---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Abhiyya <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 10:41 AM
Subject: Rings A Bell?
To:
*"The officers that Setalvad has fingered include Gujarat’s then
Director-General of Police (DGP), K Chakravarti, and PC Pande, then
Ahmedabad Police Commissioner who Modi later promoted as DGP. Pande had held
the post of Police Commissioner in Ahmedabad at the time of the massacre,
and is widely accused of willfully allowing the killings to go unchecked"*
*From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 23, Dated June 12, 2010* *CURRENT
AFFAIRS*
*gujarat*
*Rings A Bell?*
*ACTIVIST TEESTA SETALVAD HAS USED PHONE RECORDS TO NAIL SEVERAL OF MODI’S
HENCHMEN IN THE COMMITTEE PROBING THE GUJARAT MASSACRES, REPORTS** AJIT SAHI
*
*[image: image]* *LONE CRUSADER *
Setalvad's activism is bearing fruit - the ball is now in Nanavati
Commission's court.
LAST WEEK, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrested one of Gujarat
Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s key police officers in the state for alleged
complicity in a fake encounter of 2006. Now, Modi’s *bête
noire,*Mumbai-based activist Teesta Setalvad, has fired a fresh salvo
invoking
telephone records to show how his government and police connived to allow
rampaging Hindu zealots to kill about 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.
*THE **WHERE AND WHEN,
ON RIOT DAY*
*Call records from February 28, 2002*
*5.10 AM*
Ashok Bhatt at Narol, Naroda
*3.56 PM*
Tanmay Mehta (from CM’S office) to Narol, Naroda
*3.56 PM*
IK Jadeja, Meghaninagar
*5.10 PM, 5.14 PM, 5.57 PM*
Ashok Bhatt, Narol, Naroda
*5.40 PM*
AP Patel (from CM’S office) Meghaninagar
*7.24 PM*
Harsh Brahmbutt (from CM’S office) Narol, Naroda
*7.26 PM*
Harsh Bahmbutt (from CM’S office) Meghaninagar
According to documents that Setalvad submitted last month to a commission of
two retired high court judges, Modi’s office and various police officers of
the state networked with each other through the massacre on February 28 and
March 1 that year. She has sought to establish this through phone calls made
by and received by 44 people, including the police officers, and demanded
that these be examined.
The officers that Setalvad has fingered include Gujarat’s then
Director-General of Police (DGP), K Chakravarti, and PC Pande, then
Ahmedabad Police Commissioner who Modi later promoted as DGP. Pande had held
the post of Police Commissioner in Ahmedabad at the time of the massacre,
and is widely accused of willfully allowing the killings to go unchecked.
Setalvad has now demanded that the commission summon officers of the Central
and Gujarat IB as also of the Indian Army who had been deputed to quell the
killings. She has also asked the commission to summon top police officers of
the time, including Pande, to depose. The list includes many of Modi’s
favourite police officers, such as then Joint Commissioner of Police (JCP)
MK Tandon, Additional Commissioner of Police Shivanand Jha and three deputy
commissioners of police.
By targeting these police officers, Setalvad is indeed attacking the core of
Modi’s government apparatus, widely accused of complicity in the massacre.
As TEHELKA’s exposé of October 2007 clearly established, there was a direct
nexus between Gujarat Police and killer mobs of the Hindu right-wing Bajrang
Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the BJP.
Indeed, Setalvad once again lays the blame at Modi’s door, citing the case
of three officials who worked with Modi’s Chief Minister’s Office (CMO)
then. All three — Sanjay Bhavsar, OP Singh and Tanmay Mehta — filed
“hurried” affidavits before the Commission this year but have evaded
appearing before it. In addition, Setalvad wants the commission to force BJP
and VHP leaders to depose before it too.
Pande received 15 calls from Modi’s office on the morning of February 28,
the day the massacre of Muslims began. Setalvad says that the fact that
Pande did not leave his officer after 11 am indicates that these calls were
made by the “top echelons” to instruct him that the police must not
interfere with the rampaging mobs. Indeed, at the same time, Bhavsar and
Mehta in Modi’s office were talking on the phone to VHP’s Gujarat General
Secretary Jaideep Patel, an accused in the massacres at Naroda Patiya and
Naroda Gaam.
