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

Akshardham attack: POTA court acquits remaining 2 accused

Shaukatullah Ghori (left) and Majid Patel in Ahmedabad on Friday. (Express Photo: Javed Raja)

A special Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act (POTA) court on Friday acquitted the remaining two accused in the Akshardham temple terror attack case, three weeks after the Supreme Court let off six accused for want of evidence. The two accused were in the jail for the past five years since their arrest.

Special POTA court Judge Geeta Gopi ordered acquittal of Mohammad Umarji alias Majid Patel and Hafiz Kasuri alias Shaukatullah Ghori, who were arrested by Ahmedabad’s Detection of Crime Branch in 2008 and 2009, respectively.

Ghori was serving as a muezzin in a mosque in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, who was accused for raising funds and attended meeting in Riyadh and Hyderabad where the alleged conspiracy was hatched for the attack. Ghori is the bother of Farhatullah, an alleged hardcore militant and wanted in other terror related cases including Akshardham.

Umarji, a resident of Bharuch, was chargesheeted for providing funds to the accused conspirators which he allegedly received through hawala racket. Umarji’s brother-in-law, Asif V Patel, said outside the court that the whole case led to a disaster in Umarji’s family. “Relationship broke as people in the community suspected him as a terrorist. The damage has been done. The five years lost in the jail would not come back. However, we don’t have complaints against the police,” Patel said.

A Supreme Court bench on May 16 had acquitted six accused, who had been convicted by the sessions court and the Gujarat High Court in 2010.

SC refused to rely on the evidence produced by the prosecution. During the hearing, the prosecution had referred to the SC judgment and said that it had refused to rely on Bhavnagari’s statement and rejected the conspiracy charge against the accused. On September 24, 2002, terror attack on Askshardham temple in Gandhinagar claimed more than 30 lives.

Source: http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/akshardham-attack-pota-court-acquits-remaining-2-accused/

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

In Jaipur replay, university bows to ABVP film fatwa .

Pune, January 29, 2012

Symbiosis University has cancelled the screening of documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak's Jashn-e-Azadi on Kashmir, after the right-wing student organisation, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), raised objections to its ‘separatist' nature. The film was supposed to be screened at a three-day national seminar called ‘Voices of Kashmir' at the Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce, organised in association with the University Grants Commission (UGC) on February 3, 4 and 5.

The organisation now wants the entire seminar cancelled, ABVP Pune unit Secretary Shailendra Dalvi told The Hindu on Saturday evening. “The content of the seminar, like the film, is anti-India, and against the Indian Army. We will not stand for anything that divides the country. Symbiosis has agreed to cancel the film screening, and we are giving them three days' time to think about the event, too,” Mr. Dalvi stated.

Last week, Jaipur Literature Festival organisers were forced to cancel a videoconference with author Salman Rushdie after protesters threatened to disrupt the event.

Speaking to The Hindu over telephone, Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce principal Hrishikesh Soman stated that the ABVP had approached him on Friday, and that the college agreed to cancel the film screening “considering their [ABVP's] emotions and feelings.” “I told them that the seminar is entirely academic, apolitical and non-religious. But the film has met with criticism from all corners. So we have decided to avoid unnecessary controversies and cancel the screening,” Mr. Soman said. “If people have a very strong reason to protest the film, then we should be tolerant enough,” he stated. The seminar will be attended by senior journalist and Jammu and Kashmir interlocutor Dileep Padgaonkar, among others.

Asked if the college would cancel the event altogether, Mr. Soman said: “After the first meeting, the ABVP has not made such a request yet. If they do, then we will try to sort it out.” Asked if the cancellation of the film screening withheld the students' right to experience and discuss all sides of the Kashmir conflict, Mr. Soman said: “I don't want to get into petty issues. The seminar will be purely intellectual, and will focus on socio-cultural and educational issues in Kashmir.”

Mr. Soman said Mr. Kak had been “informed categorically” that the film screening had been cancelled. Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Kak stated he would be attending the seminar in spite of the cancellation. “I will utilise the two hours given to me and talk about what I want to talk about,” he said. Mr. Kak is scheduled to deliver a presentation on “Speaking about Kashmir” on February 3. His film, Jashn-e-Azadi, made in 2007, explores the meaning of azadi (freedom) in violence-gripped Kashmir.

Apart from Mr. Kak and Mr. Padgaonkar, the panel of speakers includes Hamid Marazi, Zaffar Iffat Fatima, M.K. Raina, Pran Kishore, Sanjay Nahar, and Babali Saraf. Iffat Fatima's documentary Where Have You Hidden My New Crescent Moon will be screened at the seminar, a press note stated.

Source:http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2840515.ece

Violence on minorities up by 90 pc in Karnataka: Justice Saldanha

Mumbai, January 12: Former judge in the Bombay and Karnataka high courts, Justice Michael Saldanha has described Karnataka with having the worst communal-persecution record and a state that encourages terror on micro-minorities.



Addressing a press meet organised jointly by All India Secular Forum and Catholic-Christian Secular Forum(CSF) the retired judge said that while across the country there has been a marked decrease in communal-related violence between 65 per cent to 75 per cent, “In Karnataka the violence targeting minorities jumped up by 90 per cent.”



