The Indian Judiciary...

The judiciary

The Supreme Court's backsliding on the Ramjanmabhoomi Temple-Babri Masjid case, religious conversions and cow slaughter at different points of time over the years has done disservice to Indian secularism.

Manoj Mitta

December 10, 2015 | UPDATED 13:31 IST

It was arguably the biggest blow to secularism recorded by india today in its 40-year history. The cover story of the December 31, 1992 issue depicting the demolition of the Babri Masjid was aptly titled: "A Nation's Shame". It was on the heels of this shameful incident in Ayodhya- and its immediate repercussions in Bombay in the form of riots and blasts-that I joined the magazine, with a brief to strengthen its reportage of law and justice.

One of my priorities, naturally, was to follow up on the developments in the Supreme Court on the Babri Masjid front. Although the demolition had taken place on a Sunday, a bench headed by Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah, reacting with alacrity, held a special hearing the same evening at his residence. The assault on the mosque was in defiance of the "symbolic kar seva" which the bench had allowed to be per-formed peacefully at the disputed site. At the special hearing on December 6, 1992, Venkatachaliah was widely reported to have thundered that the destruction of the Babri Masjid was the gravest ever contempt committed against the apex court. In response, the counsel for the alleged contemners, K.K. Venugopal, withdrew from the case saying, "My head hangs in shame."

The expectations of accountability rose higher when Venkatachaliah went on to become Chief Justice of India barely two months after the fateful day. But all through the 20 months he held that key post, Venkatachaliah steered clear of taking any action against Kalyan Singh for reneging on his written commitment, as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, to protect the mosque. On the last day of his tenure, in October 1994, Venkatachaliah did give Singh a token one-day imprisonment, but that was only for a smaller contempt committed by him at the same site four months before the demolition.

For the far more serious violations related to the demolition, all that the Supreme Court verdict said was: "Though the proceedings for suo motu contempt against the then chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh and its officers in relation to the happening of 6-12-1992 were initiated, those are pending and shall be dealt with independently."

Vandalised house of Mohammad Akhlaq, who was killed on suspicion of eating beef.

Despite such solemn assurance, those proceedings have never been dealt with, independently or otherwise. It's as if, after Kalyan Singh's perfidy, it was the Supreme Court's turn to let down the nation. Beginning with Venkatachaliah, successive judges have balked at taking contempt action against anybody for the vandalism that had avowedly been carried out as a prelude to the construction of the Ramjanmabhoomi Temple. In retrospect, the Supreme Court seems to have placed religious sentiments of the majority community over the rule of law. Venkatachaliah kept away from this contempt aspect even when he constituted a five-judge bench towards the end of his tenure to hear a challenge to the Centre's acquisition of 67 acres in Ayodhya post-demolition.

In an India Today interview with Venkatachaliah on the eve of his retirement in October 1994, I asked him why he had belatedly woken up to Ayodhya-related matters. Denying any extraneous considerations, he blamed the delay on systemic deficiencies in the Supreme Court. "Our system of assessing the competing priority of cases is not fully developed," he said. "I admit there is some ad hocism in it. We don't have any rules or regulations for assessing competing priorities. That needs to be done as a policy of court management. Each bench decides its priorities according to its own discretion."

If the prioritisation of cases was indeed left to the discretion of each bench, what prevented Venkatachaliah, as Chief Justice, to take up Ayodhya matters with due urgency? "That was not entirely in my hands," he claimed. "The constitution of a bench is sub-ject to the availability and commitments of my brother judges." The reply was hardly convincing as only a little earlier, the Supreme Court had promptly taken contempt action against a bar leader who had been found to have abused an Allahabad High Court judge. The errant lawyer was suspended from practising for three years and even given a deferred jail term of six weeks. Pointing out the contrast, I asked Venkatachaliah how the contempt involved in the Babri Masjid demolition was any less serious than the one related to the judge-browbeating case. "You cannot compare cases in that manner," he asserted, seeking refuge in technicalities. "The proceedings on the December 6 event expanded as more parties sought to be impleaded. Their applications for additional contemners were allowed. The service of notice on these additional contemnors has taken a long time, thereby delaying the case."

Split on verdict

The technicalities cited by Venkatachaliah, a widely respected judge, for his alleged helplessness did little credit to the Supreme Court, reputedly the most powerful and activist court in the world. The reason I recall this interview is to draw attention to the backsliding on the issue of secularism on more than one occasion since the Babri Masjid demolition. Given the centrality of secularism to the idea of India, such backsliding is indicative of more than the routine dysfunctionality of the judiciary. Tied to the failure of the Supreme Court to dispose of the contempt case against Kalyan Singh & Co was, for instance, an unedifying split along religious lines within the five-judge bench which decided the validity at the same time of the Centre's acquisition of 67 acres from Hindu groups around the disputed site.

The two non-Hindu members of the bench, Justice S P Bharucha and Justice A.M. Ahmadi, struck down the measures taken by the Centre as they "favour one religious community and disfavour another". On the other hand, the three Hindu members of the bench, Venkatachaliah, Justice J.S. Verma and Justice G.N. Ray, upheld the acquisition subject to the caveat that whatever land was found unnecessary for the adjudication of the dispute "must be restored to the undisputed owners".

The majority verdict of 1994 came to haunt the country in 2002 as, quoting from its passages, VHP laid claim to the acquired land even while the title dispute was pending. Declaring plans to begin the construction of a temple on the acquired land in the vicinity of the disputed site, VHP mobilised kar sevaks from across the country to a mahayagna in Ayodhya. It was then that the Godhra train-burning incident took place in Gujarat, triggering a series of dramatic and far-reaching events which culminated in Narendra Modi's ascent to the office of Prime Minister in 2014.

More than the dithering on the contempt matter, the backsliding in the Ayodhya context is evident from the farcical state of the criminal proceedings. To begin with, they are still at the stage of trial even after a lapse of 23 years. This has partly to do with the accused of the Babri Masjid demolition being split into two groups which are being tried separately on varying degrees of charges in two different courts in two different districts. While some 40 unknown kar sevaks are being tried in Lucknow for conspiring to demolish the mosque, eight Sangh Parivar leaders, including L.K. Advani, M.M. Joshi and Uma Bharati, are being tried in Rae Bareli on the lesser charge of addressing an unlawful assembly. Although the CBI special court had framed the conspiracy charge against both groups in 1997, the Allahabad high court four years later gave a reprieve to the leaders on the ground of a defect in a related executive notification.

Frowning upon conversion

As successive governments in Uttar Pradesh declined to cure the procedural flaw picked by the high court, it has resulted in the leaders being tried separately in Rae Bareli only for the lesser charge. The implication, much as it may stretch one's credulity, is that the leaders delivered inflammatory speeches in Ayodhya on the fateful day without being involved in the conspiracy to demolish the mosque. Repeated attempts to redress this anomaly have been spurned by the apex court.

