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Riot cop who battled state vendetta by Basant Rawat
The Gujarat government had sacked an employee in connection with the riot case that led to 31 life terms yesterday — not the three among the accused but one who became a key prosecution witness.

It was police constable Munsaf Khan, who had not only identified several key accused in the Sardarpura massacre of 33 Muslims but exposed the rioter-police collusion.

Khan’s victimisation partly mirrors that of another whistleblower policeman, IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who was suspended and arrested after spilling chief minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in the Supreme Court.

Khan was dismissed in 2007 after he had filed an affidavit in the apex court describing how the local police had left the village, giving the killers a free hand. He was sacked for going on “unauthorised leave”, the same charge on which Bhatt was later suspended.

The constable, however, again moved the top court, on whose orders the government had to reinstate him six months later and provide him with police protection. Khan, 61, retired as a constable in 2009 and lives with his family in Sardarpura, his home village, with a single constable guarding his house.

Khan says he had been home in Sardarpura on medical leave on the night of the carnage — March 1, 2002 — and saw the mob torch the house, 300 metres from his own, where the victims were hiding.

He says the previous day, February 28, police had come to the village after 20 shops owned by Muslims were torched, but had done nothing to protect the community. Being a policeman himself, Khan, who was then posted in Kallol near Gandhinagar, tried to restore peace.

“I wanted to set up a peace committee on February 28 but neither the sarpanch nor others from the Patel community responded. Perhaps they had made up their mind to attack us,” Khan said.

He later told the apex court-appointed special investigation team how then sarpanch Kanubhai Patel, 46, and his successor Kachara Patel, 58, led the rioters. Both were convicted yesterday, as were three government employees — electricity board staffers Mathur Patel, 49, Jayanti Patel, 46, and Ganesh Prajapati, 54 — who had all these years not faced even a departmental inquiry.

Khan says he saw Kanubhai help Mathur fix a searchlight before the house that was torched. He saw Kachara on the rooftop while a mob surrounded the house and shouted: “Kill them all. Not one should live.”

After Kanubhai’s term as sarpanch ended four months later, Kachara, a Congress member, was elected unopposed. Kanubhai remained influential in the area as a BJP leader.

The local police had not informed their higher-ups about the attack, which lasted from 9pm till 2.30am. It was Khan who called up a relative in Ahmedabad and got him to somehow contact district police chief Anupam Gehlot, who rushed in from Mehsana town, 50km away.

“The entire Muslim population of the village would have been wiped out if Gehlot had not arrived,” a villager said.

Of the 76 Muslim families that lived in Sardarpura, over 40 have left for good, selling their shops to the Patels. Only a few landowning Pathan families have stayed back.

Khan himself moved to Sanvala village, 30km away, for the next six months. “We have relatives there and Sanvala has a sizeable Muslim population. We felt safe,” he said.

He added that after he rejoined work, he was harassed because he had identified the riot leaders and exposed the police collusion. So, he filed the apex court affidavit a few years later.

Of the dozen-odd accused he had identified, seven have been convicted.

One of the accused, Ambalal Patel, 57, sounded remorseful in court yesterday. “We faced a social boycott after the killings. Even our relatives avoided us,” he told reporters.

In some cases, whole families — fathers, sons, brothers and uncles — have been found guilty.

Sardarpura, however, observed a bandh against the convictions today.