Courage and Cowardice
The
sign of a person of some conviction is to face adversity head on, answer
hostile questions and give her/his point of view. On all issues especially
contentitious ones. But in the season of this election, where market forces and
corporate finances are dominating even the slant of discussions on major news
channels and newspapers, hard interviews are only available when the
protagonist is say a Rahul Gandhi even though he may have not been as well
prepared as he should have been (Times Now).
Anyway
coming back to the issue of the week. If the smaller, lesser known channels
have bought into and telecast an interview with the ‘Man who would be PM ‘ over
the past two days, the Special
Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by the Supreme Court conducted a similarly
pliant interview with the strongman in 2010 though it tried to make out four
years ago, that the nine hour long interview had the protagonist sweating. As
the pliant questions and evasive answers below show, much more likely it had
the IO of the SIT, AK Malhotra, trembling.
The
interview took place on 27/28.3.2010 at the SIT office in Gandhinagar. It is
the first time that a sitting chief minister has been interrogated for his role
in mass crimes of a heinous nature that happened under his watch. Remember also
that the man who would be PM has been Home minister of Gujarat since October
2001.
and despite the fact that I, as co-complainant
with Mrs Zakia Jafri in the Supreme Court (SLP 1088/2008) had provided the SIT
with valuable evidence, the SIT tiptoes around it, and avoided it. This issue has been detailed by us in the
Protest Petition before the Magistrate (which he rejected on 26-3-2013) and has
been stressed in detail in our appeal now to be heard on April 11, 2014 in the
Gujarat High court.
Malhotra , SIT (Question)
41:
Please see a copy of the DO letter dated 22.04.2002, addressed by Shri P. C.
Pande, the then CP, and Ahmedabad City with a copy to DGP and Addl. DG
(Intelligence) about the undesirable activities of Sang Parivar, activists. Was
this letter brought to your notice? If so, what was the action taken by you in
the matter?
Ans (Man who
would be PM). In this connection, it is stated that I do not remember now, whether
this issue was brought to my notice or not. But, it
has been
my and my Government's approach right from the first day, that a
culprit is a
culprit irrespective of his caste,creed, religion or socio political
background, as
nobody is above law.
(The SIT IO
Malhotra , deliberately does not probe further showing him that the letter
(submitted by me to SIT) from PC Pande to then DGP Chakravarthi and ACS Home
Ashok Narayan (who worked directly under the Man who would be PM) speaks of the
fact that a Minister in the state cabinet Bharat Barot was, as late as April
2002 (i.e. a month after the first outburst of violence) moving around with the police in the Dilli Darwaza area of
the old city of Ahmedabad and forcibly terrorizing small vendors and
businessmen of the minority community and extorting monies from them).
SIT leaves out
the inconvenient questions. A-1, the Man who would be PM, is not questioned on
the Controversial Phone Calls from Mobiles Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) to
another fellow accused, Jaideep Patel) from the VHP despite Evidence being available
in the Phone Call Records Analysis provided in raw data form by Rahul Sharma, DCP
Crime Branch (2002) when he produced the CD before the Nanavati-Shah Commission
in 2004 and thereafter accessed by Citizens for Justice and Peace and analysed
by us. We had placed this data before the SIT and the Hon’ble Supreme Court.
Q.56.(Malhotra)
Did you ever use the mobile phones of your personal staff, namely Shri Anil
Mukim, the then Addl. PS to CM, Shri Tanmay Mehta, PA to CM, Shri Sanjay
Bhavsar, OSD and Shri O.P. Singh, PA to CM?
A (MAN who would
be PM) : Telephones are installed at my residence as well as my office Whenever,
I go out, telephones are available to me. I have never used the mobile phones
of my personal staff at headquarters. There was a mobile phone allotted to me
in the year 2002, but I rarely used the same I do not recollect its number.
