The slaying of Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) chief, Hemant
Karkare, along with 13 others from the Mumbai police (a total of 17 men
from law enforcement died in the attacks) at the hands of Ajmal Kasab and
his accomplices on November 26 had an unexpected consequence. The
self-appointed saffron torch-bearers of Indian (read Hindutva) patriotism
were miffed into silence. The reason? They, who had been busy tearing
Karkare’s reputation to shreds for weeks before and right up to the day he
was killed, had now been embarrassed into acknowledging him as martyr. But
for Karkare’s death, these graceless pseudo-patriots would have cynically
raised the public temper to a far more hysterical note, baying for some
blood.
What was Karkare’s crime, for which he was a hunted man,
targeted by the sangh parivar the day he died? He had dared to
carry out the Malegaon blast investigations with integrity and transparency,
tracing the masterminds of the crime to a serving lieutenant colonel in the
Indian army, Srikant Purohit (who was ably assisted by other, retired army
personnel), a Sadhvi, Pragnya Thakur, and Swami Dayanand Pandey among others.
Purohit’s close association with an organisation called Abhinav Bharat and the
Sadhvi’s own links to the student wing of the BJP, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi
Parishad (ABVP), embarrassed the highest echelons of the parivar.
Moreover, the Sadhvi has also been a popular part of the BJP’s campaign trail in
Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.
On January 20, 2009 the ATS under its former chief, KP
Raghuvanshi, filed the charge sheet in the Malegaon blast case naming 14 persons
(11 under arrest and three absconding) as accused, holding them guilty of crimes
under 16 major sections of Indian criminal law, including murder and criminal
conspiracy. The accused have been booked under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for
murder (Section 302), attempt to murder (Section 307) and conspiracy (Section
120B); for promoting enmity between groups on grounds of religion, race, place
of birth, residence, language, and committing acts prejudicial to the
maintenance of harmony (Section 153A); under Sections 3, 4, 5 and 25 of the
Indian Arms Act; and Sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the Explosive Substances Act.
This was not the first time that the insidious hand of the
Hindutvavadi terrorist was revealed. The Malegaon blast investigation is
the ATS Maharashtra’s third serious investigation into Hindutva-driven terror.
The first was its probe into the Nanded 2006 blast, which resulted in two charge
sheets being filed by the squad that were subsequently diluted by the Central
Bureau of Investigation (CBI) under the present UPA government (see ‘Blast after
Blast’, CC, July-August 2008). The CBI was forced to reopen
investigations into the Nanded blast of 2006 following the campaign by
Communalism Combat which also happened to receive some welcome support from
an unexpected quarter. During interrogations, Rakesh Dhawade, one of the accused
named by the ATS Maharashtra in the Malegaon charge sheet, confessed his
involvement in the consistent training of seven-eight youth, who were instructed
in the preparation and detonation of bombs, at a location near the Sinhgad Fort,
Pune, in July-August 2003.
A third such investigation, also underway in Maharashtra, is
related to the Thane-Panvel blasts of 2008. In October 2008 the then ATS
Maharashtra chief, Karkare, had also investigated and charge-sheeted persons
accused in the Thane-Panvel blasts where activists from the Hindutvavadi
outfits, Sanatan Sanstha and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, were involved. The
1,020-page charge sheet named six accused charged with attempt to murder,
criminal conspiracy, causing disappearance of evidence and causing damage to
property under the IPC as well as sections of the Arms Act, the Explosive
Substances Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Significantly, the
ATS did not directly implicate the organisations in the crime. At other times
similar incidents, where Hindutvavadi outfits were found to be involved in
explosives creation, have surfaced only to be suppressed. A blast also
occurred at Modasa in Gujarat’s Sabarkantha district on September 29, 2008, the
same day as in Malegaon, and primary evidence pointed to a link between this
incident and the group(s) responsible for the Malegaon terrorist attack. The
Gujarat police however have brazenly refused to make public any details of the
incident.
In the charge sheet filed in the Malegaon case, a significant
omission is the ATS’s failure to charge-sheet the accused under Section 125 of
the IPC for waging war against the nation despite some serious ingredients of
the crime being in evidence.
The ATS has also on the face of it treated the involvement of
serving and retired army officers (a serious development) as a one-off event
despite the evidence that has repeatedly surfaced, through the Nanded, Malegaon
and even the Jalna, Purna and Parbhani blast investigations, of a wide network
of serving and retired officers being involved in some of these activities.
Instances of RDX leakage from the armed forces that have surfaced in over a
dozen cases all over Maharashtra since 2002 have also not been treated with the
severity the offence demands. Public prosecutor, Ajay Misar, first told Judge HK
Ganatra of the chief judicial magistrate’s court in Nashik that another
(unnamed) army man had told investigators about Purohit’s role in stealing 60 kg
of RDX from the Deolali army base, Nashik, and leaking it out through a person
named Bhagwan for use in the blasts. This is not an offence for which Purohit is
specifically charged, however.
The ATS has also spared two important private institutes, the
Bhonsala Military Schools at Nashik and Nagpur, which were found to have been
regularly used for terror training and bomb-making, as well as the Akanksha
Resort at Sinhgad near Pune. These institutes enjoy patronage from the highest
echelons of the sangh parivar. These locations had earlier been
used to train cadre in bomb-making as has been revealed in the Nanded blast
charge sheets filed by the ATS in 2006. In the Nanded investigations, and the
investigations into both the Malegaon and the Jalna mosque blasts, a common link
is accused Rakesh Dhawade, an expert in arms-making. Dhawade’s statement (a copy
of which is in our possession) clearly demonstrates his involvement in this
terror ring for over six years now.
