Gulberg sentences promise no closure

The Gulberg massacre case verdict does not bring a sense of closure. The sentencing of just 11 of the 24 convicts to life in jail for murder and those convicted of lesser charges getting lighter sentences are indications of leniency in a case of a murderous mob killing 69 persons in a paroxysm of violence. Justice must not only be done but also be seen to be done, which does not seem to be the case here and not just because the relatives of those killed are dissatisfied with the quantum of punishment. The Gujarat riots of 2002 were one of two of the worst incidents of barbaric and murderous behaviour by a large group of people, the other being the anti-Sikh riots of 1984.

When we say Gujarat riots, it also subsumes the Godhra carnage in which 59 people of a particular community were targeted and killed and which was believed to be the trigger for retaliatory events in which over 1,000 people were killed. The sentences handed down in the case of the Godhra train burning were not disproportionate to the crime, but, in the Gulberg Society case, they seem to be so. It is not the debate over capital punishment that we enter into here in this comparison as much as bringing out the contrast in evaluating the intentions behind two crimes that took a toll of innocent lives.

The fact that the special SIT court tried to find mitigating circumstances to conclude there was no criminal conspiracy and so disregarded capital punishment betrays the difference in approach. To conclude that ex-MP Ehsan Jafri firing at a bloodletting mob was the trigger is simplistic and cannot be sustained in view of the evidences tendered. If a criminal conspiracy was judged to be behind the Godhra murders, it should equally have applied to the Gulberg case.

Having come to the correct conclusion that this was the “darkest day in the history of civil society”, the judge seems to have been side-tracked by the thinking that the firing was the catalyst and not the collective murderous intent of the mob that had surrounded Gulberg Society — which housed members of a particular community — and besieged it for hours before getting down to the business of murder.

The sentencing is unlikely to be the last word on the Gulberg killings. Each incident of the collective Gujarat riots was an affront to civilisation. They were a reminder that unless we learn from history we are not only the lesser for it as a nation but also we are condemned to repeating its mistakes. Only by stripping the issue of its politics and the interplay of religions will it be possible to see the events for what they really were. It is a slender hope that those punished will repent their acts as much as we do this blot on modern Indian history.