Adam Goldman, a
journalist who with the help of his colleague Matt Apuzzo first broke the story
about New York Police Department's Muslim Spy Programme in a series of articles
he wrote for Associated Press must be a happy man these days.
News has come in that
NYPD (New York Police Department) has finally decided to disband its
DemographicUnit which was engaged in spying on Muslim neighborhoods,
infiltrating groups and eavesdropping on conversations across the northeastern
United States, In the years following the Sept. 11 attacks. It has finally
admitted that its secret Demographics Unit failed to yield a single terrorism
investigation or even a single lead. Senior police officers of the department
confirmed that the police gathered information on people even when there was no
evidence of wrongdoing, simply because of their ethnicity and native language.
It was quite a
coincidence that when the world at large was discussing how NYPD tried to
stigmatise a community and terrorise a people, reports about the 'informer-cop
nexus behind Islamic Fundamentalism in Tamil Nadu'.
(http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/tamil_nadu/Informer-Cop-Nexus-Behind-TN-Islamic-Fundamentalism/2014/04/11/article216)
were already making rounds. What is important to note here is that a (retd)
senior police officers confidential correspondence with higher officials formed
a key evidence in this unfolding drama.
Not very many people
would remember today that during Lal Krishna Advani's tour of Tamil Nadu in the
year 2011 police had discovered a plot to cause mayhem supposedly by Islamic
militants. It was told that pipe bombs were discovered on the route which
Advani's cavalcade was to follow. Police had even arrested two 'terrorists'
Syed Wahab and Ismath and presented them before the media.
A petition before the
Madras Highcourt which has sought a CBI probe into the various bomb planting
cases in Madurai alleging that the real accused were not arrested is revisiting
this particular high profile case as well. Madras Highcourt ( Madurai bench) is
expected to give its opinion on the 21 st April.The said letters written by
former Madurai SP V Balakrishnan to the DGP and Additional DGP in March and
August 2013 and were presented before the court in the second week of April.
According to
Balakrishnan police informers belonging to the Muslim community were themselves
indulging in subversive activities by abusing the faith the police had placed
on them and also due to their alleged nexus with some corrupt intelligence
sleuths.
"To buttress
this contention, Balakrishnan in a letter to the DGP dated March 29, 2013
pointed to a case registered by the Avaniyapuram police against Syed Wahab and
Ismath relating to a case of extortion. Of them, Ismath, who was an informer
for the City Intelligence unit, was involved in the Advani pipe bomb planting
case. Also, Vijaya Perumal, a head constable attached to the Madurai City
Intelligence Wing, had joined hands with Wahab and conducted kangaroo courts
settling controversial real estate dealings.
Balakrishnan had in another letter
written to the Additional DGP on August 23, 2013 strongly objected to the
transfer of an Inspector of the SIT who was probing cases related to bombs
planted by Islamic fundamentalists in the temple town. He feared that the
transfer of Inspector Madasamy would embolden fundamentalists to carry on with
their subversive activities."
Definitely this could
not be said to be the first investigation of its kind where the role of the
police and investigating agencies has come under a scanner. There are n number
of cases where law and order people have badly fumbled and have received enough
opprobrium from the judiciary. Not some time ago ' Jamia Teachers Solidarity
Association' had brought out a report 'Framed, Damned and Acquitted' which looks
at the operations of the Special Cell of the Delhi police, the stereotypical
manner in which they conducted investigations in cases arresting Muslims for
being part of terrorist outfits and how in most of these cases the accused were
acquitted by the courts.
The developments in
the Malegaon bomb blast case 2006 where a terror module of RSS workers was
finally chargesheeted, was also a pointer to the prejudices entertained by the
police and the role of informers in helping people nab innocents. One still remembers
the bomb explosions in Malegaon on the day of Shab-e-Barat (Sep 2006) and the
manner in which nine Muslim youth were apprehended and had to spend more than
five years behind jail because of biased investigation. Here also role of one
Abrar Ahmad had proved crucial - who worked for the police - who had provided
'evidence' against these nine youth. Later he had submitted an affidavit before
the court recounting the false evidence.
We have n number of
such examples where the actual perpetrators were never caught and innocents
were apprehended, tortured badly and asked to ‘confess’ a crime which they had
not committed.
Or refer to the
expose by Ashish Khaitan (www.gulail.com) which has unearthed
“.[i]nternal documents from more than
half a dozen anti-terror agencies that show that the State has been knowingly
prosecuting innocent Muslims for terror cases and keeping the evidence of their
innocence from the courts...”
