New Delhi- “Do not ask what we have gone through in these 14 years, and how we were made to feel as if were the criminals,” said the wife of Habib Hava, an electrician, who has just been acquitted by the Supreme Court in the Ahmedabad Tiffin Blast case. She can barely voice her relief that her husband will soon be with her, saying, “please pray, and that we can live a normal life now.”
If it were not for the Supreme Court and the tenacity of some organisations like the Jamiat Ulema i Hind (Arshad Madani) and a host of lawyers who refuse to give up, countless innocent Muslim youth would have been doomed to the gallows by the police, the administrative system, and often the lower courts.
A pattern is emerging: a terror blast; police move in to arrest scores of Muslim youth in the city, or locality; they are tortured and interrogated; some are freed; cases are filed against the others for terrorism and related sections; they spend years in jail; in between a few are acquitted by the lower courts occasionally; others are given life imprisonment, being lucky if they do not get death; a lifetime later, the higher courts acquit them.
Their lives are destroyed, their families usually lower middle class rendered destitute, they emerge from jail un-employable. And no one is held accountable. The policemen who arrested them remain with impunity. There is no compensation for the years lost, for the torture and for the imprisonment. There is no rehabilitation. That they have been freed is suppose to be enough compensation, and most of the time they are so grateful, and so broken from within, that all they want is to remain quiet, away from the cops and the law if they are so allowed.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court released four Muslim men—in jail for 14 years for what was known as the Ahmedabad Tiffin Bomb Blast case. In 2002, on May 29 five bombs were placed inside the Municipal Corporaion buses of Ahmedabad. Two did not work, three did in which about 11 passengers in different buses sustained minor injuries. This was after the massive violence in Gujarat in which nearly 2000 were killed, if not more, by organised mobs.
Initially no action was taken. The case was transferred to the Crime Branch and about a year later 21 Muslim youth were rounded up. Four were left right at the beginning of the case. Another 12 were acquitted by a special POTA court on May 12, 2006. The trial court convicted five of them to 10 years imprisonment. The Gujarat High Court acquitted one person of all charges on January 24, 2011 and convicted the remaining four to life imprisonment, instead of the initial ten years
If it were not for the Supreme Court and the tenacity of some organisations like the Jamiat Ulema i Hind (Arshad Madani) and a host of lawyers who refuse to give up, countless innocent Muslim youth would have been doomed to the gallows by the police, the administrative system, and often the lower courts.
A pattern is emerging: a terror blast; police move in to arrest scores of Muslim youth in the city, or locality; they are tortured and interrogated; some are freed; cases are filed against the others for terrorism and related sections; they spend years in jail; in between a few are acquitted by the lower courts occasionally; others are given life imprisonment, being lucky if they do not get death; a lifetime later, the higher courts acquit them.
Their lives are destroyed, their families usually lower middle class rendered destitute, they emerge from jail un-employable. And no one is held accountable. The policemen who arrested them remain with impunity. There is no compensation for the years lost, for the torture and for the imprisonment. There is no rehabilitation. That they have been freed is suppose to be enough compensation, and most of the time they are so grateful, and so broken from within, that all they want is to remain quiet, away from the cops and the law if they are so allowed.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court released four Muslim men—in jail for 14 years for what was known as the Ahmedabad Tiffin Bomb Blast case. In 2002, on May 29 five bombs were placed inside the Municipal Corporaion buses of Ahmedabad. Two did not work, three did in which about 11 passengers in different buses sustained minor injuries. This was after the massive violence in Gujarat in which nearly 2000 were killed, if not more, by organised mobs.
Initially no action was taken. The case was transferred to the Crime Branch and about a year later 21 Muslim youth were rounded up. Four were left right at the beginning of the case. Another 12 were acquitted by a special POTA court on May 12, 2006. The trial court convicted five of them to 10 years imprisonment. The Gujarat High Court acquitted one person of all charges on January 24, 2011 and convicted the remaining four to life imprisonment, instead of the initial ten years
No comments:
Post a Comment