(SIT was in
possession of the following evidence provided by us: After the Man who would be PM first received the
fax message from Jayanti Ravi,
Collector/DM
about the provocative behavior of kar sevaks leading to an altercation between
those travelling in the train and
vendors who happened to be Muslims, at the Godhra railway station and the
tragedy of the Godhra train burning took place, two telephone calls were made
by him, the Man who would be PM. These were not made to top officials of the
police or bureaucracy. But the Man who would be PM made these calls to Jaideep
Patel (A-21), General Secretary of the VHP from the Mobile: 
09825037439
belonging to the PA of the chief minister, AP Patel. Ironically, but not
insignificantly, the PA’s (A.P. Patel) statement is the only one that the SIT
has conspicuously avoided recording,. Statements of
09825037439
belonging to the PA of the chief minister, AP Patel. Ironically, but not
insignificantly, the PA’s (A.P. Patel) statement is the only one that the SIT
has conspicuously avoided recording,. Statements of
five other officials
from the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) have been recorded.
Another PA, O.P.
Singh, PA to chief minister, has had his statements recorded by the SIT twice on
9.11.2009 & 25.3.2011. In his reply
to the SIT,
OP Singh clearly
says that CM would regularly use his phone when he was out. To quote, “….Sometimes
when the CM is out ….and is staying overnight and the calls are received on my
mobile phone, I hand over the same to the CM after ascertaining his willingness
to talk. Normally the CM talks over my mobile phone only when there is an extreme
urgency.” The tragedy at Godhra was clearly one such where the Man who would be
PM immediately sought out hardliners of the Viswa Hindu Parishad (VHP) rather
than policemen and officials after he first heard the news.
One more example
of the SIT’s pliant approach:-
Q.57. Whether
Jaydeep Patel, Babu Bajrangi and Dr. Mayaben Kodnani,
MLA were in
touch with you during the riots from 28-2-2002 onwards?
Ans. I came to
know Babu Bajrangi through media reports and he is
not known to me.
Dr. Mayaben Kodnani is a MLA from BJP and used
to meet me
Jaydeep Patel is a VHP leader, who is also known to me. As far
as I recollect,
they never contacted me over phone during the riots.
In the analysis
of phone records submitted by us to the SIT, there is a detailed analysis of
the landline numbers of the chief minister.
Though the SIT
had this evidence no harsh questions were put to the Man who would be Prime
Minister. What was the evidence the SIT was in possession of ? That there were
barely seven phone calls in toto on 27.2.2002 and 28.2.2002 on the seven residential
and office landlines of the chief minister, A-1 Modi is not
questioned on
this serious lapse given the fact that the state had been in
turmoil,
Ahmedabad and its environs burning and the chief minister is not contacted by irate
residents at all. How could a political head
of state records
such few phone calls? On those two
days. Ahsan Jafri also kept contacting the Gandhinagar offices of the
government, including the chief minister. The SIT not only does not question
the Man who would be PM on this but does not even attempt to seize the phone
records of the chief minister’s residence and office that should/could have
been made available to a Special Investigation Team appointed by no less than
the Supreme Court of India.
Post Script: Of
the 7 calls received by the Man who would be PM on his landline one is from VJP
strongman, Jaideep Patel is one of them.
The crux of our
allegations of Conspiracy (already laid out as several warnings of the State
Intelligence Bureau of communal build up by the VHP/Bajrang Dal and RSS cadres
were being ignored by the state home department) began when the Man who would
be PM spoke to Jaideep Patel immediately on hearing of the Godhra tragedy on
the morning of 27.2.2002, dispatched him to Godhra, instead of instructing the
police and bureaucratic machinery about the fall out and repercussions of the
incident
and directing
precautionary and preventive steps. Then the conspiracy went further as post mortems
of the unfortunate dead were allowed out in the open, even with Jaideep Patel
and later in the afternoon/evening the Man who would be PM, present. The final
act of illegality was the decision taken at the every highest level of
government, at the Circuit house in Godhra to hand over the bodies of the dead
to none less than the same Jaideep Patel, a man who belongs to the VHP, even
though many of them were unidentified. This amounted to not merely direct
interference in the criminal case lodged by the railway police. It also set the
stage for furthering of the cynical conspiracy to, in the words of the
Concerned CitizensTribunal headed by Justice VR Krishna Iyer, PB Sawant and
Hosbet Suresh. To quote from Volume II of the Tribunal Report, Crimes Against Humanity ( http://www.sabrang.com/
These questions
have so far not been put to the Man who would be PM. Neither by any
Investigating Agency nor any intrepid person from the Media.
Ends
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