I/III. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/modis-blog-evokes-anger-among-victims/article5512951.ece
MUMBAI, December 29, 2013 Updated: December 29, 2013 03:17 IST Modi’s blog evokes anger among victims LYLA BAVADAM [image: Rupa Mody, whose son went missing after the Gujarat riots, breaks down after a court rejected a petition seeking the prosecution of BJP leader Narendra Modi on Thursday. Photo: AP] AP Rupa Mody, whose son went missing after the Gujarat riots, breaks down after a court rejected a petition seeking the prosecution of BJP leader Narendra Modi on Thursday. Photo: AP“He has expressed his pain after 12 years... and at no point has he asked for forgiveness” Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s blog in which he says he was “shaken to the core” by the 2002 riots in the state has evoked anger and scepticism among the victims of the riots. In his letter which begins with “Dear sisters and brothers”, Mr. Modi says words such as “grief, sadness, misery, pain, anguish, agony” were inadequate to express “the absolute emptiness one felt on witnessing such inhumanity.” Reacting to Mr. Modi's letter, Fr Cedric Prakash of Prashant, the Centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace, an organisation that has worked for justice for the victims of 2002 said: “One thing is his personal feelings which have come 12 years later. Another thing is his duty as chief executive which was to ensure the protection of like and property of every single citizen and especially the victims of 2002. And this he did not do.” Speaking from Ahmedabad, Rupa Mody, whose son went missing after the Gulbarg Society massacre — her story inspired the Hindi film*Parzania* — described the letter as “crocodile tears”. Mr. Modi, she said, “has expressed his own pain in great detail but at no point has he asked for forgiveness. And what sort of pain is this that he claims to feel ? What sort of pain is it that for 12 years he has not expressed it and now on hearing of a court judgement he decides to express this great pain. The man has a heart of stone – he is not capable of pain. I am a mother who has no idea if her son is alive or not. I feel pain. Not him.” Mr. Modi’s blog post came a day after a court in Ahmedabad rejected the petition of Zakia Jafri, the wife of Congress parliamentarian Ehasan Jafri who was killed in the Gulbarg Society attack. Mr. Modi’s blog came a day after an Ahmedabad court rejected Ms. Jafri’s petition asking for an indictment of Mr. Modi in the Gulbarg Society attack, and for rejecting the clean chit given to the Gujarat chief minister by the Special Investigation Team. Ms. Mody and her son had taken shelter in the Jafris’ house at the time of the attack. Her son has not been traced since that day. Her anguish and anger were voiced by Khatun Apa, who lived in Naroda Patiya in 2002 and was a witness to the worst of the riots., barely escaping with her life at the time. The 40-year-old now lives in Citizen Nagar in Ahmedabad, a ghettoised neighbourhood of Muslims living in run down tenements with no municipal facilities. “We called the most senior police officers, we pleaded before the SRP. All we heard was ‘It is your day to die. The order from above is to kill you all’, she recalled. Khatun Apa, who said she would never return to Naroda Patiya, said she could still hear the crowds saying “Maro maro, jalao jalao [kill, burn]”. “If Modi had said ‘Stop’ [the riots] would have stopped but he did not. And now he says he felt pain. He is a liar. He has written this letter to fool people but people are not idiots. More and more Hindus also see he is a liar now.” Mrs. Mody said the letter was a “political game, a publicity stunt... he thinks saying he feels pain will get him the job of Prime Minister but it won’t.” II/III. http://lite.epaper.timesofindia.com/mobile.aspx?article=yes&pageid=6§id=edid=&edlabel=TOIA&mydateHid=11-11-2009&pubname=&edname=&articleid=Ar00601&publabel=TOI GULBARG MASSACRE *Police asked killers to look for Azhar: Rupa Mody * *TIMES NEWS NETWORK * Ahmedabad: Rupa Mody,mother of Azhar who went missing from Gulbarg Society on February 28,2002,told a special court how the local police inspector wanted her to sign a statement saying the police had come on time,before they agreed to look for her son. Breaking down while narrating the horror of the massacre which took place after the Godhra carnage,Mody recounted how inspector KG Erda offered her help by asking the prime accused in the case Atul Vaidya and Bharat Taili to look for Azhar.The Modys still have hope that their son is alive and grown-up into a young man of 21 years. She identified all three of them in the course of her two day cross-examination before judge BU Joshi hearing the case which is under reinvestigation. Mody recalled how she had called up police commissioner PC Pande for help,informing him that nearly 100 people had taken refuge in ex-MP Ahsan Jafris house.When I told the police commissioner regarding our whereabouts,he cut the phone saying that he would get further details and send police force, she said adding how minutes after this,the boundary walls of Gulbarg Society were blasted by the mob with gas cylinders,and people killed mercilessly.She also confirmed the account by earlier witness Imtiyaz Pathan which said how Jafri was showered abuses when he called up Chief Minister Narendra Modi for help. When we asked him (Jafri) for help he said that he had spoken to Narendra Modi but had got an unfavourable answer, she said adding how the former Parliamentarian had made frantic calls for help. Mody told the court that she was informed by a boy that the rioters had blasted the wall with a gas cylinder and were rushing in.She maintained that police had not come to their rescue despite repeated SOS sent to various authorities. She again broke down on Monday in the courtroom while narrating how she lost trace of her son after she was hit by a burning rag,which left her unconscious. Mody had