about the violence of mass hate, which makes its wounds fester even after many others heal.

In villages and towns of Gujarat, survivors have adapted themselves to the everyday reality of second-class citizenship. I estimate that nearly 100,000 people have been permanently ejected and their erstwhile settlements ‘cleansed’ of Muslim residents. A quarter of these internally displaced people endure in austere relief colonies, established after the carnage by various Muslim organisations. The remainder have moved to the safety of numbers in poorly serviced Muslim ghettoes.

Across the state today, I observe what I regard as the ‘Dalitisation’ of the Gujarati Muslim. Like Dalits, Muslims in Gujarat today live in segregated settlements, socially devalued and economically ostracised. They are discriminated against in schools and police stations, deprived of basic public services, discouraged in both private and public employment, and excluded from social intercourse such as wedding and birth celebrations. Dalits have lived with these social and economic disabilities for centuries. But the process of pushing Muslims to the same humiliating margins of Gujarati society as Dalits was compressed into the single past decade. This is the enduring legacy of the politics of hatred and division, which has triumphed in Gujarat. We don’t know if and when this will ever change.

Muslims in Gujarat today don’t live in the expectation of another imminent orgy of mass violence. But they survive daily discrimination as an incontrovertible element of survival. Markers of Muslim identity are fading from Gujarati public life. In many villages, one of the conditions imposed on Muslim residents who wished to return was that the call of the azaan from their mosque should no longer resonate in the village. Auto-rickshaw drivers in every city in the country decorate their rickshaws with symbols of their religious faith (alongside pictures of buxom film actresses). In Ahmedabad, I can estimate that my rickshaw driver is a Muslim only because his rickshaw has no markers of faith. Muslim eateries have adopted culturally-neutral names like Ekta, Tulsi and Jaihind, and no symbols of Muslim faith decorate their walls.

We’re helping hundreds of survivors to fight criminal cases against those who slaughtered, raped and plundered in 2002. But we frequently lose these cases in courts, because many baulk at the last minute from naming their tormentors. They want to see them punished, but calculate that if they are to live in Gujarat they can’t afford to antagonise their neighbours. Some dignify these ‘compromises’ as forgiveness. But in their hearts they know that these are acts of surrender. It’s not easy to feel resigned to see your tormentors walk free on the dusty paths of your village everyday.

Many people who filed charges against their neighbours for the crimes of 2002 found themselves embroiled in false criminal charges, and some even spent months and years in jail. They dropped their charges, as the price to be freed from jail and be relieved from false criminal cases against them. Young Muslim men also live in fear that they will be picked up for terrorist crimes. Many are forced to spend hopeless years behind prison walls on flimsy charges of which they may be acquitted. But who can return to them the lost years of their lives? And of those of their loved ones who wait all these years outside in penury and despair?

It does little to reassure the Muslim citizens of Gujarat that their persisting persecution under his watch hasn’t dimmed the sheen of chief minister Narendra Modi — an icon for legions of his admirers. He is celebrated by virtually every national corporate heavyweight for the rapid economic growth and ‘efficient’ administration offered by his stewardship of Gujarat. Yet, he refuses to apologise for the crimes of the dark months of 2002 and the complicity of his state administration. On the directions of the Supreme Court, his personal role has been investigated — and raises many doubts. His former home minister and senior police officers are in jail for extra-judicial killings. His public speeches are laced with barbs, which taunt and label the Muslim community as regressive, violent and unpatriotic. But these make him not less but more of a hero for millions of his adoring middle-class supporters.

Madhavrao Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak of the RSS from 1940 to 1973, dreamed of an India where religious minorities could live only as second-class citizens. The India of his aspirations can be glimpsed in today’s Gujarat. But the Constitution promised all its citizens a land of equality and fraternity. Its pledges lie in tatters for the Muslim residents of Gujarat, nine years after their massacre stirred the conscience of the people of India. Neither the law of the land nor the legacy of the Mahatma in the land of his birth has secured for the survivors of 2002 justice, security, social dignity and freedom from fear. How many more years will they have to wait?

Harsh Mander in Hindustan Times. More Here