In India, where the conviction rate in heinous crimes is barely 6 per cent, it doesn't require an exceptional risk-taking ability to get away with murder, literally. More so because controversies over crimes and their punishment, or the lack of it, are seasonal. They come and go. Only some of them stay as landmarks. They put their stamp on the national psyche, either by showing grave errors in public policy or by exposing excesses committed by the executive, the legislators and at times, even the judiciary.

MUTE WITNESS: The Best Bakery in Vadodara; (above) Zaheera

In that sense, the controversy kicked up by Zaheera Sheikh, the 18-year-old daughter of the late Habibullah Sheikh, owner of the Best Bakery in Vadodara, is headed for a long run in the minds of the public. On March 1 last year, on a day a bandh was called by the VHP and the Bajrang Dal in Gujarat in protest against the Godhra carnage, nearly 1,000 rioters swooped down on the bakery-cum-residence. Eleven members of the Sheikh family and three bakery employees were either charred to death or hacked to pieces before being consigned to flames. Zaheera escaped death along with her mother, grandmother and three brothers, by taking shelter on the roof of the building. She became the prosecutor's star witness when in her police complaint she described the attack and named the assailants. However, when the trial began, she denied having named them and said she hadn't witnessed the killings, being on the terrace all the time. After Zaheera's court appearance on May 17, it was the turn of her mother Sehrunissa and younger brother Nafitullah to withdraw their statements. Of the 120 witnesses, only 73 deposed. Of them, 41 backtracked on their police testimonies.

The fast-track court said though the reports of the violence were true, there wasn't enough evidence to convict the accused persons. Judge H.U. Mahida said evidence had been "fabricated" against the accused, and "the police got them signed from the injured". On June 27, in a judgement that created an instant uproar, Mahida acquitted all the 21 accused. National Human Rights Commission Chairman A.S. Anand, a former Chief Justice of India, described the trial as a "miscarriage of justice". Soon after, Zaheera disappeared from Vadodara. Last week, she resurfaced in Mumbai to appear before the media, with human-rights activist Teesta Setalvad in tow and flanked by ad guru Alyque Padamsee and screenplay writer Javed Akhtar. Standing in the arc light of publicity and away from the prying eye of rioters and their agents in Vadodara, she confessed to having lied on oath. She said she had lived under a constant threat to her life from BJP legislator Madhu Srivastava, who had even escorted her to court and back while giving the testimony as he had desired. "Believe me, I had no option," she said and demanded that the case be reopened and retried outside Gujarat.

DUBIOUS ROLE: Madhu Srivastava

As Zaheera spoke with extraordinary courage and clarity on national television, her predicament twinged the country's collective conscience. The issues she raked up are galling and undesirable in a civil society supposedly based on the foundation of the rule of law. There were troubling questions over just how sincere the prosecutors, who represented the state Government, were in bringing the perpetrators of the carnage to justice. Why, for instance, did the police not build a strong enough case to indict the accused? What was the prosecution doing while the key witnesses were being threatened? Why didn't the court direct the state to protect the witnesses? Fair trial being an integral part of the constitutional mechanism, is it functioning in Narendra Modi's Gujarat? If not, how should the Centre, governed by the same BJP-led coalition, respond to the problem? The answers, if any, will certainly be disturbing for the nation.

Botched Case
While the request of Zaheera-and human rights organisations-for a retrial has sparked off a debate in legal circles, the verdict has also thrown up key questions: Would the fate of the 21 accused been any different had Zaheera and her family members not turned hostile? Unlikely. Much before Zaheera's U-turn, police and prosecutors had already lost the case thanks to shoddy investigation, perhaps even connivance. Says Kirit Bhatt, who heads the Vadodara unit of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL): "There is little doubt that the investigation was on the wrong track from day one."

SCOT-FREE: The accused celebrate after being acuitted by the court

The investigation officer in charge, P.P. Kanani seemed to rely on eyewitness accounts without making any real effort to build a body of supportive evidence that would indict the accused. For a high profile case, where the prestige of the police was at stake, Kanani's superiors hardly made any effort to see if he was doing his job right. In his judgement, Justice Mahida observed, "There was not even an iota of trustworthy evidence in the crime of the accused presented before the court." He described it as a case of producing a dead horse for the prosecutor to flog.

