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India: Politics of Vendetta Shall not Defeat the Cause of Justice - Statement in Solidarity with Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand

16 February 2015

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SAHMAT
Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust
29 Ferozeshah Road, New Delhi 110 001
(011) 23381276, 23070787
sahmat8@yahoo.com
www.sahmat.org

16.2.2015

Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand, who have fought a long and heroic battle to advance the cause of justice for Gujarat’s 2002 pogrom, face possible prosecution on charges of financial misappropriation. We see this as a clear case of the politics of vendetta launched with explicit intent to whitewash and efface from public memory the misdeeds of those who today wield political power in the state and centre.

As the government headed by Narendra Modi launches a fresh investigation into the 1984 carnage on the streets of Delhi – a measure that we would welcome except for the obvious partisan motivation behind it – we are shocked to see this persisting spirit of vendetta against an effort to enforce legal and moral accountability for an equally horrific massacre in Gujarat.

The Gujarat police’s alacrity in turning up at the doorstep of Teesta and Javed’s Mumbai residence within minutes after the High Court in Gandhinagar pronounced that it would not entertain their plea for anticipatory bail, suggests an intent to bully and intimidate. The ostensible reason, that Teesta and Javed are required for “custodial interrogation†is an unwitting, but nonetheless chilling confession of the Gujarat police’s real intent.

We have serious doubts about the bonafide of the complainants in this matter, but have taken the trouble of familiarising ourselves with the nature of the charges they make. An utterly trivial complaint has been inflated by the prosecution into charges involving crores, when the actual magnitude of funds received for the impugned purpose – building a museum of remembrance in Ahmedabad for victims of communal violence – was a mere Rs 4.6 lakh. These funds were received in the accounts of Sabrang, one among two trusts that have been engaged in the cause of justice for the 2002 riots. The other trust of which Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand are executive functionaries – Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) – has received far larger donations for the cause of pursuing avenues of legal redress for the 2002 victims and survivors. Curiously, every withdrawal for petty cash expenses for the activities of the Trust has been portrayed by the prosecution as an instance of defalcation for personal ends. Honrarium or salaries paid to Teesta and Javed have been similarly presented, though these are fully in conformity with memoranda of understanding and agreements arrived at between their trusts and donor agencies.

There are several such patent distortions of fact in the prosecution case. For their part, Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand, we understand, have submitted all relevant invoices clarifying the purposes of every one of the impugned cash withdrawals. These number some 11,000 documents and have been available with the investigating agencies for several weeks.

By way of background, we would like to recall that the Supreme Court has at least twice in past years, made adverse observations about the Gujarat state government’s campaign of vilification against Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand. The first such instance was in 2004, after elements within the ruling party in Gujarat pressured and in other ways induced a key witness in the Best Bakery case, Zaheera Sheikh, to change her testimony so that charges of obstructing the course of justice and perjury could be brought against Teesta. A second instance was in 2010-11, when malicious charges of exhuming the bodies of riot victims from their graves were brought and summarily dismissed as absurd by the highest court.

We are shocked at the tone of some of the media coverage, especially in some television news channels. These have made a bonfire of the basic principle of fairness and due process, which is the presumption of innocence. They have also shown more than the usual aversion to understanding issues of complexity, though these are not matters that would challenge more than the average intelligence.

We extend our solidarity to Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand in this hour of trial and reaffirm our unstinting support to the cause they are engaged in.