In a press conference
held in Mumbai he had presented his investigation and had even screened a film
with candid interviews of accused Muslim men. He has even sent a letter
petition to the Bombay high court with nearly 400 pages of evidence in the form
of official investigation and interrogation reports of the accused men and
other documents which clearly indicate huge discrepancies. According to him his
research into the July 11, 2006, train blasts, the Malegaon 2006 blasts and the
Pune German Bakery blasts of February 2010 showed that the ATS has deliberately
created bogus evidence, extracted false confessions by the most inhuman
torture, planted explosives in the houses of the young men and implicated
innocent youth. In the name of internal security, the ATS and other agencies
were misleading the courts.According to a report which appeared in a section of
the media
..Khetan said he wasn’t out to prove
anyone’s guilt but expose the farcical criminal investigation which also
reflected deepset anti Muslim prejudice. What is serious is that one of these
men Himayat Baig has been given the death sentence for the Pune German Bakery
blasts when clearly police had found evidence of another man’s involvement. The
case of Qateel Sheikh who died in a high security Pune prison just before he
was to testify in a Delhi court is not longer a mystery going by what Khetan’s
documents show. The ATS arrested Himayat Baig from Udgir and claimed he had
carried out the German Bakery blast. However, a year later the Delhi police
arrested Qatil Siddiqui and Interrogation Reports obtained by Khetan show he is
linked to the Pune blast. These reports were not produced in the court which
finally gave Baig the death sentence. Police then tweaked reports to show
Sheikh’s involvement in another case.
Presenting all the facts, Khetan has
asked the high court to order an independent commission of inquiry into the
conduct of the investigating officers, action against officers guilty of
violations and relief for the victims of such operations.
(http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/from-stenography-to-journalismashish-khetan/article4739935.ece)
It has been more than
six years that Vanzara, ex DIG of Gujarat is languishing in jail for his
alleged role in the encounter killings which saw 15 deaths. All these killings
followed a very similar pattern. May it be the case of Ishrat Jahan, the
student from Bombay or Sameer Khan Pathan or for that matter Mr Soharabuddin,
all these encounters took place at night wherein none from the police force
received any injuries, despite the 'terrorists' being armed with 'latest automatic
weapons' (as was announced later) and the rationale provided for these killings
was that they had come to kill Mr Modi and his other colleagues from the
Hindutva brigade.
Last year his ten
page resignation letter had made headlines. Commenting on the unprecedented
situation wherein more than thirty officers working with him were now in jail -
which includes few officers of the IPS rank also - he maintained that between
2002 and 2007, he and other officers of his ilk
"simply acted and performed their
duties in compliance of the conscious policy of this government"
and yet his political
bosses betrayed him. The letter targetted Narendra Modi- Amit Shah - who
handled the home portfolio then- duo for their continuous neglect of these
police officers who were just implementing the policies formulated at higher
level and demanded that the policy formulators should also be questioned and
punished.
According to him
..the CBI investigation officers of all
the four encounter cases of Sohrabuddin (Sheikh), Tulasiram (Prajapati), Sadiq
Jamal and Ishrat Jahan have to arrest the policy formulators also as we, being
field officers, have simply implemented the conscious policy of this
government, which was inspiring, guiding and monitoring our actions from very
close quarters… I’m of the firm opinion that the place of this government,
instead of being in Gandhinangar, should either be at Taloja Central Prison in
Navi Mumbai or at Sabarmati Central Prison in Ahmedabad.”
(Excerpts of the letter sent)
As an aside it may be
mentioned here that when the Ishrat Jahan investigation was on, it was reported
that the CBI has evidence on tape where one of the accused police officers in
this particular case has claimed that Vanzara had told them that both Safed
Dadhi (White beard, alluding to Modi) and Kali Dadhi ( Black beard, alluding to
Shah) were in the know of things.
Coming back to NYPD's
decision to shut the unit, an activist notes the NYPD people just "[d]idn’t
wake up in the morning and decide to be nice to Muslims. " And he adds it
need be remembered that it took years of advocacy work, reports in the media
exposing the veil on the secretive program that was being conducted without any
public information, years of activism from members of the American Muslim
community and its allies. It included courageous plaintiffs who took great
risks to sue the New York Police Department in a lawsuit, Raza v. The City of
New York. and also included public pressure, rallies, joining coalitions with
the folks working on stop-and-frisk to show that the New York Police Department
has been conducting discriminatory police practices against many communities of
color, including political activists.
Perhaps a hint to everyone who is part of the democratic
movement elsewhere to persist and expose the machinations of the police and the
powers that be to stigmatise a whole community and consider everyone of
its members a suspect.
