The Bombay High Court on Friday upheld a lower court's order discharging former Mumbai police commissioner Ram Deo Tyagi and eight others, but observed that the firing in Suleiman Bakery by the police during the 1993 Mumbai riots was 'cruel and atrocious'.Justice Mridula Bhatkar upheld the trial court's conclusion that Tyagi -- a joint commissioner at the time -- and eight other policemen had no intention to murder. Eight persons were killed and 12 injured in the firing.
'No one talks about the Mumbai riots anymore, though like Delhi 1984, the guilty have not been punished. In Gujarat, many powerful leaders of the state's ruling party are in jail for their role in the riots... In Mumbai, only one politician of the Shiv Sena, a former MP, was convicted of hate speech, along with two other Shiv Sainiks, one of whom was a corporator and the other a junior functionary... So why the apathy? Could it be because despite these statistics and the widely-publicised findings of the Srikrishna Commission, what remained in public consciousness was the violence by the Muslims, thanks to a highly efficient Sena propaganda machine? There's no demand for it, but would an SIT probe into the closed cases of the Mumbai riots help today?' The fadeout of Mumbai's riots from public debate can be called a triumph of the communal State, argues Jyoti Punwani.
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