Both the Nanded investigations as well as the Malegaon probe
have pointed to the indoctrination/inspiration provided by high-profile
rabble-rousing leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Dr Praveen Togadia
and Acharya Giriraj Kishore, in exhorting youngsters towards these acts, both
individuals having allegedly visited Nanded on the eve of the blast in 2006. The
ATS has been wary of drawing them into the charge sheet as accused or witnesses,
however. Similarly, in the Malegaon case, the involvement of Himani Savarkar,
niece of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, and daughter-in-law of
Narayan Savarkar, the brother of Hindutva ideologue, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar,
is also handled with kid gloves. Himani Savarkar, a member of Abhinav Bharat,
(who is on record on video as saying that she supports the ‘bomb versus bomb
theory’) was, according to the ATS’s own investigations, also present at the
meeting in which the Malegaon conspiracy was hatched. She is not named as part
of the conspiracy but is only named as witness.
Links to other blasts in which this widespread terror ring may
be involved have also surfaced during these investigations. During a narco
analysis test conducted on November 9, 2008 Lt Col Srikant Purohit spilt the
beans about his own role in, and his network’s connections to, the Samjhauta
Express blasts that occurred on February 18-19, 2007, killing 68 persons, most
of them Pakistanis. Similarly, he spoke during his interrogations of a possible
role in the Ajmer Sharif blast (that killed two persons) and the Mecca Masjid
blast in Hyderabad (where 11 people died in the blast and five in subsequent
police firing). The police forces in Haryana and Rajasthan are reinvestigating
two of these blast cases in the wake of this information while the CBI is
handling the Mecca Masjid blast case. (Muslim youth who were initially accused
of perpetrating the attacks but were subsequently found not guilty had been
brutally tortured while in custody of the Andhra Pradesh police.) When public
prosecutor, Ajay Misar, first made these declarations public in November 2008,
ATS chief, Hemant Karkare, had quickly clarified that the Malegaon
investigations had revealed no connections whatsoever with the blasts on the
Samjhauta Express.
Given these details, how does one rate the charge sheet in the
Malegaon blast case?
The charge sheet has drawn a firm net around the 14 persons
accused of the immediate crime that took place at Malegaon. Making a strong
argument for the application of MCOCA (Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime
Act), the charge sheet states that "this organised crime syndicate of Rakesh
Dhawade (accused number 7) had been committing bomb blasts since year 2003". All
the other accused had joined this organised crime syndicate and continued its
unlawful activities which "included the procurement and transportation of the
materials which are required to make bombs". They had also transferred large
amounts of money, arms and ammunition used to carry out unlawful activities and
had worked together to advocate and promote their organised gang and continue
its unlawful activities, namely promoting their fundamentalist ideology to form
a separate Hindu Rashtra. Their strategy, according to the ATS charge sheet, was
to explode bombs and other improvised explosive devices in areas with a dense
Muslim population even as they seek to create the impression that they act in
retaliation and revenge for acts committed by the Muslim community.
But the charge sheet fails to draw a picture of the wider nexus,
of a preparatory training ground that breeds cadres of such terrorists, of the
scale of their operation and their continued access to the expertise provided by
Indian military and intelligence agencies. The latter point raises serious
questions about ideological infiltration into India’s security agencies.
Detailed revelations of the involvement of over half a dozen serving and retired
army officers in this network of Hindutva-driven terror, which spans at
least eight states in the country and goes back at least a decade, remain
largely ignored, with the ATS Maharashtra treating it as a single, albeit
serious, case of terror-driven crime. As investigations go, under both Karkare
and Raghuvanshi the results have been professional but limited.
The reluctance of the authorities to track and trace the vicious
spread of Hindutva’s terror network despite its systematic planning and
exhaustive training in violence is a historical legacy. Eight attempts were made
on Gandhi’s life before the final one on January 30, 1948 was successful. Yet
public discourse is reluctant to recognise that the first act of terror
perpetrated on independent India’s soil stemmed from determined and vicious
planning by the Hindu Right. Discourse is formed by what a society allows and
accepts out in the open. Be it in our public parks, drawing rooms, state
assemblies, Parliament, school texts or public speeches.
It is this reluctance to accept the genesis, seriousness and
viciousness of Hindutvavadi terror that has affected our law enforcement
agencies as a whole and can be analysed in the charge sheets of both the Thane-Panvel
and the Malegaon investigations. These lacunae are rooted in the assumptions
reflected in the pervasive discourse that surrounds home-grown terror and
violence. Cleverly but not entirely influenced by the ideologues of the BJP and
the sangh parivar who are omnipresent in the national media, Hindutva-driven
terror is slotted by definition as reactive and through this association as less
pervasive and dangerous than the jihadi’s murderous games. Its easy and natural
certificate of association with patriotism lends a further dangerous ambivalence
to the Hindutvavadi’s actions.
The limitations in the Malegaon charge sheet therefore stem as
much from probable and insidious political pressure exerted on officers of the
ATS both within and without the system as from this carefully formulated
discourse of the sangh parivar. It is a strategy cultivated
through propaganda which stresses that any violence stemming from the Hindu fold
is only retaliatory, driven by a righteous angst against the heap of injustices
perpetrated on ‘us’ in the name of Islam. Where jihadi attacks are seen
as only the most recent manifestation of a centuries old plan to devour this
civilisation through invasions of both a physical and moral kind.