Even the role of the public prosecutor, Raghuvir Pandya, comes in for harsh scrutiny. Zaheera charges Pandya with not even meeting her before she stepped into the witness box. When key witnesses turned hostile, Pandya did not exercise his right to cross-examine them. As witness after witness turned hostile, the public prosecutor didn't find it necessary to seek adjournment and use the extra time to strengthen his case. Or even appeal to the court to take cognisance of these anomalous developments.

The defence, meanwhile, was able to hold its key witnesses together. Lal Mohammed, an eyewitness, told both the police and in court, that far from being hounded, he had been in fact offered sanctuary by two of the main accused in the case, Munna alias Harshad Solanki and Dinesh Rajbar, his neighbours in Hanuman Tekri. Zaheera had named Mohammed as one of the persons who along with Srivastava and his cousin, Congress councillor Chandrakant Srivastava, had threatened her and forced her to turn hostile. Jyotsna Bhat, a widow who lives opposite the Best Bakery, also rubbished Zaheera's claims, maintaining that the local Hindus had tried to save the lives of the local Muslims.

Judge Mahida too has come in for a fair share of criticism for the way he handled the case. Says Justice (retired) Hosbet Suresh of the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP): "The least that the judge could do was to hold the trial in camera." Instead, there is a perception that he responded mechanically to a case that was patently unfolding outside the court, in the maze of lanes around Zaheera's house, where, as she said, "those who attacked us were following me".

If the Best Bakery was a test case, the legal system of the state appears to have failed and miserably.

Political Fallout

DUAL PERSONALITY: While human-rights activists see Narendra Modi (second from left) as a villain, there are many in Gujarat who consider the chief minister a hero of Hindutva

But Best Bakery has turned the spotlights once again on one man and for all the wrong reasons. Chief Minister Narendra Modi now finds himself in the same situation as during the riots in February-March last year-a hero for the strong and strident Hindutva constituency and a villain for everyone else. Anti-Modi campaigners are now trying to whip up a frenzy over the role the Government agencies played in botching the bakery case and its likely bearing on the other four massacre cases being handled by fast-track courts (see box).

But they are not without their dilemmas. The massive victory of the Modi-led BJP in last year's assembly elections, despite the human-rights groups' best efforts to focus the campaign on the post-Godhra riots, is proof perhaps that the more Modi is pushed, the stronger he becomes. Already, Hindutva groups in Gujarat are demanding that if a retrial is ordered for the Best Bakery case, similar action must be taken for past massacres in which Hindus were at the receiving end. Besides, the onslaught of the human rights organisations and the intelligentsia has resulted in various outfits of the Sangh Parivar, not all of them kindly disposed to Modi, closing ranks. Much will, of course, depend on how the Centre, which is ruled by the same party that is in power in Gujarat, responds to any pressure that may build up over the Bakery case.

Legal Minefield
For those who masterminded the torching of Best Bakery, there are two reasons to shake their tridents in a celebratory manner. First, the trial of the 21 accused and their acquittal have nearly destroyed the value of the star witness in the case, Zaheera. The Constitution and the Criminal Procedure Code prohibit a person (or persons) once acquitted from being tried again for the same offence. Besides, assuming that Zaheera will remain the key witness even if the case is reopened somehow, the defence counsel may laugh her out of court if she again changes her story, saying, on a second oath, that she had lied on oath earlier. Will that not be a confession of perjury?

Judicial opinion in the country is sharply divided on the feasibility of reopening the Best Bakery case. If there is a miscarriage of justice, or so goes the argument, it should be remedied. Senior counsel and former Union law minister Shanti Bhushan charts a road map for the retrial. "The acquittal order has to be set aside by a high court or the Supreme Court on the ground that there has been no fair trial. The Supreme Court may also direct the trial to be held outside Gujarat."