He warned that the current scenario “is so alarming that even a minor flash point in near future may turn the state into a communal inferno... if steps to rein in parochial forces are not taken in time.”



The retired judge who grew up in Mangalore said, “This was never the case during my schooling and college days. All communities used to live harmoniously. But now something is wrong and the partisan-nature of the state machinery can be seen clearly.”



Justice Saldanha who had recently carried out an in-depth study of communal-related violence, said: “I found that Catholic community is the worst affected by this kind of violence. False cases are registered against people from this community. All this shows that apart from the saffronisation of the police force...what has been unleashed in this once-a-peaceful region is state-sponsored terror.” Citing examples of violence meted out to people belonging to Catholic community, he said no action was taken against parochial organisations espousing Hindutva ideology through hate-speeches instigating majority community to carry out violent attacks on micro-minorities.



Elaborating the former judge’s point, CSF general secretary Joseph Dias said that in Karnataka, “it has been found that micro-communities are worst affected in Dakshin Karnataka, Mysore and Mangalore.”



Dias said that going by the press reports also, “2011 has been the worst year for Indian Christians. Sheer number of attacks clearly point to the fact that the persecution has become more widespread.



“Moreover, even though there has been no major problem like Kandhamal in Orissa, one just has to see the fear glinting in the eyes of minority communities residing in interiors.”



Dias also claimed that the attacks on Christians have increased so much that the number of such incidents have over taken attacks on Muslims.

Source: http://www.coastaldigest.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=34950%3Aviolence-on-minorities-up-by-90-pc-in-karnataka-saldanha

Hindu right-wing group "Sri Rama Sena" flew Pakistani flag on a government building to create communal tension.

Six members of a right-wing Hindu group have been arrested in India's southern Karnataka state for raising Pakistan's national flag on a government building.

Police say those arrested belong to the Sri Rama Sena group.

The flag was raised in Sindgi, near Bijapur, on 1 January, leading to angry protests by Hindu organisations and the stoning of a Muslim prayer hall.

Police say Sri Rama Sena was trying to create "communal disharmony" in an area with a sizeable Muslim presence.

Sri Rama Sena is a fringe group that claimed responsibility for attacking women outside a pub in the coastal district of Mangalore in 2009, saying that allowing females in pubs was against Indian culture.


'Dividing society'

Inspector general of police Charan Reddy told the BBC the situation in Sindgi was "now peaceful".

"It seems they were out to create communal disharmony," he said.

Hindu organisations had called for strikes in a number of towns around Bijapur to protest against the flag-raising.

But Mr Reddy said police investigations had led them to members of the Sri Rama Sena, a group founded by Pramod Muthalik after it broke away from the Bajrang Dal, an affiliate of the long-standing Hindu nationalist organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Mr Muthalik is the leading suspect in the attack on the women in Mangalore.

Former chief minister and Janata Dal Secular party leader HD Kumaraswamy said of the flag-raising: "It is such a shame. I blame the RSS and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the incident. They want to divide society on religious lines."

Bijapur is close to Hyderabad in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh and is a historic town with a sizeable Muslim population.

Police arrested Sri Rama Sena members for the desecration of a mosque in Mysore a few years ago.

The carcass of a pig was thrown near the prayer hall, an act that triggered major riots between Hindus and Muslims.

Karnataka was also rocked by a series of attacks on churches by right-wing groups in 2008, immediately after the BJP came to power.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16424473
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No any National media covered this news....How biased they are??? likewise If any Muslim is arrested by police calling him terrorist the entire national media give it a special coverage and runs the news for many days, but most of them are acquitted by the court but this news of acquittal hardly get any mention in these so called FORTH PILLAR of our DEMOCRACY........:(

Journalist attacked

Shahina K.K., a journalist from Kerala, who visited the Somwarpet tahsildar's office in Kodagu district on Friday in connection with a case, was allegedly attacked by a Hindutva organisation despite being under police protection.

According to Ms. Shahina, she was inside a van along with over a dozen policemen when activists of the Hindu Jagran Vedike stopped and surrounded the vehicle.

Shouting slogans

“Initially, they only shouted slogans. But, when the police did nothing to disperse them, they started throwing stones at the van,” she said.

Ms. Shahina, who is facing charges of criminal intimidation, interviewed K.K. Yogananda, one of the eye-witnesses in the Bangalore bomb blast case in which People's Democratic Party leader Abdul Nasser Maudany is an accused. After the interview was published, Mr. Yogananda accused Ms. Shahina of criminal intimidation.

She also alleged that the local police in Somwarpet refused to provide any protection earlier. “I had to call a senior police official in Bangalore to get protection,” she said.

Confirming that protection was provided to Ms. Shahina on his insistence, Deputy Superintendent of Police (CID) Mohan Das told presspersons that he could not comment on the attack as he was not at the spot.

Charges

Stating that the police had been treating Ms. Shahina badly ever since they filed the charges, her lawyer B.T. Venkatesh said: “We will lodge a complaint and also make the circle inspector a party in the case.”

Source:http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article2705644.ece