State of slow simmer

First Gujaratis learned that lions are being poached in the Gir sanctuary while politicos and officials paraded their increasing numbers. Then came the scandal of tribal BJP MP Babubhai Katara, hailing from one of the 100 poorest districts of country, arrested on an international flight in an immigration scam. The hat-trick has been completed by Gujarat government’s admission in the Supreme Court that their star cop carried out a fake encounter — and that the victim’s wife Kausar Bi was burnt and killed too — even as BJP spin masters find it difficult to conjure up some criminal antecedents for Sohrabuddin Sheikh. There is also the killing of Tulsiram Prajapati in the same case.

The developments have Gujaratis riveted to every small bit of news. The stories are being recounted — from newspreads in competitive exclusives to editorials in the leading Gujarati dailies — in Divya Bhaskar and Gujarat Samachar and Sandesh. It is these Gujarati dailies — the latter duo were indicted by the Editors’ Guild for their inflammatory and biased coverage during the 2002 riots — that are telling the stories of how Vanjhara fancied himself as an actor in Gujarati films, or speculating on how Modi could let the law take its course to keep up his righteous posture as a good administrator. And why should a housewife — even if she were to be somehow proved to be married to a criminal — be killed in this manner, they ask.

The official narrative of the Sohrabuddin encounter case goes like this: An LET operative out to kill the chief minister, was killed in an encounter in 2005. The criminal who operated in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan is bumped off not by the police of these two states, but by the Gujarat police, and that too when traveling in a bus from Maharashtra to Andhra Pradesh. All this happened without any official paperwork. Not surprisingly, post 2002, the system, its political bosses and their pets in the police force did not feel the need for paperwork or the rule book.

... contd.