The backsliding on secularism did not of course begin with the Ayodhya issue. Take the Supreme Court's ruling way back in 1977 on the equally contentious issue of conversions. It glossed over the pro-conversion declaration made in the Constituent Assembly by drafting committee member K.M. Munshi that it would be "open to any religious community to persuade other people to join their faith". Orissa and Madhya Pradesh, the two states that first passed anti-conversion laws, had however been mindful of Munshi's liberal definition of the freedom of religion and belief. So those two laws prohibited only the conversions made on the basis of extraneous factors such as force, fraud or allurement.

But the Supreme Court verdict, authored by Chief Justice A.N. Ray, frowned upon conversions based even on persuasion. It said, "If a person purposely undertakes the conversion of another person to his religion, that would impinge on the freedom of conscience." Having sidestepped the Constituent Assembly debates, Ray gave no explanation for disagreeing with the founding fathers on conversions.

Allowed to get away

Following Ray's example, Verma, the author of the 1994 Ayodhya judgment, upheld Hindutva in a subsequent case without any reference to the man who had coined that term, Vir Savarkar. This allowed Verma to assert that Hindutva, despite being conceived by Savarkar as a political ideology of Hindu supremacy, could not be "equated with narrow fundamentalist Hindu religious bigotry".

The provocation for the Hindutva judgment of 1995 was election petitions challenging allegedly communal speeches delivered by Shiv Sena leaders in a Maharashtra assembly election. On one of those petitions, Verma allowed Manohar Joshi to get away with the promise of establishing the first Hindu state in Maharashtra. Verma's controversial reasoning was: "In our opinion, a mere statement that the first Hindu state will be established in Maharashtra is by itself not an appeal for votes on the grounds of his religion but the expression, at best, of such a hope." Setting a dangerous precedent, Verma said that the promise of a Hindu state was not a "corrupt practice" under the election law "even though we would express our disdain at the entertaining of such a thought".

The backsliding on cow slaughter, another topical subject, is even more unmistakable. In 2005, the Supreme Court reversed its own position on whether Article 48 of the Constitution permitted the slaughter of animals that had ceased to be "milch and draught cattle", meaning when they were too old to provide milk or carry loads and plough fields. The earlier ruling, given in 1958 by a five-judge bench headed by Justice S.R. Das, said that the ban on cow slaughter envisaged by Article 48 did not extend to the cattle that was "not capable of milch or draught". As a result of the 1958 verdict, various states allowed the slaughter of cattle that could be classified as "useless". But all this changed in 2005 when a seven-judge bench headed by Justice R.C. Lahoti ruled that the Article 48 ban extended to all cattle, irrespective of their age and the strain they put on the availability of fodder. In his classic, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, Granville Austin wrote: "Article 48 shows that Hindu sentiment predominated in the Constituent Assembly." Clearly, the expansive interpretation given in 2005 to Article 48 detracted further from India's commitment to inclusiveness.

Whatever the legal sophistry behind all such backsliding on secularism, it puts in perspective India Today's spirited headline at the time of the Babri Masjid demolition, "A Nation's Shame". The editors who chose that headline could not have imagined though that there was another shame in store: the failure so far to punish any of the people responsible for what has been rated as the worst setback to secularism after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination. Within two years of Gandhi's murder, eight were convicted for conspiracy though their alleged leader, Savarkar, was acquitted for want of evidence. The contrasting trajectories of the 1948 and 1992 crimes undermine the common assumption that the institutions of the rule of law in India have matured and become more robust.

EXCERPT

November 15,1993

BJP stumps the court

...Did the Supreme Court itself not embolden the kar sevaks by its inaction after the construction of a platform at the Ayodhya site in July 1992 in defiance of its status quo order? Did Attorney General Milon Banerjee not inform the court on November 27,1992, that the Intelligence Bureau had warned of danger to the mosque? Did the judges still not grant permission for a symbolic kar seva, and even direct that the permission should be widely publicised? How could the Uttar Pradesh government have thereafter prevented large crowds from congregating at the site? Further, did the state not repeatedly tell the court that it would under no circumstances resort to firing at the kar sevaks? How can the court now fault it for not firing at those who crossed the police cordon and destroyed the mosque?

The Supreme Court gave room for such questions by attaching to its contempt notices, copies of an application for a contempt case filed by senior advocate O.P. Sharma. It simply used the allegations against each individual contained in his application to level, contempt charges against Kalyan Singh and the officers. Thus, though the court issued the notices suo motu, the contempt charges were actually levelled through Sharma's application. As it happened, the thrust of Sharma's allegations was that the tragedy could have been averted if only Kalyan Singh and the six officers had imposed Section 144 of Cr.P.C. and prevented the kar sevaks from congregating in lakhs. The court seems to have realised its vulnerability in this regard once the seven persons filed their counter-affidavits.

by Manoj Mitta

Manoj Mitta is a fellow with National Endowment for Democracy, Washington DC. He is working on his third book, which is on the impunity for caste violence.

Source: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/india-today-40th-anniversary-manoj-mitta-the-judiciary-babri-masjid/1/543146.html

Hindu Vahini’s involvement case thrown in SIMI’s basket to further the ban.

By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter,

Hyderabad: Security agencies have once again landed in awkward moment with their consistent maneuver to maintain ban over Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Andhra Pradesh police while deposing before a UAPA tribunal turned a Hindu Vahini attached communal violence instigation case into a SIMI proscribing justification.

On 8th April 2012 communal clashes had erupted in Madanapet and Kurmaguda areas of Hyderabad after cow legs were found hanging on Hanuman temple gate. A SIT formed to investigate the case arrested five men belonging to the right wing militant group Hindu Vahini, who according to the police desecrated the temple to create communal clashes and to gain from polarization.

Since getting banned in Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in 2001, SIMI alleged to be an Islamist fundamentalist group by the Ministry of Home Affairs faced seven ban extensions on Government notifications. According to the provision of UAPA the ban has to be proved by a sitting High Court judge. Every tribunal except in 2008 upheld the ban on SIMI.

The new tribunal headed by Delhi High Court Judge Suresh Kait is formed after fresh notification from Government was issued extending ban on SIMI. The tribunal began its hearing from March this year and already completed proceedings in Kerala, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

The tribunal proceedings were held at Ranga Reddy district collectorate office in Hyderabad on May 21st and 22nd. In the first day of proceeding Madhusudan Reddy DIG Counter Intelligence cell deposed before the tribunal.

Mr. Reddy in his affidavit gave reference to Darsgah Jihadt o Shahadat, Tehreek-e-Tahafuz-e-Shair-e-Islam, Thereek-e-Galba-e-Islam, Wahdat-e-Islami and Al Ummah and their activities supporting ban on SIMI.

