Office-bearers of Tata Workers’ Union pay tribute to former president V.G. Gopal on his death anniversary. Picture by Uma Shankar Dubey

Jamshedpur, Oct. 14: Ten years ago, on this day, V.G. Gopal, president of Tata Workers’ Union, was brutally murdered on the premises of the union office itself. He was talking to me as he was felled by the assassin’s bullets. I had gone to his office that morning with one Prashanta Ghosh, a teacher of Visva-Bharati University, who was doing a project on labour participation in management. He wanted to talk to Gopal but failed to get an appointment. I took him along with me to Gopal.

We talked for a while in his office. Gopal regretted that he could not give any time to Ghosh as he was leaving for Calcutta that very evening. From Calcutta he was to go to New Delhi. He suggested that Ghosh should call on him after three days. I pointed out that Ghosh was staying in a hotel and Gopal readily agreed to see him at 4 pm that very day.

We came out of his office together. The narrow staircase was chock-a-block with people, eager to hand over petitions to Gopal. He told one of his aides to take them. I noticed a young man sitting on the verandah with a blanket wrapping the upper part of his body.

He attracted my attention because mid-October was hardly the time for blankets in Jamshedpur. He did not make any move as we climbed down the stairs. As we came down, we shook hands at the portico and Gopal moved towards his car. As he was going to enter the car, he stopped, turned around and came to me.

He said, “Ashit, do you want me to...,” he gasped suddenly and fell on the rear seat of his car, half his body hanging outside. He had been shot in the back of his head.

The last half-sentence of his life addressed to me could not be completed.

I stood face to face with the killer. He was a wiry young man, dark and wearing an industrial helmet. He was dressed in trousers and a shirt. He mixed with the assembled crowd very easily. Almost half the people who had come were his age and dressed alike. I didn’t take my eyes off him for a single moment, not knowing what to do. He put his hand inside the car and shot Gopal in the temple from point-blank range to be doubly assured that he was dead. He started shooting towards me shouting “hat, hat”. I looked around and found that the hundreds of people who were there a few seconds ago had vanished into thin air. I saw a man behind me with a red blotch on his left breast trying to get up and then slumping to the ground. Later I came to know that he was Gopal’s bodyguard and he died on the spot.

I shouted for help. Some people came running along with the driver of Gopal’s car. We rushed him to Tata Main Hospital. The doctors there took nearly two hours to declare him dead. I suddenly found that I was holding Gopal’s spectacles. I didn’t remember exactly at what point of time I had picked them up. I gave the spectacles to Daisy Irani, who promised to hand over them to Gopal’s wife. A sense of emptiness and futile anger engulfed me as I started walking out of the hospital.

(Ashit Biswas is a witness to the murder of VG Gopal and has deposed before the CJM, Jamshedpur, and recently before the special judge of the CBI court in Ranchi)

That was 10 years ago. After the local police failed to impress the administration, the case was handed over to SIT headed by Abhayanand. The police made a breakthrough when they nabbed one Lalit Chandra Biswas. I was called to the Kadma police station and recognised the man as the one sitting on the first floor verandah of the union office. I read his written statement. He had confessed being a member of the gang of four hired to kill Gopal. He had seen Gopal for the first time in his life when he came out of his office with me. “I felt very sad when I saw the beautiful, old man whom we have come to kill,” he had said.

There was a ring of truth in those words. He was taken to the union office and he re-enacted the scenario of Gopal’s murder correctly. But he was not the killer.

I had seen the killer from the closest possible quarters and I am not going to forget him in my lifetime.

Gopal’s wife, Lakhsmi Gopal, waited till March 2001 to see the criminals being punished and justice being done. She died without any glimmer of hope. Justice delayed is, indeed, justice denied.