New Delhi: Age relaxations granted in recruitments to various official posts to the children or relatives of those who died in the 2002 Gujarat riots stand revoked, the Union home ministry announced in a recent order.The order dated March 28 was addressed to the Gujarat chief secretary by deputy secretary to the Union government P. Venukuttan Nair.Referring to an earlier order issued by the ministry in 2007, Nair said that the age relaxations stood withdrawn with immediate effect.He noted that the benefit of giving “necessary age relaxation” had applied to recruitment to “para-military forces, IR [India Reserve] Battalions, state police forces, public sector undertakings and other state and [Union] government departments by giving necessary age relaxation”.Nair’s order did not say what prompted the government’s decision.The age relaxation measures accompanied the issuing of additional ex gratia payments made and other benefits given to the kin of the victims of the riots.Hundreds of people were killed in the state in the course of the riots, most of them belonging to the Muslim community.Human Rights Watch had said ten years after the riots broke out that “efforts to investigate and prosecute cases inside Gujarat were stalled and activists and lawyers involved in the cases … harassed and intimidated”.It also noted that over those ten years, “increasing evidence [had] emerged of the complicity of Gujarat state authorities in the anti-Muslim violence”.It has also been alleged that then-Gujarat chief minister and now-Prime Minister Narendra Modi bore responsibility for the riots, but Modi has denied them.During a recent interview to podcaster Lex Fridman Modi said that Gujarat had a long history of communal riots even before he was “in the picture” and pointed to the “backdrop” of terror attacks occurring before the violence.In a 2022 decision the Supreme Court upheld the closure report of a special investigation team probing the riots which said it found no material evidence against Modi.