further stated that she had seen 4 to 5 naked bodies lying in the Jafris garden while she was coming out after the police arrived.She stated that the bodies had number of wounds on them and identified them to be of a few women,a man and a child,while she was not able to identify the others. Parzania, a Bollywood movie was made based on this real life story,which was banned from being screened in Gujarat. *(Left) Rupa Mody and her missing son Azhar * III. http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/talking-terms/entry/mother-courage Mother courage Dileep Padgaonkar <http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/talking-terms/page/authorProfile?page=authorProfile> 21 April 2013, 02:34 PM IST Zakia Jafri deserves accolades for her grit and determination to get justice for her slain husband. On April 24, a magistrate in Ahmedabad will begin daily hearings on a petition filed by Zakia Jafri, widow of the slain Congress leader Ehsan Jafri, challenging the clean chit that the Special Investigation Team gave Narendra Modi’s for his alleged role in the Godhra and post-Godhra violence in 2002. She contends that the SIT overlooked masses of evidence - including dispatches filed by the intelligence department and detailed records of cell-phone calls made on Februray 28, the day on which her husband and 70 others were killed in the city’s Gulberg Society - to save the Gujarat chief minister’s skin. The calls indicate that as soon as he was he informed about the burning of the train at Godhra, Modi contacted not his senior officials first but the secretary of the Gujarat unit of the VHP, Jaideep Patel, and asked him to go post-haste to the site of the gruesome incident. There Patel ensured that the bodies were handed over to him and not, as is the prevalent practice, to the next of kin. He then hauled them in trucks and, ignoring police warnings, orchestrated a procession of the bodies through the streets of Ahmedabad. This brazen attempt to provoke communal fury had the desired effect: death and destruction on a scale that shamed India. The fact that the Supreme Court first allowed Zakia Jafri access to a truck-load of documents compiled by the SIT and also permitted her to file the petition was a clear indication that in the eyes of the apex court Modi is not entirely off the hook. That realization probably explains why he sought the death penalty for two individuals convicted for their actions during the riots: Maya Kodnani, who once served in his cabinet, and Babu Bajrangi, a VHP activist. But far from giving himself a freshly minted secular image, this move has triggered indignation in the ranks of Hindu right-wing groups, including the Shiv Sena. And it has further alienated him from his critics within the BJP, especially from L.K. Advani who had doted on Kodnani. Nor has he succeeded in detracting attention from Zakia Zafri’s petition. It should finally settle the matter one way or the other. Regardless of its outcome, however, the remarkable courage that this frail and elderly lady has shown over more than a decade to get to the bottom of the communal carnage must command respect and admiration. Despite repeated legal set-backs, she never wavered in her determination, nor did she once fear the consequences of defying the Gujarat strong-man. No less significant is her undiminished faith in the judiciary. Time and again she has vowed to abide by its verdict once she exhausts all legal remedies available to her as a citizen of the republic. For a woman who has borne untold suffering, such faith is touching beyond words. And such grace and dignity under intolerable pressure is quite simply miraculous. But tough times await Modi even if the magistrate hearing Zakia Jafri’s petition endorses the SIT’s conclusions. According to a report published in the Sunday Times of India, two senior police officers made numerous calls to the chief minister’s office during two encounters: one that killed Sohrabuddin Shaikh on 26 November 2005 and another that killed Tulsiram Prajapati on 28 December 2006. Modi’s minister of state at that time, Amit Shah, is an accused in these two cases. He was recently given a plum job in the highest echelons of the BJP. Public pressure will now mount on the CBI to take cognisance of these calls – something that the investigation agency apparently failed to do even though it was in possession of the details. At some point or the other, the kin of the victims, or human rights organizations, or both, will petition the courts to order a probe. Moreover, even those sections of the media that are enamoured of the Gujarat chief minister’s record in office – effective and clean governance, speedy economic growth, a no-nonsense attitude to security issues etc – will find it hard to ignore the ghost of Godhra that is certain to haunt him in the weeks and months ahead. As it happens, these weeks and months are crucial for Modi to reinforce his claim that none other than he can lead the BJP-led NDA to rout the two-term, scam-ridden, indecisive UPA in the next general elections. The one who is best placed to thwart his prime ministerial ambitions is not Rahul Gandhi, nor Nitish Kumar nor even his detractors within his own party’s fold but Zakia Jafri. She has emerged as the Mother Courage of an India that abides by the letter and spirit of its Constitution and by the ethos of its pluralistic culture. It is a pity that there is no such Mother Courage to expose the criminal shenanigans of the likes of Jagdish Tytler and many others who lost their lives in communal riots under the watch of the Congress and that of other self-appointed votaries of secularism for decades. But that cannot detract attention from what the courts have in store for the zealous prime ministerial aspirant Narendra Modi: either a squeaky-clean image of constitutional rectitude or an image that is forever tainted with bias, prejudice and worse against our minorities. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
