Macho man Modi. Justice may be blind but it remains the sole hope against the tyranny of the system. And all manner of mortals from the law maker himself to those pulverised by it, end up knocking at its doors seeking justice. These range from the mighty to the midget. From governors ousted for sheer inconvenience and chief ministers short-changed by a changed political dispensation through cops incarcerated for standing up to unjust orders to the ordinary citizen fighting for his rights, the court remains the last port of call. And the cases range from serious constitutional issues calling for interpretation of the finer points of the law to resolving of marital conflict and sometimes stupid gaffes by the state. Sample the fare on show.
In 1995, as general secretary of the Gujarat BJP, Narendra Modi was among those to protest when Keshubhai Patel, who led the first BJP government in Gujarat, was destabilised by his own rebel MLAs led by Shankersinh Vaghela. Suresh Mehta, who succeeded Patel, found himself left out in the cold when governor KP Singh recommended central rule and installed Vaghela as CM with outside support from the Congress. But the same Modi had no compunctions later as prime minister in destabilising the Congress-led Nabum Tuki government in Arunachal Pradesh. Tuki sought judicial redress after President’s Rule was imposed by the Modi-led NDA. This was quickly withdrawn to clear the decks for a BJP-supported government headed by rebel Congressman, Kalikho Pul. The judicial verdict is awaited. And now the same has been done in Uttarakhand.
However, in BJP-ruled Haryana, the stance of the NDA government was different as it turned a blind eye to the Jat stir that rocked this state. Unprecedented violence, arson, rape and plunder there affected Delhi too and brought the Centre down to its knees. The government abdicated its role, was a mute witness, said Haryana Human Rights Commission (HHRC) chairperson Justice (retired) Vijender Jain on record. The Commission invoked Section 13 of the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, to issue notices to the state. But the Modi government found no fault with its government.
The judiciary is also seized of the highly politicised issue in JNU, where its president, Kanhaiya Kumar, was assaulted in Patiala House court even as the police looked on and a case of sedition slapped on him. Congress spokesperson Dr Manish Doshi said: “See the larger game plan — that educational institutions of national repute are in the cross-hairs of the BJP-led government for take-over by its youth wing, the ABVP.”
One of the first institutes to feel the heat of this government was Pune-based Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where students were irked by little-known TV actor Gajendra Chauhan being made the chairman. Then, it was the turn of Hyderabad University where the death of Dalit student Rohith Vemula was politicised. Even the presence of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi at these venues had the BJP flaring up. Doshi asked: “Why does the presence of leading Congress opposition leader Rahul Gandhi upset the establishment?”
There is merit in his argument. Many in Gujarat are aware of the case of Vipul Chaudhary, BJP leader and chairman of India’s largest cooperative, Dudhsagar Dairy in Mehsana. Chaudhary’s chance meeting with Gandhi at a press meet in Ahmedabad proved to be his undoing. He was also hounded out as chairman of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) and corruption charges levelled against him. The might of the Anandiben Patel government was used to dethrone him from the dairy too. Chaudhary fought a running legal battle that went right up to the Supreme Court. He was eventually re-elected chairman, defeating the party’s official nominee. Nonetheless, a ding-dong legal battle continues with the government.
However, it is in Gujarat that vendetta cases are often filed and people look to the courts for succor.
Various bureaucrats in Gujarat have also run afoul of the government and been slapped with cases. One of them is 1986 batch Gujarat cadre IPS officer Satish Verma who had diligently investigated the Ishrat Jehan case and was victimised by the state government. He found himself posted to the North-Eastern Electric Power Corporation in Shillong after the Gujarat chief minister took charge of the country in 2014. The state government also pulled a 1997 torture case against Verma and an SIT was constituted to investigate it.
The issue is not whether Ishrat was a terror module member but whether there was an extra-judicial killing. The government of the time in Gujarat tried everything in its power to scuttle the probe. It was an uphill judicial battle that was fought by the likes of lawyer-activist Mukul Sinha and IPS officer Satish Verma to unravel the case.
In 2009, Ahmedabad Metropolitan magistrate SB Tamang ruled that the encounter was staged. The Modi government challenged the decision in the Gujarat High Court. Since investigations continued to hit roadblocks the High Court constituted an SIT to probe it and monitored the investigation. The three-member SIT ruled it to be a staged encounter too and the Court thereafter handed over the case to the CBI which concurred after independent investigations and filed the first chargesheet on July3, 2013.
The case is in court and is it just plain coincidence that after the change of guard in Delhi, all the officers’ chargesheeted in the case have been granted bail.
Besides tarring public perception for larger political gains, the fact is that the diversion is likely to have a fall-out on the actual trial which is stuck in a CBI court in Ahmedabad since the last two years.
The trial is stuck for want of sanction from the Centre to prosecute Intelligence Bureau officers who have been chargesheeted by the CBI. The first chargesheet filed in July 2013 was against seven police officers including an additional DG, a DIG and an SP of the Gujarat police. The CBI had said the encounter was fake and a joint operation by the Gujarat police and the Intelligence Bureau. In the second chargesheet filed in February 2014, the CBI had charged special director of IB, Rajendra Kumar with murder, criminal conspiracy, kidnapping to murder, wrongful confinement and under the Arms Act. Three other IB officers who were part of Kumar’s team have also been chargesheeted. However permission from the Centre to prosecute the IB officers has not been forthcoming and therefore the court has not taken cognisance of the second chargesheet. And this is where the trial rests and the political brouhaha has to be seen in this backdrop. The immediate effect of the “politicization” is that the Special CBI judge before whom the case lay has recused himself from hearing it.
