December 27 was a good day turned sour for Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. At the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) silver jubilee meeting in Mumbai, speakers sang paeans to him. The same day, back home, skeletons of those killed in the post-Godhra genocide were being dug up from a mass grave at Lunawada in Panchmahal district.

Narendra Modi’s silence on the issue was utterly expected. But former BJP chief LK Advani’s lavish praise for Modi, despite his complete complicity in the genocide, only exposed his “concern” for secularism that he has been trying hard to redefine.

The mortal remains found at the mass grave site on the bank of the River Panam in Lunawada are believed to be of the 29 people killed by frenzied Hindu mobs at Pandarwada on 28 February 2002 in retaliation for the deaths of 58 karsevaks returning from Ayodhya the previous day who were killed when four coaches of the Sabarmati Express were torched by local Muslims at the Godhra railway station. After the massacre, the police reached the village to take custody of the dead bodies and buried them along the riverbed after post-mortem. Of the 29 killed, 21 people are still listed as “missing” in the police records.

For people like Sayeed, the local police’s FIR against those who dug up the site was not unexpected. “It is not unanticipated. As soon as they knew that we were digging the site, the police reached and cordoned off the spot. We want to ask them: Where were they when mobs were on the killing spree in our village after the Godhra incident? No policeman was seen for weeks then,” said an enraged Ghulam Kharadi, who was detained by the police after the incident. Kharadi is also named in the FIR. Ameenabanu Rasool, who petitioned the Gujarat High Court for a CBI probe, stated that despite several attempts, the police never told the relatives that the dead bodies were buried along the river.

“It was our fifth attempt to find the bodies. An affidavit was also filed in the Supreme Court seeking the list of missing people. Neither was the figure given nor was the site where the bodies were buried shown to us. We kept hunting until at last we found the site after tribals who live nearby told us,” Sayeed added.

Sayeed and Ghulam Kharadi went to dig up the site when the tribals informed them that some bodies were dumped at night during the carnage. “The tribals, who live nearby, told us that some bodies were taken by tractors and a big pit was dug by the earthmover and all the bodies were dumped there overnight. It was only after we started digging at the site that we found the remains,” said Kharadi.

The mass grave has again exposed the inhuman face of the Gujarat Police. As soon as the news spread, local police tried their best to stem it. The Godhra police are still reluctant to give the figure of “missing” persons. “We have handed over all the papers to Gandhinagar office. You can get the details from there,” said an inspector at the Lunawada police station. However, the Director General’s office in Gandhinagar maintained that the figures could be had from the local police station.

The mass grave excavated at Lunawada in central Gujarat did not just unearth skeletal remains of those “missing” persons of the Pandarwada massacre. There abound stories of many more such “missing” people who might have been buried by complicit authorities at many places without their relatives being informed.

According to the victims’ relatives in Lunawada, who had gathered at the site where skeletons were dug up, there are around 100 people still “missing” in the Lunawada area alone. But that does not bother the police at all. “At least 100 people are still missing from this tehsil since 2002. Because of the media spotlight, this neglect was highlighted this time. Otherwise the police would have tried to cover it up,” said Anwar Patel of Lunawada, who lost his maternal uncle in the riots.
(Source: Tehelka)