Lingering suspicion clouds hope

At ground zero, Godhra, it was time for some wary relief tinged with lingering suspicion on Tuesday, after the Supreme Court upheld the POTA Review Committee’s recommendation to lift the stringent Act from those accused in the 2002 train burning incident.

Newsline caught up with two of the families coping with their loved ones being locked up under POTA, for the last six years.

For Mohammed Abdul Sattar Majmu, 70, the news that his blind son, Ishaq Mohammed Majmu is likely to get off POTA’s stringent provisions, is like an unfulfilled election promise.

“Journalists from all over had trooped into my house, discussing our plight. My son is a blind man. How could he have been guilty? Yet, has anything happened that will spare him?” asked Abdul Sattar in his two room tenement in Godhra town.

Between the frequent power-cuts, the septuagenarian rued over the failure of the state to protect his 35-year-old son who was blind since birth. “I won't believe in any judgments till my son walks free. It seems all the courts are owned by the Gujarat government,” said Sattar, who lost his wife, Kulsum Biwi, on December 7, 2002.

According to Sattar, his wife would weep every night till the day she died of a heart attack thinking about Ishaq, her blind unmarried son, who was picked up by a ‘dabba’ or a police van from their shop in April 2002 on allegations that he was one of the perpetrators who burnt the S-6 coach of the Sabarmati Express in February 2002.

... contd.