When defense counsel Advocate Ashok Agarwal pointed out that none of those organizations mentioned in affidavit are banned by any authority, DIG Counter Intelligence showed lack of knowledge. Later when official list of banned organizations were summoned by the judge it was found that none of the mentioned organization was banned in Andhra Pradesh. But Mr. Madhusudan Reddy testified before the tribunal that all those organizations mentioned are involved in anti-national activities and are inter-related and have links with SIMI which police have information from intelligence ‘secret reports’.

On the first day of the proceedings police presented cases from 2007 which were already been discussed in previous 2010 and 2012 tribunals.

On the second day of the hearing police tried to present the latest case to weight their argument that SIMI is still involved in unlawful activities while operating clandestinely. Inspector Koteshwara Rao of Madanapet police station deposed before the tribunal on Kurmaguda communal violence of 2012 of Cr.No 66 to 83/2012 and Cr.No. 126,128,132 and 133/ 2012 which were described in police affidavit as SIMI cases.

Local police which investigated the case before it was handed over to SIT did arrest three Muslim youths for allegedly participating in stone pelting during communal clashes. Those youngsters were described as SIMI members and whole incident was given a color of SIMI orchestrated plan.

Advocate Ashok Agarwal during his cross examination with Inspector Koteshwara Rao questioned whether any of those accused who are presented as SIMI members were charged with UAPA on which Inspector replied in negative.

During cross examination Mr. Rao was made to describe the events which led to violence in which he conceded that violence were conspire by Hindu right wing members by desecrating temple, he also accepted that charge-sheet has been filed against those Hindu youths involved in this case.

He also accepted that both communities indulged in stone pelting after communal clashes broke out. In spite of accepting the chronology of the events which pointed out towards the hand of Hindu Vahini in the violence police maintained its stand that three accused Muslim youths in this case has relations with SIMI and claim to have basis to connect those accused with the banned organization. Inspector Rao testified that information and antecedents of those accused were collected from the earlier police records.

Defense counsel Mr. Ashok Agarwal commenting on police stand told TCN, “Name of SIMI is interpolated to further the ban. Four cases were registered in 2012 pertaining to stone pelting, it was clear that it was communal tension and violence for which cases were registered and persons from both sides were charged. Those three Muslims were stated to be members of SIMI, even if we assume that it was correct it is not the basis of continuing the ban on SIMI, the Government has to show the activity about which they are reporting was done by SIMI or its members were part of conscious activity on behalf of organization.”

Source:http://twocircles.net/2014may29/hindu_vahini%E2%80%99s_involvement_case_thrown_simi%E2%80%99s_basket_further_ban.html#.U4n2qnKSx5u

Sleep And The Innocent...

COVER STORY

Sleep And The Innocent

When night falls, a quiet fear invades the smoky relief camps in Ahmedabad. For the children of the Gujarat riots, the witching hour has begun. In the slow hours till dawn, many huddle close to their mothers, struggling to stay awake. The horrific memories that they try to hold at bay during the day stalk them in their sleep.

For the riot's children, there is a thin dividing line between memories and nightmares. There are visions of parents being dragged out of their homes and cut into pieces, of brothers and sisters thrown into flames. There are memories of women being brutally raped, foetuses ripped from pregnant bellies and of their own spine-chilling escapes from imminent death.

There are some 42,000 children among the over 1 lakh inmates in Gujarat's relief camps today. That's what the discredited state government says anyway. Those working in the field—civil rights groups, ngos—claim that there are at least 30,000 children in Ahmedabad's camps alone. Many of them are orphans. "Children have been worst affected by the carnage. Unlike adults, they may not be able to fully absorb or vocalise what they saw. But the impact is deep," says Father Victor Moses, who is coordinating Citizen's Initiative, a group of 30 ngos working with the state's riot victims.

He is right. First came the mobs—burning, pillaging, murdering and raping in front of the eyes of these hapless children. Then came displacement—after their homes were torched. Suddenly, family, friends and schools are a chimera. Dr R. Srinivasa Murthy, professor of psychiatry at the Bangalore-based National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (nimhans), who visited some of the camps, found the children in a state of shock. "The trauma seen in children who survived the riots in Gujarat is similar to the trauma children suffered after the Bhopal gas tragedy, the Uttarkashi earthquake and the earthquake in the state." So they end up extremely prone to anxiety disorders, acute depression and stress.

Possibly even worse. When the Ahmedabad-based ngo Centre For Development tried to involve the camp children in art classes, they ended up drawing burning houses and dead people. "There is a lot of anger among the children," says Mira Mehta of the centre. "You will see a lot of small, silent children playing around in the camps. They don't look rattled but they are badly affected inside." That's not hard to discover. A three-year-old boy playing in the camp says occasionally: "Abba ko mar diya. Goli, goli! (They killed my father. Bullet, bullet!)"

Counselling will be futile, say psychiatrists, as long as the carnage continues. "There is so much fear and anger among children and we can't even tell them that it is all over. Until it stops, how can they begin healing?" asks Sandhya Surendradas of the ngo Sanchetna's child survival project.

Right now, they are possibly lucky to be just alive. Remember, quite a few children were murdered. Here are some testimonies to a gory end of childhood and innocence:

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Javed Hussain, 14Son of a rickshaw-puller father and a tailor mother, Javed lost his family in the Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad, where 91 people were burnt alive on February 28. The fourth-standard dropout stitched handkerchiefs for a living.

Present Home: Shah Alam relief camp, Ahmedabad

"We had just finished having tea around 9.30 am when we heard a mob outside. They were throwing stones, brandishing swords, dharias and khanjars and chanting 'Jai Shri Ram'. They said they would destroy all Muslims. We tried to run but they had surrounded us. They set fire to houses and started throwing people into the flames. I was standing with my pregnant cousin Qausarbibi, who was to deliver in another two days.They dragged her away, ripped open her stomach with a knife and threw the foetus into the fire. Then they threw my family into the fire, one by one: my father, mother and my 17-year-old sister Sophiya. My aunt's family was also burnt alive.

"Someone hit me with a pipe and I fainted. When I came to, it was night. There were corpses all around me. My pants had been burnt off. I walked to my house and put on some clothes. Then, I walked 10 km in the night to the house of my employer. All along the way, I feared someone would leap out and kill me. He took me to the hospital and then they brought me to this camp.

"I feel like my mind has been destroyed. I can't talk for more than a few minutes. I can't sleep at night. Those scenes keep coming back to me. I think about my mother a lot. She used to say that I was her joy, her support. I want to ask the people who did this: What had my family ever done to you? I don't think all Hindus are bad. I had four or five Hindu friends in my colony and I can't believe that they were involved. It was outsiders who did this.

"I feel scared to leave the camp but sometimes I think I have already lost everything. What can I feel scared of now? When (Prime Minister A.B.) Vajpayeeji had come to visit Gujarat, he spoke to me and asked me about my problems. But I want to know, what has he done to stop the killing? When is it going to end?"

