Rs. 3 lakh for Best Bakery case witnesses

The Bombay high court (HC) has increased the compensation for five witnesses in the Best Bakery case from Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 3 lakh.

The Bombay high court (HC) has increased the compensation for five witnesses in the Best Bakery case from Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 3 lakh.

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Four of these witnesses —Taufil Siddique, Rais Khan, Shehazad Khan and Shailun Pathan — were employed with the bakery in Vadodara, and were seriously injured when a mob burned it down on March 1, 2002, during the Gujarat riots. Their testimony was crucial in convicting four accused in the case.

Fourteen members of a family were killed in the attack.

Despite this, they were awarded only Rs. 2,000 by the Gujarat government. The court has now ordered the Gujarat government to give all five witnesses — including key prosecution witness Yasmeen Shaikh — Rs. 3 lakh as compensation.

A division bench of justice VM Kanade and justice PD Kode held that the “compensation given to these witnesses was inadequate given their ordeal”.

The court had on Monday upheld the life sentence for four accused - Sanjay Thakkar, Bahadursingh Chauhan, Sanabhai Baria and Dinesh Rajbhar.

The high court, however, reversed the conviction of five other accused - Rajubhai Baria, Pankaj Gosavi, Jagdish Rajput, Suresh alias Lalo Devjibhai Vasava and Shailesh Tadvi - giving them the benefit of the doubt as no witnesses identified them as part of the mob that attacked the bakery.

The court also observed that it was high time the government put in place witness protection programmes, considering that several witnesses either turned hostile in the case, or retracted their statements. “A witness protection programme should be undertaken so that witnesses feel safe,” the court said.

The judges made it clear that such programmes should be undertaken by the state and not by an NGO or a private party, so that there were no allegations of tutoring witnesses in the future.

The court had, on Tuesday, dismissed Yasmeen Shaikh’s allegation that activist Teesta Setalvad had tutored and misguided her into testifying against 21 accused in the case.