Best Bakery verdict analyses riots
Ashish Mehta (Indo-Asian News Service)
Ahmedabad, July 1

The irony is inescapable. While acquitting all 21 people accused of the Best Bakery violence during the Gujarat riots last year, sessions judge HU Mahida has also given a detailed analysis of communal violence in the country and the reasons behind it.

But human rights activists and other concerned citizens just wish that he had stuck to the task of meting out justice.

"We can have a debate on the long term causes of communal violence. We can discuss how globalisation or lack of social reforms has created communal tension. For that matter, we can discuss the polarisation in the police administration or in the judiciary.

"But the agenda here was to see that justice is done to the victims and that has been denied," said Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) secretary Dwarikanath Rath.

The fast-track court, looking into one of the most ghastly incidents of communal violence in Vadodara, had given its verdict last Friday. The 21 accused of massacring 12 people at the Best Bakery in the city were let off on grounds of insufficient evidence. As many as 39 out of the 73 witnesses turned hostile in the case.

The judgement, which has been severely criticised by human rights groups, has taken pains to spell out the reasons for sectarian violence.

It lists communal tension, failure of industrial policy and the job reservation policy as the three major reasons for sectarian violence.

According to observations made in the judgement, the 10 percent job quota for the weaker sections of society was meant to be discontinued at the end of the first decade of the Constitution. Its continuance and quota politics had given rise to situations conducive to communal violence.

"This is not to digress from the topic, but riots do take place because of the reservation," Mahida noted in his judgement.

The verdict observed that the rift between Hindus and Muslims in the country was a legacy of the British policy of divide and rule. It also cited the failure of Nehruvian industrial policy and unemployment as contributory factors.

"The intensity of riots is more in cities, particularly slums. The growth of slums must be curtailed," the judgement observed.

Activists were unimpressed.

"Whether the reservation policy is responsible for ethnic violence or not is debatable, but the need of the hour is constitutional intervention in the Best Bakery case so that the guilty are punished," Rath countered.

The SUCI had declared June 27, the day the verdict was delivered, as a "black letter day" in the annals of Indian judiciary. The case had been "influenced by criminals and vested interests of the party in power," the organisation stated.

Movement for Secular Democracy (MSD), an NGO, alleged that witnesses turned hostile "for obvious reasons" and sought the intervention of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).

The Best Bakery case is one of the five major cases of communal violence in the state in 2002 that the NHRC wanted to be probed by the independent Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). At least 1,000 people were killed in the violence.