While Verma is fighting the might of the establishment with his back to the wall, providing him legal backing is Rahul Sharma, another Gujarat IPS officer who was similarly targeted. He has since quit and is practicing as a lawyer. Sharma rubbed the establishment the wrong way when he prevented violence in the area under his charge during the 2002 communal riots that followed the Godhra train carnage on February 26, 2002. He was summarily transferred to the police control room in Ahmedabad and later, additionally attached to investigations into the 2002 violence in Ahmedabad. It was his intrepid work that turned him into a ‘black sheep ‘in the eyes of the then administration.
Sharma diligently collected mobile records of the days of intense rioting — February 27 to 28 — which provided crucial details about the movements of BJP and VHP leaders, police officers and ministers. Even details of calls to the CM’s office and vice versa were recorded. All this data on CDs was handed over by Sharma to his superiors. Thereafter, it went missing. Summoned by the Nanavati-Shah commission probing the riots, Sharma provided duplicate CDs when the state government failed to do so. The Modi government chargesheeted him in August 2011. Sharma knocked on the doors of the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), which, in its judgement on January 22, 2016, gave a stunning indictment of the then government.
Its judgement excerpt reads: “The chargesheet is tainted by mischief, malafides, malice and coloured by arbitrariness, illegality and designed to defeat proximate and pertinent matters blessed by constitutional compulsion and designed as an engine of oppression. And now to add insult to injury a chargesheet is issued to an officer who aided the cause of truth. Has the word satyameve jayate no meaning. The then chief minister and present prime minister were among the respondents in the petition since he had initiated the necessary proceedings.” As if this was not enough, just days before the CAT order, on January 12, the Gujarat home department issued a fresh notice to Sharma asking him to explain why there should not be action against him for making unnecessary payment of over Rs 3,000 to his driver and gunman as dearness and travel allowance!
Sharma, like other officers who stood up against the state government, has been marked out for harassment. Some 35 show-cause notices were issued to him which were all challenged in CAT. The harassed officer sought premature retirement and quit service on February 28, 2014. A practicing lawyer now, he still gets notices like the present one.
Another senior IPS officer who got similar treatment was Rajnish Rai, who is presently Inspector-General of Police in the CRPF in the North-East. Rai got into the cross-hairs of the Modi-Amit Shah dispensation in Gujarat when he arrested DIG DG Vanzara and IPS officers, Rajkumar Pandian of the Gujarat cadre and MN Dinesh of the Rajasthan cadre in connection with the staged encounter of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a petty criminal, and the elimination of his wife, Kauserbi.
It was in this case that Amit Shah, now BJP president, was arrested when he was Gujarat home minister. He had to spend an extended time behind bars. Soon after Modi assumed power in Delhi, Rai was shunted out to the Uranium Corporation of India, Jharsughda in Jharkhand as Chief Vigilance Officer (CVO). He challenged his deputation in CAT, claiming his posting to Jharkhand was due to malafide intentions of the state as well as the central government. CAT gave some respite to Rai but he moved the Delhi High Court against the order and sought a police posting. Thereafter, he was posted to the CRPF.
That’s not all. In April 2008, this upright officer who had studied at one of the IIMs, was even hauled up for ‘cheating’ in an LLB exam. Gujarat University vice-chancellor Parimal Trivedi, who was in Delhi then, rushed to the state to personally conduct the inquiry. Rai was found guilty, but the Gujarat High Court trashed the University order with scathing remarks. The Modi establishment had also downgraded his Annual Confidential Report, forcing him to go back to CAT. In April 2011, CAT stayed the downgrading.
Rai’s wife, a senior IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre, was also not spared. She was twice marked out for posting in the PMO but the Modi government in Gujarat denied her this privilege, citing shortage of officers. The irony is that when Modi moved to Delhi, he got many of his civil servants from Gujarat transferred to the national capital to serve him despite a 69-officer shortfall in the state.
The list of other officers who stood up to the might of the Modi establishment and paid a heavy price is long and includes the likes of additional DGPs RB Sreekumar and Kuldip Sharma, IAS officer Pradip Sharma and IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt.
Sreekumar was the first of the Mohicans. As additional DGP (intelligence), he had opposed holding of Vidhan Sabha elections in 2002, the year of the Godhra carnage and subsequent communal riots. Modi, through his ‘gaurav yatra’ had led a highly surcharged campaign aimed at widening the communal divide and wanted to hold Vidhan Sabha elections immediately after to consolidate his hold. Sreekumar opposed it and made that it clear to Chief Election Commissioner LM Lyngdoh. This 1971 batch IPS officer, who was the grandson of freedom fighter Balramapuram G Raman Pillai, stuck to his guns and held Modi guilty of numerous acts of administrative commissions and omissions. Ostracised, sidelined and superseded, he deposed before the Nanavati-Shah commission and moved the CAT against his supersession. He won the case.
Then, there is Kuldip Sharma, a 1976-batch IPS officer, who had taken on Amit Shah in the Rs 1,200-crore Madhavpura Mercantile Cooperative Bank case, and even recommended his arrest. Denied a promotion, he was posted to Sheep and Wool Development Corporation as MD. He challenged this in CAT and directly blamed Modi. Subsequently, he went on deputation as DGP to the Centre and later became advisor in the home ministry. Piqued, the Gujarat government charge-sheeted him on frivolous grounds and re-opened a 30-year-old case against him. On retirement, Sharma joined the Congress.
His brother, Pradip Sharma, a senior IAS officer, also fell out with the Modi establishment and had a number of cases slapped against him. These range from the trivial to the serious, leading him to be in and out of jail. Then, there is IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt who filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court on Modi’s role in the 2002 riots. He was removed from police service in 2015.
The list is long and tedious. And in most cases, it is the courts which have provided salvation to brave officers willing to stand up against wrong-doings of the state.