However, the feasibility of a retrial is in serious doubt. N.R. Madhav Menon of the West Bengal University of Juridical Sciences, who is designated as the chief of the National Judicial Academy in Bhopal, thinks a retrial is impossible under the law and an appeal is possible only on the available material. "What were the NGOs which are now demanding reopening of the case doing when the trial was on?" Menon asks. "They should have intervened at that time." He is also sceptical about Zaheera's demand that the case be reopened outside Gujarat. "If that is allowed the Supreme Court may be besieged with requests from parties to transfer their cases from one state to another," he says.

Menon was a member of the committee led by Justice K. Malimath for reforming the criminal justice system. However, Malimath's own views on the case are diametrically opposite. Like Shanti Bhushan, he holds that a retrial is possible in an appellate court which sets aside the acquittal on the ground that the trial at the fast-track court was unfair. "A new trial means a new investigation, with the court not behaving as an umpire but acting as a seeker of truth." He also points at the power of the Supreme Court, under Article 131, to move the case "to any court in any state" where the trial doesn't run the risk of being influenced by "extraneous elements" (meaning local politicians). And Malimath holds that Zaheera is free to overturn her statements in the Vadodara court. "She can say that the replies she gave were due to coercion. If a witness has been under threat, and she can prove that she has been under threat, the court will see her point."

Zaheera is not the first prosecution witness in a riot case to turn hostile. Earlier, there was Satnam Bai who filed a case against H.K.L. Bhagat of the Congress for leading a mob that killed her husband in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. Before trial, Satnam Bai had vividly described Bhagat as the man leading the attackers. As the trial began, she turned hostile and said she was unable to identify Bhagat. In the Best Bakery case, it is the turn of the bjp to get its supporters out of the clutches of law. "The trial process follows political cycles," says senior counsel Anil Divan, "which is all the more the reason why a retrial of the Best Bakery case is necessary. When the regime changes, the case may take a different turn."

In Vadodara, the police obviously lacked the will. There is also an urgent need for a witness protection programme, like in the US or Canada, where threatened witnesses are even given a new identity, complete with a new social welfare number, so that the man can be relocated in a safer place with a new life. Zaheera's capitulation under pressure in a court in Modi-ruled Gujarat and her subsequent confession before the media in the capital of the Congress-ruled Maharashtra, has thrown up a much larger public issue-that of protecting the rule of law from political interference. Her desire to face a new trial outside Gujarat is a shame on Modi's Government, as much as it was a shame on the Congress government that Satnam Bai failed to recognise the rioters who had killed her husband.

Zaheera Sheikh, 18, the complainant and key eyewitness in the Best Bakery case, has been moved to Mumbai by the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) along with her mother Sehrunissa and brothers Nasibullah and Nafitullah. She told India Today Special Correspondent sheela raval how she was threatened, what made her retract her statement and why she is no longer afraid to speak the truth. Excerpts:

TRUE LIES: Zaheera and Sehrunissa (left)

"When the court summons came for my mother, younger brother and me, we were confused and scared. We had never seen a court. Who would represent us? As the date neared, the pressure mounted. Our neighbour Lal Mohammed (another key eyewitness) strongly advised me not to speak the truth in the court. He visited us often and said that if we want to live peacefully, we should not make more enemies. He also said people like Bhattu (Congress councillor Chandrakant Srivastava) were not good and might even kill us. He told me that we should think about people who are alive and not about those who were already dead. When I asked him what he would have done if his family had been massacred, he finally gave up his efforts to dissuade us.

Our neighbours also visited us often and told us that tension was again mounting in the area. They said if I chose to narrate what I had seen then I would be putting them in more trouble. We were confused and scared because all sorts of messages and stories were reaching us. But I was determined to get justice for my sister and relatives. On May 17, I set out for the court along with my mother Sehrunissa and younger brother Nasibullah determined to seek justice at any cost. How could I forgive those who ruthlessly slit throats of children and burnt people alive? My mother strongly supported my decision.

As we approached the court, I saw Srivastava alias Bhattu standing near the gate. When we came close, he told me: "Zaheera, soch le kya karna hai. Agar nahi sochegi to bahut bura hoga. (Think about what you have to do. If you don't, you will suffer.) Hamari side pe bolna (You have to take our side). Mera kehna maan le, police bhi bik chuki hai aur tera vakil ab hamara ho gaya hai. (Do as I say. The police have been bribed and your lawyer is now on our side)."