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Mohammad Yashim, 8
A survivor of Naroda's Jawan Nagar blaze which claimed his mother and six of his nine siblings on February 28, he escaped with 20 per cent burns by jumping into a water tank.

Present Home: Living with his sister in Surat

"My father was on the roof, watching, and he told us that a mob was approaching. We were sitting on the bed, crying and holding hands. Then, the mob came towards our home. They were screaming, 'Kill them, cut them!' The police was with them. They had swords and were carrying flaming torches.

"We decided to run towards our friends' homes in Gangotri Nagar. We felt that would be safe. They were Hindu and we used to watch TV at their homes. I played with their children. But when we got there, we saw that they were part of the mob. I saw Keshubhai, Bhavani Singh and Guddu Chharra in the crowd. My family was holding hands and running but we got separated. I saw them drag my mother and set her on fire. She was screaming. Everyone was screaming. Then they set me on fire too. I ran and jumped into a water tank. There were three other children in the tank: Babloo and his sister, and Mehboob.

"After the mob left, we hid in the nearest house. We were there for hours. We heard someone latch the door from outside and then people started setting the homes on fire. I thought we would be burnt alive now. I heard my father calling out to me from outside and I screamed. He opened the door and got us out.

"I can't sleep. If I do fall asleep, I wake up screaming. I can't eat. I remember my mother and my brothers and sisters: Hussain, Khajjo, Afreen, Shaheen. I feel scared to close my eyes. What if Keshubhai and Guddu Chharra come and get me? They know that I saw them and they want to hunt me down. When too many people gather together, I start feeling nervous.

"I want to grow up and track them down. I want to go and burn their houses like they burnt our house. I want to cut them with swords the way they cut my family. I want to become stronger and take revenge. I cannot live with Hindus now. I will not feel safe."

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Reshma Bano, 11On the night of the Gujarat bandh, her home in Piplej village near Ahmedabad was attacked by mobs. She witnessed the horrific rape of a neighbour.

Present home: Shah Alam relief camp.

"The night before the attack, the police came and picked up most of the men from our village.The 20 to 40 people left were mainly women and children. About 9 that morning, a mob of about 2,000 people in white shorts and T-shirts and orange bandanas arrived in trucks. They had swords and knives and were shouting 'Miya log ko kato (Kill the Muslims)!' They burnt the masjid near our house. I saw police but they did nothing. The village was surrounded but we jumped over a wall and escaped into a thorny field.

"I was looking over the wall when I saw 10 men grabbing my 16-year-old neighbour. She was screaming, 'Save me! Save me!' They ripped her clothes and fell on her. It went on and on. We were all sick with fright, we couldn't go out and stop them. When they finished, she was still alive but they stabbed her in the stomach and threw her in a ditch.

"In the evening, we tried to return but a man came and grabbed my sister, Firdaus. My mother and aunt managed to free her and we ran back into the field. We stayed there all night. Walking through the fields for over a day, we made our way to Rahimnagar to my uncle's house. He got us here with a police escort.

"I am scared mobs will come and attack me the way they attacked our neighbour. The violence has not stopped. I keep to myself. I even feel scared to talk to people inside the camp. What if they are killers in disguise? What if they have come inside the camp to hunt us down? All Hindus are not bad, I know. Our neighbours did not do this. It was people from outside.

"But the police did not help us. When I grow up I want to join the police, so that I can help people."

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Yasmeen Sikandar Khan, 12This seventh-class student lost her mother and elder brother in the Gulbarg Society blaze in Chamanpura, which claimed over 40 lives including that of former Congress MP Ehsan Jaffrey.

Present home: Dariyakhan Ghummat relief camp, Ahmedabad.

"We used to live on the second floor of Gulbarg Society, right across Ehsan Jaffrey's house. Just after breakfast on February 28, we heard the mob. They were throwing stones at our building. My mother said we should stay inside, so my parents and six of us locked ourselves in. Then the fire started. The floor tiles got hotter and hotter. Then all of us ran to Jaffreysaab's house where we could be safer. There were at least a hundred people there. We were all crying with fear.

"Then a mob entered the house. They grabbed my brother Salim and struck him on the head with a sword. He cried 'Papa!' and fell to the floor. Then they set fire to the room. I managed to run out and onto the roof with the rest of my brothers and sisters.

"My mother got left behind. We went to my aunt's house on the roof and hid inside her bathroom. After five or six hours when it was over, we were rescued by the police. But the same police had done nothing to stop the mobs. We had to climb over heaps of corpses to get out.

"Sometimes I hear my brother's voice calling me. I was his favourite. I keep seeing the burning building. They never found my mother. She was burnt alive inside, just like the rest. Sometimes even in the middle of my sleep, tears are pouring out of my eyes.

"I can't stay with Hindus after this. Even now, they are not leaving us alone. They have attacked this camp so many times. Nearly every day, a bomb goes off outside or the police fire at the camp. They don't want Muslims to remain in Hindustan."

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Sher Khan, 13Son of a tailor, he worked in a plastic factory. He and his four-member family escaped marauding policemen helping a mob attack Akbar Nagar. His best friend was shot dead by the police and he himself narrowly escaped being hurled into the fire by the police.

Present Home: Akbar Nagar home

"The mobs, led by the police, came with guns, swords and knives.They were shouting 'Jai Siya Ram' and wore saffron bands on their heads. I saw police inspector Gadvi from the nearby station. We ran out of the house but the police began firing. I got separated from my family but was running right beside my friend Sagir Khan when the bullet hit him. He fell down. The police picked him up and threw him in the fire that the crowd had lit. Then, three policemen caught me.

"I thought that that was the end for me. I was going to die. There were three of them. One of them tried to hit me with his stick but hit the other policeman by mistake. I managed to escape and started running. They kept firing at me but I managed to duck the bullets. I got to the main road and hid behind a truck. Then, I crossed the road and scaled a wall to reach Aman Chowk, where there was no fighting.

"If the police had protected us, things would never have become so bad. If I see a policeman now, I start running away. They don't want this to end.

"The Hindus say they don't want miyabhais (Muslims) in Hindustan and that we should go away to Pakistan but we will have to live here. Where else can we go? What else do we have? I don't even want revenge. I just want to be left alone.

"I try not to think about what has happened. If I remember, I cry to myself when no one else can see me. I have to be strong for my family."

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Mohammad Asif, 14A student of ninth class, he lived in Mahadeoni chaali near the Mahakali river with his six-member family. They survived the mob but their home didn't.

Present home: Dariyakhan Ghummat relief camp

"I was reading namaaz at the Kosadia Masjid at about 2 pm when we were attacked. The armed mob first began throwing petrol bombs. They had been gathering at the Mahakali mandir in our locality. Instead of controlling them, the police started shooting in our direction. The crowd burnt the masjid and also the Quransharif. I ran towards my house but the crowds had already burnt and looted it.

"I feel that the minister Bharat Barot was behind the attack. He had been having meetings in our area every night. He had even been distributing petrol and weapons to the Hindus.

