Complaint against Sonia and NAC members for communal violence bill

Janata Party President Subramanian Swamy on Tuesday registered a complaint with the Delhi Police against Sonia Gandhi and members of the National Advisory Council (NAC) who formulated the communal violence bill.

Stating that the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill, 2011, spread hate against the Hindu community, Swamy in his complaint with the SHO of the Crime Branch of Delhi Police charges that the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and members of the NAC have committed offences under IPC Sections 153A & B, 295A, and 505.

The draft bill is "mischievous in content of targeting the Hindu community, malafide, unreasonable and prejudicial to public order" and incites "crimes against the Hindu community with impunity", said Swamy.

Noting that the bill did not find favour with any party as it provided sweeping powers to the Central Government, Swamy went on to say that the most vocal opposition to the bill came from the "Muslim, Christian and so called secular quarters".

"Their contention was just the opposite of what the political leaders were saying. The view of Muslim and Christian groups was that the 2005 Draft Bill was "completely toothless". They demanded that the powers of managing communal violence be vested in non-government actors and make governments and administration at all levels accountable them for communal violence," the complaint alleged.

"From their (Muslims' and Christians') arguments in opposition to the draft bill, it is clear that they wanted a bill that would consider only the Christians and Muslims as the "generally targeted" victims of communal violence; and that the word 'communal violence' be re-defined in such a way that only the Muslims and Christians are treated as victims and Hindus as predators, and that the local police and administration, including the state administration, considered hand-in-glove with the perpetrators of violence."

The Harvard-educated economic scholar, Swamy, pressed that the script writers of the bill were themselves "blinded with religious biases". "In India communal violence happens mostly because of politico-communal reasons. In many instances, as documented by several commissions of inquiry, it is the so-called minority group that triggers the trouble. We hence need laws that can prevent such violence irrespective of whoever perpetrates it."

The proposed communal violence bill intends to prevent and control targeted violence against the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and religious and linguistic minorities. The bill came in for sharp criticism from several political parties during the recent meeting of the National Integration Council (NIC) in New Delhi.

Commenting on the NIC meeting, John Dayal, general secretary of the All India Christian Council, said there has been a possible attempt in some official quarters to kill the bill even before it had formally seen the light of the day.

"The manner in which it was allowed to be mauled in the open meeting of the NIC put a huge question mark on why the bill was so prematurely put before political opponents for their views, and why no one from the government or from the Congress Party spoke in defence of either the bill or the rational for coming up with suitable legislation to save religious minorities of all sorts from targeted violence," asked Dayal, who also is a member of the National Integration Council.

"The bill is not against any majority community as alleged by BJP, instead it gives a sense and security to minority communities who have been subjected to targeted violence in recent years," Dayal said during a press conference last month.

Dayal cited the Gujarat riots in 2002 and the Kandhamal violence in 2008 to call attention to the significance of the bill. In the last ten years, he said, there have been more than 6,000 cases of communal violence.