Mail Today, 2 July 2010
by Rajesh Ramachandran
ALMOST two years after three blasts rocked three different states in the country, two of the cases remain unsolved. Only last week, the National Investigation Agency took over one of them. The common factor in all three attacks was the target: a Muslim neighbourhood.
History is only for scholars, the rest of us are brought up on folklores of the imagined past — of communities and even nations. All the country’s enemies or terrorists till now, in the chronological order of the insurgencies, have been Naga Christians, Khalistani Sikhs and Kashmiri Muslims. Now, of course, anyone with a Muslim name from Azamgarh or Kozhikode could be a terrorist. And, aimless bloodshed, mindless violence and targeted murders are all synonymous with radical Islam.
Meanwhile the mastermind of the first big terrorist attack in independent India, which killed the Father of the Nation, was honoured by an all party parliamentary committee. VD Savarkar’s portrait now mocks at Gandhi in Parliament’s Central Hall. Well, it is just a matter of detail that the Hindutva icon was let off only on technical grounds by the trial court and that a later commission of enquiry held him guilty of conspiring with Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte to kill the Mahatma.
Bias
To cut to the chase, there seem to be two distinctly different yardsticks to investigate crimes by Islamist terrorists and Hindutva terrorists. The handbook of Indian investigators has only one set of suspects for bombings in mosques and Hindu neighbourhoods: hotheaded Muslim youth.
Hundreds of young Muslims from the ghettoes of the old city were rounded up when Hyderabad’s famed Mecca Masjid was bombed in May 2007. Their mothers had to hold candlelight vigils for the police to even admit that these youngsters were in their custody. Soon, some of them were let off and some others were officially arrested. The great Indian investigative tool, endless inhuman torture, could not solve the case.
Now, the Central Bureau of Investigation finds that the Mecca Masjid was bombed by the same people who had triggered the Ajmer blasts. At that time, names like Huji, HuM, LeT and JeM were bandied about by the Rajasthan police, only for the CBI to later discover that the Ajmer blast was orchestrated by Hindutva terrorists.
This amply demonstrated the communal bias of the police forces in various states. Just as an Islamist group could be suspected for attacking a Hindu religious congregation or a market place, there is reason to look for Hindutva leads into an attack on a Muslim neighbourhood or place of worship. But this logic seems to beat the Indian police.
Of the three bombs that went off in September 2008, the first attack was on Delhi’s Mehrauli locality on September 13. Even if the Delhi police claim that the target was not specifically a Muslim locality, the fact remains that the blast occurred very close to a mosque and that the other two attacks in Malegaon and Modasa, a fortnight later involving similar low intensity crude bombs, were clearly targeted at Muslim localities.
Despite Hemant Karkare, the brilliant investigator who unraveled the Hindutva terror network, cracking the Malegaon case in a matter of weeks, the Delhi police or the Gujarat police did not even seek the custody of the Hindutva terrorists.
The Modasa blast in Gujarat occurred on the same day as Malegaon, yet the many glaring similarities did not prompt the Gujarat government or the police to at least question the Malegaon accused.
Worse, Delhi police, answerable to the Congress government at the Centre, still do not want to talk to Pragya Thakur, Lt Colonel Purohit and the rest. In fact, a couple of years before the Mehrauli bombing, the country’s biggest and most magnificent mosque, the Jama Masjid, was targeted. The case remains forgotten and the Delhi police have still not considered the possibility that Hindutva terrorists could be behind it.
Credibility
Though Karkare had laid bare the Hindutva terror network restoring the Indian state’s credibility to a certain extent, his martyrdom during the Mumbai attack has caused irreparable damage to the investigation and the trial. The prosecution has ‘ forgotten’ to charge the accused with stricter provisions of the IPC like sedition and waging war against the country. While suspected Maoists are routinely charged under these sections, the prosecution’s lapse in the case of a group of people who sought to overthrow the Indian Constitution with the help of foreign forces betrays the Indian state’s communal bias.
It was indeed a relief to see the CBI finally joining the dots and carrying Karkare’s investigation forward and arresting Lokesh Sharma and Devender Gupta for the Ajmer blast. All it required all this while was a thorough investigation into the activities of the accomplices and contacts of the Malegaon accused, but BJP- ruled states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and till recently Rajasthan refused to play ball.
After many years, what was suspected is being established — that the tentacles of the Malegaon accused are spread across the country and that they are responsible for a series of attacks including the Ajmer and Mecca Masjid blasts.
What suffered while Muslim men were arrested and beaten up for these very crimes without any solid evidence of their involvement was the Indian police’s credibility. But the police don’t seem to bother.
Maloy Krishna Dhar, the former joint director of the Intelligence Bureau in his book, Open Secrets claims that the curricula at the IB’s training centre “ had a distinct pro- Hindu bias.” Dhar an RSS activist in his youth, scarred by privations of the Partition, notes in his book that, “ A little later in my career I was surprised by the similarity of perception prevailing in the IB and the RSS.” For sure, IB cannot be compared with other police forces as it is not governed by a state government.
But the men and officers are chosen from the same pool. It is shocking that the nation’s internal security apparatus appointed a person like Dhar who professed the Hindutva ideology.
That too, when people with political affiliations like Communists were completely barred from entering even the central civil services.
State
The Constitution gives the monopoly of violence to the country’s armed forces and law enforcing agencies to ensure that it is upheld. But the law enforcing agencies appear to be soft on one section of terrorists who want to bring down the Constitution just as the other section of terrorists who are rightly punished seek to do.
Every arm of the state has its own logic; unfortunately the Indian police have retained a lot of colonial traits, which are often at variance with the people and the Constitution. The enemies of the people and the Constitution ought to be the enemies of the police. Any deviation from this basic principle, as manifested in the handling of riot cases and terror cases, ought to be addressed by the political leadership. Disciplinary action against all those officers who tried to link innocents to terror cases would be a good beginning to restore the Indian state’s credibility.
rajesh. ramachandran @ mailtoday. in
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