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“The Hindus have been so much humiliated and insulted since 1947 that sometimes it seems doubtful whether they are living in their own country. In Kashmir and Punjab, so much Hindu blood is being shed. Even in Ayodhya unarmed kar sevaks, including the sadhus were brutally killed.” Sadhvi Rithambara, Vishwas Nagar Chowk, New Delhi, on 28 November 1990.
Does this speech sound inflammatory? Yes, said former deputy secretary home, M.O. Siddiqui. No, ruled the metropolitan court of S. K. Aggarwal.
Last week, the court dismissed the charges against Sadhvi Rithambara. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader had been charged with inciting communal violence under Section 153(A) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
This section punishes those who are responsible for promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, language, etc. Those who recall the sadhvi of the ek-dhakka-aur-do fame at the time of the Babri Masjid demolition would have had no problem with this charge. Hence, it came as somewhat of a surprise when the lady who was out of jail on a Rs. 10,000 bail bond was acquitted of the charge of inciting communalism.
A closer look at the court order, however, explains a lot.
After going through the arguments advanced by the prosecution and the defence counsel, the judge said that he found “no evidence on record which might suggest that the feelings of any particular community, person, were hurt after hearing the alleged speech”.
Further, he said that the prosecution’s case was a weak one in the sense that the matter had been registered in a “haphazard manner” and that the charge-sheet filed “without proper investigation”.
For instance, there was only one witness to the “inflammatory” speech on the basis of which the charge-sheet was filed: a poojari (priest) in a nearby temple. To weaken the prosecution’s case further, the poojari’s statement was recorded not the next day, or even the next week, but a few months after the delivery of the speech.
And all the one and-only-witness said in his statement was that “the accused had given speech” The contents of the said speech were not recorded.
All this enabled the defence to build a strong case for acquittal. The defence lawyers, Alok Kumar and K. L. Sabharwal, were able to convincingly argue that “the words that in the Punjab and Kashmir, Hindu blood is being shed, pertains to the hostilities between the Indian troops and the ISI of Pakistan”.
Nowhere in the speech, said the defence, had Rithambara targetted any community in particular.
As to the prosecution’s claim that the sadhvi gave “a call to the Hindus to unite and fight bravely against injustice and atrocities being perpetrated on them, like the kar sevaks who martyred themselves at Ayodhya in connection with the construction of the Shri Ram temple”, the defence counsel maintained that this was well under Rithambara’s right to freely profess and propogate any religion.
In fact, the court order ended up admonishing Siddiqui for not taking a wider interpretation of the speech made by the accused, and hinted that the case against the sadhvi may have been influenced by political forces.
Since one can be reasonably certain
that this judgement is going to be cited by Rithambara and her allies every
time her role in the demolition of the Babri Masjid is brought up, it would
perhaps have been better to file no case at all than such a weak one.
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