"This camp is not safe either. We are still being attacked and the police come and throw teargas shells inside. I would like to ask them, 'Are we the attackers?'. The other day, one woman in the camp died of shock after a bomb went off near the camp. I want to go back home but the situation outside is still not safe."

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Shahid Khan, 14
A sixth-class student, he lived in the Gulbarg Society and witnessed the murder of former Congress MP Ehsan Jaffrey. He survived with his seven-member family.

Present Home: Dariyakhan Ghummat relief camp, Ahmedabad

"I was playing cricket with friends when the police came. They told the Hindu boys to go home. They were warning them that something was going to happen.

"Around 9 am, a mob of 15,000-20,000 people arrived and surrounded our building. They started throwing stones and petrol bombs. Everyone began running helter-skelter when the fire started. I ran up to the roof and hid there. Ehsan Jaffrey was well known and everyone thought they would be safe with him. So many people hid in his house.

"I was peeping from a window at the top when I saw him on the ground floor. He was telling the mob, 'Kill me if you want but let the people go.' Then, the mob told him to say 'Jai Siya Ram' but he didn't say anything. They got angry and put a burning tyre around his neck. They pushed a sword through his stomach. I turned my head. I couldn't watch anymore.

"I keep having nightmares about it. I can't sleep. Sometimes I think I'm sleeping but I wake up crying.

"I hate Hindus.Why did they do this to us? I saw our neighbours in the crowd. I want to kill them if I can. I want to go back there and kill them."

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Imran Khan, 11
This Class V student from Mariambibi ki chaali in Ahmedabad's Gomtipur was almost shot by men from the Rapid Action Force (raf) and the police on March 20, when their locality was attacked by Hindu mobs.

Present home: Shah Alam relief camp

"I was having lunch when we were attacked. There was a huge crowd with swords, knives and stones. I ran out of the house with my parents and went to Ishraf Pehelwan's house, where we thought it would be safer. But the blue-uniformed raf men with guns and sticks came inside. They grabbed my father and beat him up. They began hitting my mother too. I also got hit on the foot. I told them, 'Why are you beating us? We didn't do anything.' One raf man held a gun to my chest and told me to shut up. I thought that I was going to die. Then the military arrived and they stopped. By nightfall, we came to this camp.

"In my locality, I had a lot of Hindu friends. We used to play cricket and basketball together. But after these problems started, they began chasing me away and say that they didn't want to play with a mussalman. They are not my friends anymore. I don't want to go back there again."

---

Jagdish Kumar, 15
He and his father sold vegetables for a living near their Raipur Mill home in Gomtipur, Ahmedabad. He and his family of eight, including five sisters, survived a mob attack.

Present home: Saraspur Municipal School relief camp, Ahmedabad
"On the afternoon of February 28, I was at home. Suddenly, 150-200 people arrived on the street outside. They had black cloths on their faces and were shouting 'Maro kato (Kill them)!' Then the mob began firing at us. They also threw bombs and started a fire. We all started fleeing. We ran and came to the main road. By night the relief camp was set up. I have been there ever since with my family.

Source: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?215524

HINDUTVA TERROR TAPES

THE UNTURNED STONE

The Malegaon blast probe threw up 37 audiotapes in which ultra-Hindu groups plot terror attacks. These tapes expose a shocking nexus between Military Intelligence men and the outfits. Two years later, why is this still unexplored, asks RANA AYYUB

Lt Col Shrikant Purohit Military Intelligence officer The man who procured the RDX that was used for the Malegaon blast. He is the first serving officer to be arrested in a terror case PHOTOS: DEEPAK SALVI

HATE IS one of the obvious and evident yields of the Hindutva worldview. But few had imagined it could spawn a terror network until investigations into the 2008 Malegaon blast led to a series of startling arrests that included Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and Lt Col Shrikant Purohit of Abhinav Bharat, an ultra-right Hindu group. Since then, the issue of ‘saffron terror’ has entered national discourse as a fractious and heated debate.

Last week, the issue erupted once again, triggering livid responses across the political spectrum. First, senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh claimed that Maharashtra Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare — who had been investigating the Malegaon blast — had called him hours before he died on the fateful night of 26/11, saying he was being threatened by those opposed to his probes. Singh was speaking at the launch of a book by Aziz Burney, controversially titled 26/11 — A RSS Controversy? and both sections of his own party and the BJP were dismayed that his “irresponsible” remarks would play into Pakistan’s hands.

Maj (retd) Ramesh Upadhyay Military Intelligence officer He is suspected of training those who assembled the bomb that went off in Malegaon. He also headed BJP’s ex-servicemen cell PHOTOS: DEEPAK SALVI

A few days later, in its ongoing exposé, WikiLeaks released a cable in which US Ambassador Timothy Roemer claimed that Rahul Gandhi had told him that ultra-Hindu terror was probably a greater threat to national security than Islamist terror. In all the furious exchanges that have followed, a crucial issue was overlooked. With the capture of Ajmal Kasab, it is undoubtedly an absurd stretch of imagination to believe 26/11 was engineered by ultra-Hindu groups, but the truth is the ‘saffron terror’ story is indeed far from being a closed book.

TEHELKA has found that, in the two years since the Malegaon blast, investigators have left many leads unexplored. Most alarmingly, they have failed to pin down eight Indian Army officers allegedly involved with the terror network. Why haven’t they been questioned by the army or sufficiently tracked? How far has the network penetrated sections of the army? To understand the full implication of this, it is important to recall the whole story.

Sadhvi Pragya Thakur Self-styled godwoman Her cell phone call records proved to be a minefield of information about those involved in the Malegaon blast PHOTOS: DEEPAK SALVI

IT WAS a low-intensity bomb fitted in a motorbike, but its impact was powerful. It exploded in the small town of Malegaon in Nashik district, Maharashtra, on 29 September 2008, leaving six dead and several injured. The only clue was a mangled number-plate. Forensic lab officials used a 25 MP camera for a magnified view of the number-plate. They managed to get three sets of possible numbers. Then the ATS began the chase. The first combination took them to Badayun, Uttar Pradesh, where the vehicle bearing the number still existed. The second was tracked down to Gujarat. Here too the vehicle was still in use. In October 2008, the last number-plate took them to the bike owner, a self-styled godwoman called Sadhvi Pragya Thakur

Pragya’s interrogation and call information from her cell phone opened a pandora’s box. Shamlal Sahu, 42, a commerce graduate, was first to be arrested on charges of planting the bomb. Shivnarayan Kalangasara Singh, 36, a science graduate, was arrested for setting a timer device in the bomb. Another science graduate, Sameer Kulkarni, 32, was arrested for his role in procuring chemicals for the bomb.

