Modi: No chance for US visa as State Dept slams Gujarat again for 2002 riots

Courtesy: Times of India

The US State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has slammed Gujarat's record on human rights in its July-December, 2010 International Religious Freedom Report.

In a post on the web dated September 13, when the Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was actually celebrating a US Congressional document which went in his favour, the State Department's agency has again blamed the Gujarat government for failure in arresting those responsible for the communal violence in 2002.

While the Congressional document projected Modi as a future PM and praised his performance as a CM, this State Department report doesn't seem to indicate any change in policy of the US government with regard to Modi, even as WikiLeaks documents too show that the US diplomats are closely monitoring the growing importance in Indian politics of a person who is persona non-grata in the US. The State Department agency, which raises the 2002 riot cases every year, again quotes media reports stating that some Muslims still feared repercussions from Hindu neighbours as they waited for the court cases to be resolved.

The process of justice, it said, was delayed as the Nanavati-Mehta Commission investigating the violence got a 15th term extension. Several victims have accused the Special Investigation Team (SIT), appointed by the Supreme Court in March 2008, of pressuring them to dilute its earlier testimony before the Nanavati-Mehta Commission.

In many of the cases tried in Gujarat's lower courts, the accused were acquitted due to lack of evidence or changes in testimony, the report said.

The report added that hundreds of other court cases stemming from the 2002 violence (which were not in the purview of the SIT) remained unsettled. The situation for many persons displaced by the 2002 violence remained difficult.

In September 2010, the Norwegian Refugee Council's Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reported that approximately 19,000 persons remained displaced eight years after the violence, living in 86 relief colonies that lacked adequate infrastructure and typically were not connected to city centres.