'On 5 July, a Supreme Court division bench led by the judge Arun Mishra overturned a 2011 judgment of the Gujarat high court. The high court had acquitted 12 men accused of murdering Haren Pandya, a former home minister of Gujarat, in 2003. In the acquittal, the court condemned the Central Bureau of Investigation’s probe into the case—the agency had linked Pandya’s murder to the killing of a Gujarat-based leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and said that the murders were an international conspiracy supposedly led by a Muslim cleric to spread terror among Hindus.
'In a nation known for its collective amnesia, it is important to restate names, characters and situations. Forgetting these can jeopardise free thought and the very idea of justice. One such name is Babubhai Patel alias Babu Bajrangi. He is a member of the Gujarat unit of the Bajrang Dal and his notoriety lies in the fact that he confessed (during a sting operation) to have actively participated in the killing of men, women and children in Naroda Patiya – an Ahmedabad neighbourhood witness to the worst rioting in February 2002, leading to the deaths of 97 people.
'The Gujarat high court on Friday acquitted former BJP minister Maya Kodnani in the Naroda Patiya massacre case. She had earlier been found guilty of conspiracy by a trial court in the massacre in which 97 Muslims were killed during the Gujarat riots...
'The Union Ministry of Human Resource Development is now acting on a BJP parliamentarian’s complaint against a JNU professor for comments made on TV in July. Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a professor of political science, had criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying that he should have visited Palestine as well when he went to Israel. According to the Telegraph, Chenoy also referred to the Gujarat “genocide” and called the BJP “anti-Muslim” in his comments, which lasted less than four minutes.
'His 2003 visit to the UK was a nerve-racking and politically fraught affair, writes Satyabrata Pal, who was India’s Deputy High Commissioner in London at the time... Throughout 2002, after the Gujarat riots, the British media was up in arms, particularly since a family of Indian origin was among the Muslim victims. The Conservatives demanded that the Labour government live up to its claim that it ran an ethical foreign policy, Amnesty and other human rights organisations were on the warpath, the NRIs were split down the middle, and the bilateral relationship came under strain.
'Narendra Modi’s forthcoming visit to Britain is still weeks away but it has already become a subject of heated debate in Cambridge University with the vice-chancellor facing pressure to withdraw his invitation to the Indian prime minister to address the Senate, its most important academic body. A group of students and faculty members have written to the VC Leszek Borysiewicz protesting his decision arguing that by inviting him the university would be seen condoning “ongoing attacks on academic freedom and freedom of expression in India’’.
'On Tuesday, the Supreme Court dismissed a petition filed by Sanjiv Bhatt, the former Indian Police Service officer from Gujarat, asking for two police cases against him to be transferred out of Gujarat and investigated by an independent agency. Bhatt said he feared the state was trying to falsely implicate him since he had given testimony against Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat. One of those two cases pertained to a complaint filed by Tushar Mehta, then Additional Advocate General of Gujarat, alleging that Bhatt had hacked into his email account.
'Zakia Jafri, a frail 76-year-old, has begun what may be the last legal battle to pin blame on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for deadly riots that shook Gujarat when he was chief minister, and claimed her husband's life. Modi denies any involvement in the 2002 unrest, one of the worst outbreaks of religious violence in independent India. In 2013, a panel appointed by the Supreme Court said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him. It was the third investigation to come to the same conclusion.
'One police official saw his promising career flatline and was dogged by minor misconduct charges until he took early retirement this year. Another endured a long suspension before being fired last month, but not before a sex video surfaced that purported to show him with a mistress. (Apart from the receding hairline and healthy mustache, his wife said, he looked nothing like the man on screen.) A third faces a possible inquiry into decade-old charges of disclosing sensitive information. It could cost him his pension.