PHOTOS: DEEPAK SALVI

But the story did not end with these arrests. Five days after Pragya’s arrest, the ATS caught a major fish: Maj (retd) Ramesh Upadhyay, 64, a resident of Pune. He had worked in the Indian Army’s Military Intelligence (MI) unit and was suspected of training those who had assembled the bombs. He had also headed the BJP’s ex-servicemen’s cell in Mumbai.

On 2 November 2008, three more arrests were made — Ajay Rahirkar, 39, for raising funds for Abhinav Bharat; Rakesh Dhawde, 35, a weapon consultant in the movie The Rising; and Jagdish Mhatre, 40, who had paid money to Dhawde for buying weapons. All these men were from either Nashik or Pune. Then came the biggest arrest. On 5 November, the first ever serving army officer, Lt Col Purohit, 37, was arrested for procuring the RDX used in the blast. The MI officer was posted at the Army Education Corps Training Centre and College in Pachmarhi, Madhya Pradesh, where he was studying Arabic at the time of his arrest.

Terror on board The Samjhauta Express blast in 2007 killed 68 people PHOTO: SHAILENDRA PANDEY

Purohit’s role as a prime conspirator became clearer with the arrest of selfstyled seer Swami Dayanand Pandey alias Shankar Acharya alias Shukhakar Dwivedi, 40, on 14 November. Pandey had a habit of recording all his conversations with his co-conspirators on his laptop.

The ATS retrieved three videos and 37 audiotapes. These proved to be an unprecedented source of information. On 21 November, Karkare questioned Pune’s RSS leader Shyam Apte, named in the tapes.

Purohit himself wasn’t an easy case to crack. During his interrogation, he asserted that his job as an MI spy included interacting with both Hindu and Muslim extremists. At first, the army seemed to rally behind him. Soon after his arrest, the army spokesman claimed he had only been detained, not arrested. Pragya, however, disclosed that she had met Purohit in Pachmarhi, where Purohit had told her that he had executed two blasts in the past. The ATS officials suspected Purohit was hinting at the Samjhauta Express and Ajmer Sharif blasts, but this was not made public because of its diplomatic implications.

Cycle of violence The Malegaon blast in 2008 left six people dead PHOTO: REUTERS

THE AUDIOTAPES revealed a chilling landscape. A godwoman, a seer, political bigwigs and retired and serving army officers all seemed part of the conspiracy. They spilled vitriolic hate for Muslims and even Hindus who did not subscribe to their ultra right-wing communal vision. They had set up Abhinav Bharat with the intention of infiltrating and subverting every institution in the country. This, for instance, is an excerpt of what Purohit says on the tapes about the nation they dreamed of creating:

“We must aim for militarisation of the organisation (Abhinav Bharat). Every member at all levels must have a basic knowledge of weapons. We haven’t done it so far. We should indoctrinate them with our ideology. We should establish an academy for ideological indoctrination. At the end of the course, each member will be tested and only those who pass will be finally admitted to the organisation. The level of testing is when he will be tried in ‘action’. Then our organisation will propagate establishment of all-India Hindu rashtra called Abhinav Bharat. There will be a uniform code of conduct irrespective of any caste. Reporting channels like those in the armed forces will be established. This will ensure the smooth flow of information and passing of orders. An Honour Court Committee will exist at all levels. This will ensure strict adherence to moral and ethical behaviour as decided by the core group by all the members based on our Vedas.”

Ground zero Fourteen people died in the 2007 Mecca Masjid bombing PHOTO: AFP

The conversations were alarming. The then Maharashtra Home Minister RR Patil was briefed by senior ATS officials. Other national agencies like the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and, later, the National Investigating Agency (NIA)were brought in. Initial investigations suggested that Purohit was an aberration. The investigators found it odd that despite their mentors in the army, the attackers behaved like novices. “They were so dumb they used their own motorcycle to plant the bomb. It took us just a month to catch all of them. The police have never taken such a short time to arrest terrorists,” says a senior home ministry official, requesting anonymity. How could anyone take them seriously? he asks.

After Purohit’s arrest, there was a lot of pressure to downplay the role of the army, reveals an ATS officer

So the sleuths deemed the Malegaon blast to be a freak incident. Over the next two years, however, a larger pattern began to emerge. First Malegaon. Then Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Sharif. The Abhinav Bharat cell was found to have a hand in all these blasts. It obviously had deeper roots.

TEHELKA first scooped and wrote about the tapes in 2008. Subsequently, a few other media organisations accessed and published parts of the tapes. However, through all this, at no point has there been sufficient focus on the army officers who figure on the tapes. They remain the big unturned stone in the investigation.

There are a total of eight army officers, retired and serving, named in the tapes. At least four of them have an MI background. Apart from Lt Col Purohit and Maj Upadhyay, who are now in jail, topping the list is Col (retd) Hasmukh Patel. A JNU graduate, Patel was commissioned into the Infantry Jat Regiment and later detailed with the MI. After 25 years in service, he retired in 2007 and joined Reliance. His LinkedIn profile says he is a specialist in threat analysis, background checks, physical- electronic-aviation security, vigilance, investigations, disaster management, negotiation and loss prevention. The NIA is understood to have questioned him recently but let him off under surveillance.

Col Shailesh Raikar is a retired commandant. He is said to be a brilliant officer who belonged to the Maratha Regiment. According to the tapes, Raikar was commander of the Bhosla Military Academy in Nashik. He allegedly provided academy facilities to Purohit and other Abhinav Bharat members for weapons training. He too is under the NIA scanner.

Others named in the tapes are Col Aditya Bappaditya Dhar (Parachute Regiment, now retired); Brig Mathur (full name not known, but he was apparently posted at Deolali Cantonment near Nashik); Maj Nitin Joshi and Maj Prayag Modak (in both cases, regiment not known).

The NIA has reportedly established contact with Col Dhar; it is yet to initiate investigations against the rest. Apart from these men, there is a Brig Lajpat Prajwal, apparently posted with the Nepal Army. According to the tapes, Purohit and he had trained together at IMA and that Purohit was in constant touch with Prajwal for logistic support. In one of his conversations with Col Purohit on the tapes, Col Dhar asks: Did you see one of my messages?

LT COL PUROHIT: Yes... About how this country should be taken over by the army?
COL DHAR: Yes, yes. I have written three lakh letters... I distributed three lakh letters among the jawans... It is not a political stunt... And I distributed 20,000 maps of Akhand Bharat among the jawans on 26 January... It is my humble attempt to sow the seeds.

Given these alarming ambitions and self-confessed acts of sedition, why haven’t their roles been probed more seriously yet? Why has the army itself not acted on them?

Maharashtra ATS chief KP Raghuvanshi, who was accused of going slow on the Malegaon probe, says: “We acted on the basis of evidence. The case against these armymen was not watertight. We did call some of them in, including Col Dhar, for questioning but there was nothing on the basis of which we could detain or arrest them.”