We were completely shaken up. There were Bajrang Dal activists and Srivastava's men following us. Nobody from my community came to our support. My mind was filled with scary thoughts as I was asked to go and meet the sarkari vakil (public prosecutor). I was surprised that this man had never approached us. And nobody had told us that we too had a vakil. Only when I was in the witness box did he introduce himself as Raghuvir Pandya.

The court was jampacked and people were staring at me. Some even made menacing gestures. My mother and brother were waiting outside. I was all alone at that critical moment. I knew I had two options: to get justice for dead family members or save those who were living. When Pandya asked me about the incident, my mind went numb with fear. I had no choice but to lie. Whatever I said in court was false. I would not have given up the fight if even one person from my community had stood by me during the crisis. Members of the relief committee also ditched me when I needed them the most. Main akeli ladki kis kis se ladti (how could I fight all those people alone)?

I came out of the room within half an hour because the public prosecutor did not ask me more than four questions. I felt shattered and very heavy in heart. My mother and brother got to know that I had retracted my statement and also chose not to tell the truth. I went into hiding but when I heard that people were accusing us of "selling out", I was terribly hurt. I came back to clear our name. We have got Rs 90,000 for my sister Sabeera's death and Rs 50,000 for damage to our property from the Gujarat Government and nothing else.

After my retraction, I could not eat or sleep properly for weeks. I would just sit in a corner and cry. The feeling that I didn't fight to get justice for my family was revolting. But I tried to justify my action by telling myself that I did it to save my mother and brothers. I can't afford to lose them too.

Just then, I was approached by some social workers, including Teesta Setalvad, whom I had met on March 2, the day after the massacre. She offered us help and told me that they would get us justice if I told the truth. We thought about it and felt that it was a chance for us to truthfully say what had happened. Today I am not scared because these people are there to protect us. Mumbai is a safer place for us and we can start our life afresh. I would like a retrial outside Gujarat. I have mustered the courage to identify the killers before the court with CJP's help.

TESTIMONY OF THE DARK NIGHT: The bodies of the passengers who were burnt to death and the S-6 bogie of the Sabarmati Express that was set on fire

Those in judicial custody include the core group of 33, including Bilal Haji, Razak Kurkur and Maulvi Hussein Umarji who are accused of hatching the conspiracy to kill the Ramsevaks on the night of February 26. The core group includes Kurkur's 10 boys who allegedly took petrol to the railway track to set S-6 bogie of the Sabarmati Express afire. Only one major accused, Farooq Bhana, is still absconding.

There are 70 star witnesses in the case, the majority of whom are policemen, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad workers and railway personnel. To support the conspiracy theory the prosecution is relying more on six eye witnesses. The most important among these six is Jabir Biyamin Behera (the only one out of the six who is himself an accused), who played a key role in setting S-6 on fire. Behera gave his statement in an open court stating how the conspiracy was hatched in Kurkur's Aman guest house on February 26 night and how it got the green signal from Umarji, an influential religious leader of the radical Deoband-Tableegh Jamaat movement in Godhra. Says Rakesh Asthana, special inspector-general of police who heads the sit: "We have a fairly strong case against the accused based more on direct, circumstantial and scientific evidence."

SARDARPURA (Mehsana) Toll: 38

It was one of the worst post-Godhra massacres in a rural area. But it appears to be the weakest among all the cases being handled by fast-track courts. All 32 accused obtained bail within a few months of the massacre. The trial is yet to begin. Says a member of an NGO: "If human rights groups don't mount pressure, other cases will go the Best Bakery way."

GULBERG SOCIETY (Ahmedabad) Toll: 42

Second only to Naroda-Patiya in brutality, the Gulberg Society massacre saw the gruesome killing of former Lok Sabha member and Congress leader Ehsan Jaffri in the labour-dominated Meghaninagar locality. The pattern was similar to that in Naroda-Patiya. Trial is about to begin in the case in which 21 out of 28 arrested are out on bail.