State violence: No conspiracy, says the police

Despite several pointers that the post-Godhra riots were well planned and had the same modus operandi in the entire state, police says the riots were spontaneous and that there was no conspiracy involved.

It is amazing that though VHP announced a statewide bandh on February 28, no one has been caught for planning to target minority community’s lives and property, said a senior police officer. This, despite common knowledge that many local VHP leaders allegedly led the mobs on that fateful day, he added. VHP had reportedly held meetings of its workers in Ahmedabad and other district centres on February 27.

One DCP said that many people in the mobs had the list of shops they were to target and knew exactly which were the Muslim shops, so someone obviously had made the list. But DCP crime D.G. Vanzara said that it is common for people residing in a locality to know which ones belong to Muslims and that’s why they were targeted out of sheer anger.

It was a spontaneous reaction to the Godhra incident and not a planned conspiracy, he said. "Still we have charged all those arrested for rioting with conspiracy under section 120 (B) of the IPC but investigations have failed to establish this," he said. "We have also charged all rioters with common intent under section 34 of the IPC which can be established since all of them acted in a similar manner," he added.

But he explained that it was not necessary for common intent to be preplanned. However, a report submitted to the home ministry on the number of people arrested during the riots points to a different conclusion. State police had arrested totally 32 persons with a criminal background between February 27 and February 28, as many as 4,845 in March, 4,043 in April and 1,037 by May 15.

The very fact that persons with criminal background were involved in the rioting, proved that someone asked them to get involved in the violence since criminal elements do not get swayed by sentiments but by economic gain, observed another senior police officer.

Talking along similar lines, security adviser to the Chief Minister Mr. K.P.S. Gill has said that minority community delegations had represented to him that professional criminals were involved in the rioting. He further said, "It had been brought to my notice that persons were given Rs. 500 and a bottle of alcohol for rioting, and if that is so then police should find out who financed them."

Several police officers feel that the inquiry into rioting cases should be handed over to the CBI so that they can look into who conspired to destroy Muslim business and target them in places where they were few in number like in Naroda Patiya and Chamanpura.

"This time the pattern of the riots was different. Instead of occurring in the walled city area like always, the eastern suburbs where Muslims were in small numbers were targeted," observed a DCP. And this was not done by rioters to vent out their spontaneous anger but it is quite evident that it was carefully orchestrated, he added.

Many officers feel that the investigators are missing the whole conspiracy angle because they are looking into each case in isolation instead of looking at the riots as a whole. "It is so evident that some people at the top planned the genocide but our police are failing to spot it," a senior level police officer said angrily.

Republished from The Asian Age