‘I gave 20,000 maps of Akhand Bharat to the jawans. It is my humble bid to sow the seeds,’ says Col Dhar

Interestingly, Raghuvanshi admits to a major handicap while interrogating the officers. “A MI official was always around monitoring our questioning. In the beginning, in fact, it was difficult to get hold of Lt Col Purohit because even though we presented a dossier of evidence against him the army insisted it’s their internal matter and they’d look into it themselves,” he says.

Finally, pressure from the home ministry worked and Purohit wa arrested. The army, however, has still not initiated action against its officials and court martial proceedings against Lt Col Purohit are yet to take off. Sources say the proceedings have been postponed under Section 7 of the Indian Soldiers Litigation Act, 1925. Since Purohit was serving under ‘special conditions’, the Act says a postponement is necessary in the interests of justice.

ANOTHER ATS official says, “Most of what Purohit says on the tapes about sending people to Nepal and Israel for training wasn’t taken seriously. That is the biggest blunder. The job of a MI officer posted along the Jammu & Kashmir border is to spread his net of informers, spies and get crucial information. Imagine what damage Purohit has already done while posted there. The entire truth on Purohit is still not out.”

That seems a very disturbing probability. The armymen named on the tapes are not mentioned casually. Sample snatches of this conversation between Lt Col Purohit, Maj Ramesh Upadhyay, Col Dhar, Dayanand Pandey, BL Sharma Prem, a twotime BJP MP, and RP Singh, an endocrinologist at Apollo Hospital and president of the World Hindu Federation.

LT COL PUROHIT:We have done two operations which have been successful and I got material support for them. On 24 June 2007, Col Lajpat Prajwal, now a Brigadier, had arranged our meeting with King Gyanendra Nobody in this country will be able to figure who is doing the work. If Major Saheb (Upadhyay) has 20 people, we (read Prajwal) will train them.

Terror taint RSS’ Indresh Kumar was linked to Ajmer blast PHOTO: SHAILENDRA PANDEY

RP SINGH: King Gyanendra’s close relative sat with us in Gorakhpur... We are constantly in touch with them... Maj Prayag Modak was the one who came to our meeting. There are Col Raikar and Col Hasmukh Patel, who are helping us in the training. Prajwal is from the side of Rani Aishwarya.

Col Dhar enters the room…

LT COL PUROHIT: Namaskar Dharji… (To the others) He has been in the army since 23 years and has been with me. He’s with the Parachute Regiment. I was also posted with him. Dhar sahib, let me introduce you to the people here. We are all on the same plane, Hindu rashtra…

LT COL PUROHIT:We also have General JJ Singh, he’s from the Maratha Regiment. As you know I have also been part of the Maratha regiment…

PANDEY: Ok…

LT COL PUROHIT: Swamiji, we haven’t spoken about certain things, but two operations have been done by us. One of our own captains has visited Israel for training and meeting and there was a very positive response… We demanded four things from Israel — continuous and uninterrupted supply of arms and training, our office with a saffron flag in Tel Aviv, political asylum and support for our cause of a Hindu Nation in the UN. Israel has asked us to show something on the ground and have promised at least a supply of arms and political asylum... I have a state-wise population of Muslims in each state but I have only three AK-47s. We couldn’t buy much earlier because we didn’t have funds.

MAJ UPADHYAY: AK-47 is available at Cox Bazaar in Gorakhpur, but mostly jihadis sell the weapons…

LT COL PUROHIT: You will get very expensive AKs…

PANDEY: Arrey, you get many AK guns.

LT COL PUROHIT: The Israelis ask us to give them proof of our involvement. What more proof do they need? We have completed two successful operations.

MAJ UPADHYAY: The Hyderabad blasts were executed by our man. Colonel will tell you about that.

PANDEY: What if this organisation is banned?

APTE: We will give it an international aspect... and a covert name. We have to fight. See, if you aren’t a Hindu, you are my enemy. I will be unsafe if you are alive…

Obviously, this was not just empty bragging. Purohit goes on to talk of Khetomi Sema, a leader of the banned insurgent group, Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland. Purohit says he had saved his life and Sema has issued a letter to all his generals to support Purohit’s cause. “He has promised to give us seven years of logistic support,” Purohit tells Pandey.

Purohit’s conversations further reveal that he had been using the army machinery to serve Abhinav Bharat. He says he was in the process of indoctrinating like-minded army officers who could serve in Abhinav Bharat. He also admits to catching and killing two Maoists in cold blood in Delhi.

LT COL PUROHIT: “I bought weapons worth Rs. 4 lakh in Assam. A police officer got me the weapons. It costs a lot. I had 3 lakh and I borrowed one more. I kept one pistol with me. I sent some weapons to Nepal. Our study is on… We will soon start action. We have got a list of top 5-6 Maoist financers. We’ll kill them first…You know one Assam DIG had informed me about two Maoists who had arrived in Delhi to kill me. We caught them at the Vasant Kunj Civic Centre. We kept them in a place at Munirka through the night. You know we have encroached upon a property in Munirka that has sewer lid inside the house. We got the information out of them, then killed them and threw them in the gutter.”

PUROHIT’S CONVERSATIONS also suggest an alarming shared mindset among sections of the army. At one point he tells Pandey, “There was a captain and a major posted in Delhi. I managed to do my work with them over the phone. This work otherwise would have taken more than three months. It happened because I belong to Sangh and he was also from Sangh. I didn’t even know him. He was from UP and he did the work in one day. Tapping such people (with Sangh background) is important.”

Sample another chat between them:

PANDEY: I have to attend a programme organised by one editor of Organiser, Deepak Rath, in Orissa on 17 February. This is his personal function.

LT COL PUROHIT: Is it in Bhubaneshwar city? Let me know, I will arrange my Orissa commander to receive you…

PANDEY: Do you know Narendra Modi?

LT COL PUROHIT: I have met him once or twice, but I don’t know him well.

PANDEY:Will you be interested if I arrange your meeting with him?

LT COL PUROHIT: Why not!

PANDEY: In fact, there is one Swami Aseemanandji....
He has good relations with Narendra Modi… I can arrange your meeting through him.

(Swami Aseemanand, a Kolkata native known as Jatin Chatterjee before he donned his ochre robes, came to the Dangs district of Gujarat to start a campaign to bring Christian converts back into the Hindu fold. A RSS man, he is said to be very close to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Aseemanand was arrested recently but the police have not shared any information gleaned from his interrogation.)

Elsewhere in the tapes, Purohit elaborates on other sinister strategies the Abhinav Bharat group plans on adopting against Muslims — including shooting people under false identities to create mayhem.

“I know that the army and the BSF don’t complement each other’s action,” says Purohit. “Nor there is any coordination between the BSF, CRPF and state police. So if I buy two army vehicles from the scrap and paint them with army colours and send them along with our people in army uniform into Meerut, they can just fire and come out of the situation easily. There is so much confusion in this country.”