For the CM’S office to be in touch with Patel is indeed intriguing. It may
be recalled that Patel was in charge from the VHP to escort dead bodies of
56 people, many of them Hindu activists, who had been charred to death in a
fire in a train that was bringing them to Ahmedabad from Uttar Pradesh. The
train had caught fire outside Godhra town’s railway station, and it is the
contention of Modi’s government and the BJP-VHP that the local Muslims
deliberately started the fire. It was primarily the VHP’s shutdown to
protest the train deaths which stoked the violence against the Muslims and
spiralled it out of control. “For the chief minister’s office to be directly
in touch with the man accused of leading and inciting the massacres and
rapes… suggests collusion in the violence at the highest level,” says
Setalvad.
Even then Health Minister Ashok Bhatt was also talking on the phone with
Patel that day. Gujarat’s then Minister of State for Home, Gordhan Zadaphia
— who Modi has since forced out of the BJP — had been in communication with
both Patel and Dinesh, a VHP activist and brother of VHP leader, Praveen
Togadia. Another person who was in touch with then JCP Shivanand Jha is Amit
Shah. Shah is today Modi’s embattled home minister who, as TEHELKA reported
last week, has been running to evade arrest by the CBI in the fake encounter
case.
Indeed, Modi’s woes on the 2002 massacres have worsened since the CBI
arrested his former Minister for Women and Child Welfare Maya Kodnani over a
year ago. Then an MLA, Kodnani and another minister, Kaushik Jamnadas Patel,
too, had been in touch with JCP Jha as also several other police officers,
right down to police inspector KG Erda, who is accused of facilitating the
massacres of Muslims in the locality of Meghaninagar. Another police
inspector KK Mysorewala, and BJP State President, Rajendrasinh Rana too were
in touch with Kodnani and Patel, among others.
Two questions arise. One, why would so many police officers, from JCP down
to inspectors, be talking to so many leaders of the VHP and the ministers?
And two, why would the police still fail to bring an end to the violence,
especially if it was in constant touch with these bigwigs in the government
and the partisan outfit that had called the shutdown?
Why were so many senior policemen
present in areas where massacres took place?
The connection appears self-evident. Modi has always said that Hindu mobs
attacked the Muslims as a spontaneous reaction to the train fire in which
Hindus were killed. But so many members of the VHP-Bajrang Dal-BJP stand
accused of leading the mobs that killed the Muslims that records of their
numerous telephonic conversations on that day suggests collusion among them,
as Setalvad suggests.
Indeed, phone calls records also show that VHP men such as Babu Bajrangi,
who is accused of the violence in the two massacres at Naroda Patiya and
Naroda Gaam, and Atul Vaidya, who is accused of complicity in the massacre
at Gulberg Society where former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was killed, were in
touch with each other, too. Bajrangi, who confessed before TEHELKA’s hidden
cameras of his involvement in the massacre, was also in touch with Patel and
two others of the VHP.
ANOTHER QUESTION that Setalvad has raised is about the presence of six
persons from Modi’s office in the Meghaninagar area of Ahmedabad on February
27. According to the telephone call records, they were in the area during
2-5 pm that day, while Modi was visiting Godhra. Then Health Minister Bhatt
and Mehta from Modi’s office were at Narol Naroda between 9 am and 5 pm. “It
was at these locations that violence spilt over in broad daylight the next
day as policemen watched,” Setalvad says.
In fact, on the day of the massacres at Gulberg Society, Naroda Patiya and
Naroda Gaam, phone records show that the officials from Modi’s office, and
ministers Bhatt and IK Jadeja, and even DGP Chakravarti were located in
these areas. The question arises: what were these bigwigs doing in those
areas, and why could they not stop the killings?
There are also graphs showing the locations of officers from Modi’s office
and senior policemen in and around his residence in Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s
capital, “corroborating the fact that secret/illegal meetings did take
place, where instructions to allow free reign to the organised mobs led by
men of the VHP/Bajrang Dal are alleged to have been given,” says Setalvad in
her statement to the commission.
Now the ball is in the Nanavati Commission’s court. Given that the
Commission gave a near-clean chit to Modi in an interim report in September
2009, Setalvad may be staring at an uphill trudge.
*WRITER’S EMAIL*
*[email protected]*
*From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 23, Dated June 12, 2010*
*With Regards
Abi*
“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and
justice he is the worst”
*- Aristotle*
--
You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a
nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the
foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
-AMBEDKAR
http://venukm.blogspot.com
http://www.shelfari.com/kmvenuannur
http://kmvenuannur.livejournal.com
--
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