Irfan Habib
Noam Chomsky
Ashok Mitra
Romila Thapar
Amiya Kumar Bagchi
Vivan Sundaram
Prabhat Patnaik
Mushirul Hasan
Kumar Shahani
Aijaz Ahmad
Sheldon Pollock
Akeel Bilgrami
Nilima Sheikh
Mihir Bhattacharya
Saeed Mirza
Sashi Kumar
Ram Rahman
Sukumar Muralidharan
Aashish Yadav
Aban Raza
Abdullah A Rahman
Abha Dev Habib
Abhilasha Kumari
Adil Qureshi
Aditya Mukherjee
Aditi Chowdhury
Aditi Raina
Ahmar Raza
Akila Jayaraman
Ali Ahmad
Ali Akbar Mehta
Amar Farooqui
Ameet Parmeswaran
Amol Saghar
Anant Raina
Anil Bhatti
Anil Chandra
Anil Nauria
Anil Sadgopal
Anisha Imhasly
Anita Cherian
Anjali Raina
Annie Chatterji
Annie Mathew
Anuradha Chenoy
Anuradha Kapur
Archana Hande
Archana Prasad
Arjun Dev
Arpana Caur
Asad Zaidi
Asoknath Basu
Attaullah
Atul Bhardwaj
Ayesha Kidwai
B P Sahu
Badri Raina
Bhanu Mehta
Bharati Kapadia
Bina Sarkar
Biswamoy Pati
Bratati Pande
C P Chandrasekhar
Caecillia Tripp
Carol Rovane
Chanchal Chauhan
Chandana Mathur
Chitra Joshi
D N Jha
Daanish Raj
Dev Benegal
Dinesh Abrol
Dinesh Mohan
Estelle Desai
Gaurav S
Gautam Arora
Geeta Kapur
Geeti Das
Githa Hariharan
Gulammohammed Sheikh
Hans Kaushik
Harish J Padmanabhan
Harsh Kapoor
Hassan Suroor
Indira Arjun Dev
Indira Chandrasekhar
Indrapramit Roy
Iqtidar Alam Khan
Ira Raja
Ishrat Alam
Jaikrishan Agarwala
Jamshed Chenoy
Janaki Nair
Jauhar Kanungo
Javed Malick
Jayati Ghosh
Jehangir Jani
K M Venugopalan
K Satchidanandan
K M Shrimali
Kabir Chandra
Kamal Mitra Chenoy
Kanad Sinha
Kanishka Prasad
Kannan Sundaram
Kaushik Mukhopadhayay
Keval Arora
Kirtana Kumar
Krishna Shekhawat
Kumi Chandra
Kumkum Sangari
Kunal Chakrabarti
L Jagannath
Lata Singh
Lawrence Surendra
Lima Kanungo
M K Raina
Madan Gopal Singh
Madhu Prasad
Malini Bhattacharya
Manu Chandra
Maya K Rao
Meera Devidayal
Meera Menezes
Mira Chandra
Mithu Sen
Mitul Baruah
Mohan Rao
Mohd. Arif
Moloyashree Hashmi
Mridula Mukherjee
Mukul Mangalik
N K Sharma
Nalini Malani
Neeraj Malick
Nilima Sheikh
Nina Rao
Pabitra Sarkar
Padmaja Shah
Partha Chatterjee
Parthiv Shah
Partho Datta
Prabhat Shukla
Prabir Purkayastha
Prachi Narayan
Praveen Jha
Pushpamala N
R Vijayashankar
R K Poddar
R C Thakran
R G Mukhopadhyay
Radhika Desai
Radhika Menon
Rahul Verma
Rajendra Prasad
Rajinder Arora
Rajni Bhagat Arora
Rakhshanda Jalil
Rani Ray
Rashmi Kaleka
Ratnabali Chattopadhyay
Ritambhara Shastri
Rubin D’Cruz
Ruchira Gupta
Rustom Bharucha
S Kalidas
Saeed Mirza
Saif Mahmood
Smita Gupta
Savita Singh
Seema Mustafa
Shahana Bhattacharya
Shaina Anand
Shakti Kak
Shankar Chandra
Shankhayan Chowdhury
Sharmila Samant
Sheba Chhachhi
Sherna Dastur
Shikha Jhingan
Shireen Jungalwala
Shireen Moosvi
Shivaji Panikkar
Shubhra Chakrabarti
Siddharth Varadarajan
Sujata Madhok
S K Das
Sohail Hashmi
Sonia Jabbar
Subhashini Ali
Sumesh Sharma
Sumit Chowdhury
Sunil Kothari
Suvira Jaiswal
Syed Hasan Kazim
Syeda Hameed
Tarun Majumdar
Tirthankar Chattopadhyay
Tushar Joag
Upendra Trivedi
Utsa Patnaik
Varunika Saraf
Vasudha Thozhur
Veer Munshi
Vikas Rawal
Vinoo Mathew
Virendra Saini
Vishwamohan Jha
Xavier Dias
Zasha Colah
Zoya Hasan

[see also: Diverse Statements and a Citizens Online Petition in Defence of Prominent Activists Teesta Setalvad & Javed Anand Under Threat of Arrest http://www.sacw.net/article10592.html]