The conversations on these tapes demand extreme vigilance. These statements were not recorded under police custody or during interrogation. They were voluntarily recorded by Pandey. Therefore, there can be no accusation of coercion or manipulation with regard to them. So the question is, how far did Lt Col Purohit’s influence run in the army? How vast was the network he had succeeded in building? Was he only a small link in a bigger, more dangerous, chain within the army?

In the Mecca Masjid blast, which brought the Abhinav Bharat under the scanner, the accused had used a combination of TNT and RDX. An IB official based in Mumbai raises a pertinent question: “Do you think Purohit can smuggle RDX and weapons from Jammu Army depot on his own? Can he alone sponsor sending men for military training to Nepal and Israel?”

This question has even more alarming implications when one recalls that in the narco reports of Nanded blasts accused, Himanshu Panse and Sanjay Bhaurao Chaudhury, first published by TEHELKA in 2006, the men clearly talk of how an army man named Mithun Chakrabarty had trained them to make the IEDs for the blasts at the Sinhagad Fort. The identity of this army man is yet to be established.

Going slow? ATS’ Raghuvanshi says the army tried to meddle PHOTO: SHAILENDRA PANDEY

A senior ATS Official told this reporter that after Lt Col Purohit’s arrest, there was a lot of pressure on them to downplay the role of the army. “We were told we couldn’t lower the morale of officers posted in sensitive positions. It could have a backlash. But with more cases involving military intelligence officials coming out, we could be overlooking a dangerous trend.”

The MI is a small but important corps, and a relatively new addition to the army structure. It is currently headed by Gen Lumba. MI officers are tasked to track spies and other security threats and, outside the country, are mostly active in China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Japan, USA and Russia. Many MI cadre officers (Lt Col Purohit was one of them) do not wear uniforms and work in conjunction with the IB, BSF (‘G’ Force) and other intelligence agencies. MI officials work in field formations and report to their respective commanders. Nobody, except the commander, would know they are part of MI.

What makes the story of Lt Col Purohit so dark is that the Indian Army has never been suspected of any communal overtones. But as an IB official says: “There was a time when the army would not think twice about religious identity when they entered the Golden Temple to arrest the terrorists holed inside. But after the 1992 Ayodhya movement, things have changed. The political climate has affected the army too in a big way, especially among officers posted along the border. Look at Lt Col Purohit. His indoctrination happened during his posting in Kashmir.”

THE UNMAPPED SCALE of the army connection, however, is not the only missing piece in the ultra-Hindu terror puzzle. In December 2007, Sunil Joshi, an RSS man suspected of a key role in the Ajmer blast and of being a link between several ultra-right groups like Abhinav Bharat, Vande Mataram and other fringe elements was mysteriously murdered. His family said he had been bumped off by his own organisation. Sadhvi Pragya confirmed this. According to her, a man named Mayank had probably killed Joshi. Despite these clues, the MP Police closed the case.

Clued in Hemant Karkare pursued the ‘saffron terror’ angle PHOTO: DEEPAK SALVI

Earlier this week, however, the MP Police finally accepted that Joshi was murdered by his own friends in the RSS. They charged Mayank, Harshad Solanki, Mehul and Mohan from Gujarat, Anand Raj Katare from Indore and Vasudev Parmar from Dewas with Joshi’s murder. While Mehul and Mohan are still on the run, Solanki was brought before the Dewas court last week and confessed to the murder. (Solanki is also an accused in the infamous Best Bakery case, Gujarat 2002.) This development validates what TEHELKA had reported back in 2008.

However, even these arrests don’t join all the dots. The MP Police have claimed internal rivalry as the motive for the murder. The CBI though believes the real culprits in the RSS behind Joshi’s murder are also the men responsible for the blasts. Their hunch is, if Joshi were alive today, most of the masterminds would have been unmasked. Joshi was known to be close to senior RSS leader Indresh Kumar. Their question is why did the two fall out?

The MP Police, Rajasthan ATS and CBI are all looking into the Ajmer, Mecca Masjid and Samjhauta blasts. However, their investigations do not have the same conclusions.

This October, the Rajasthan ATS filed a chargesheet linking Indresh to the Ajmer blasts. They said he attended a secret meeting in Jaipur on October 25, 2005 in which the conspiracy for the Ajmer blast was drawn up. The meeting was allegedly attended by Indresh, Pragya Thakur, Sunil Joshi, Ramji Kalsangra, Devendra Gupta, Lokesh Sharma and Sandeep Dange. The chargesheet hinted the same people were responsible for the Samjhauta blast. The chargesheet, however, did not list Indresh as an accused. And Dange and Kalsangra are still on the run.

The CBI, which is also probing the case, blames the Rajasthan ATS for not making sufficient headway in pinning down the role of the RSS. “They have helped RSS men like Indresh create an alibi by alerting them with witness statements that are not credible evidence in the court of law. This has allowed him time to concoct documents to prove he was not physically present at various places,” says an investigating official.

Confusingly, however, Lt Col Purohit and his co-conspirators on the tapes also curse Indresh as a sell-out and wish they could kill him.

Source: http://archive.tehelka.com/story_main48.asp?filename=Ne010111The_unturned.asp

Gujarat HC raps Modi govt. for ‘inaction’ during post-Godhra riots

Ahmedabad, February 8, 2012

PTI Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. The Gujarat High Court rapped the Modi government for "negligence” during the 2002 post-Godhra riots. File photo

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The Gujarat High Court on Wednesday pulled up the Narendra Modi government for “inaction and negligence” on its part during the 2002 post-Godhra riots that led to large-scale destruction of religious structures.

A division bench of acting chief Justice Bhaskar Bhattacharya and Justice J.B. Pardiwala made these observations, while ordering compensation for over 500 religious structures in the state.

The court was hearing a petition filed by Islamic Relief Committee of Gujarat (IRCG).

Inadequacy, inaction and negligence on the part of the State government to prevent riots resulted in large-scale destruction of religious structures across the State, the court observed.

The government was responsible for repair and compensation for such places, it further said.

The court said that when the government had paid compensation for destruction of houses and commercial establishments, it should also pay compensation for religious structures.

The court also ordered that principal judges of 26 districts of the state will receive the applications for compensation of religious structures in their respective districts and decide on it. They have been asked to send their decisions to HC within six months.

IRCG’s petition in 2003 had sought court’s directions to the government to pay compensation towards damage of religious places during riots on the ground that the National Human Rights Commission, too, had recommended and the state government had in principle accepted the suggestion.

The state government had opposed the IRCG petition, saying it was a violation of article 27 of the Constitution.

The government further said that there was no policy with regards to compensation for restoration/repair of religious places damaged or destroyed during the riots.

Lawyer for IRCG, M.T.M. Hakim hailed it as a “landmark judgement” in the country, in which compensation has been ordered for destruction of religious structures.

“This is also probably for the first time that a court has held the State government responsible for inaction and negligence during the 2002 riots,” Mr. Hakim said.

Source:http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2871891.ece