Apex court orders review of 2,000 Gujarat riot cases

Gujarat advocate-general summoned

The Supreme Court yesterday ordered a re-examination of more than 2,000 cases relating to the Gujarat communal riots by a special cell headed by the director-general of police.

This step was taken when the court was told that out of 4,250 complaints, over 2,000 were closed summarily by the police. Many complaints were not recorded at all, even after approaching the top officers.

The cell will consist of two additional directors-general of police and seven range inspectors-general for the 24 districts in Gujarat. This panel will go into each of the closed cases and decide whether fresh investigation was required or not. If re-investigation is necessary in any case, it will be done by an officer other than the one who had closed the case earlier.

The panel, to be set up by the state government, will also report to the Supreme Court every three months.

This order, passed by a Bench comprising Justice Ruma Pal, Justice SB Sinha and Justice SH Kapadia, comes as one more blow to the Gujarat government, as another Bench of the Supreme Court had recently transferred the Best Bakery case out of the state to Mumbai and appointed public prosecutors selected by the Maharashtra government.

The Supreme Court order on Tuesday directed that the investigating officers should file their reports in respect of each case to the respective range inspectors-general who would forward them to the additional directors-general of police and finally for scrutiny of the director-general of police.

If the police decided to close the case once again, they should give reasons to do so, the court said.

Moreover, such reasons should be published on the Internet for the information of those interested in them, especially the non-government organisations who have been associated with the riot cases.

Such non-government organisations may also approach the additional directors-general of police with relevant details to assist them in arriving at the final decision about any case.

These orders came when the Bench took up an application seeking reinvestigation of suspiciously large number of cases, which had been closed by the police as "a summary" cases.

The application was made in the petition moved by the National Human Rights Commission seeking retrial of nine gross riot cases outside the state.

In the second part of the order, the court asked the Gujarat advocate-general to appear before it personally on Monday to give details about the trials of the communal riots following the Godhra train fire in 2002.

He will have to give information such as the number of trials going on, the procedure followed by the state for filing appeals against acquittals, the number of acquittals, nature of the cases, the procedure adopted by the authorities to decide on appeals.

The day-long hearing ended with the last part of the order, which dealt with the issue of compensation for the victims of the riots. This subject is already being dealt with by the high court.

However, there is a grievance that the state has imposed limits on the amount of compensation for deaths, permanent disability and the like. Therefore, the court may not be able to award just compensation.

Moreover, rape and sexual assaults do not find place in the crimes listed for compensation. The Supreme Court asked the high court to consider these issues while dealing with the compensation claims. The court pointed out that there have been precedents for award of compensation as in the Cauvery riots and the 1984 Sikh riots.