Why Malegaon blasts witnesses and accused are retracting statements in court

By Saba Naqvi
Terrorism is far too serious an issue to be hostage to political expediency. Yet, that is precisely what is happening with cases against members of the Hindu ultra-right. Witnesses and accused in the Malegaon blasts (2006, 2008) case and the Samjhauta Express blast (2007) case have been recanting their statements. Ambitious policemen hoping to curry favour with the current regime have been coming out of the woodwork, claiming they were never comfortable with the narrative of “saffron terror”.

There are several unmistakable signs that the prosecution intends to go slow till the cases altogether fall apart. What we do know is this. The slain chief of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) Hemant Karkare had filed an FIR in 2008 which included transcripts of conversations from 2007 to 2008 between those who were allegedly plotting the Malegaon blasts (one of the participants had recorded the conversation).

We would subsequently get other evidence such as the rich-with-detail confession of Swami Aseemanand made in 2011 (he later recanted but it is hard to imagine anyone concocting such details). There was also evidence about an organisation named Abhinav Bharat, apparently initiated by Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Prasad Purohit in 2006. The picture that emerges from the transcripts is a group of disgruntled army men, militant sadhus and disillusioned Sangh Parivar cadre.

They were also overwhelmingly Maharashtrian Brahmins, in the manner of the group that emerged around VD Savarkar, founder of the Hindu Mahasabha, whose member Nathuram Godse assassinated Mohandas Gandhi. It was also an open secret in the last few years of the UPA rule that the RSS was deeply worried about its links to some individuals who had advocated the “bomb for a bomb” philosophy.

The Sangh has many expectations from the government of Narendra Modi, but the key one arguably is to make the cases against the Hindu ultra-right go away. Towards that end, the BJP spokespersons are now going on TV shows to make statements such as the one by the party’s national secretary Shrikant Sharma: “It is a fact that all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”

It is a statement that can be swallowed in an atmosphere where the world is confronted by the extreme violence of jihadi groups such as the IS, Taliban, Boko Haram to name a few. In India, too, we have faced terror strikes orchestrated by Muslims, possibly ordered by groups in Pakistan, most famously in Mumbai but in other centres as well. We have an ongoing problem in Kashmir, where terror strikes, mostly on symbols of the state, are routine.

Yet it is particularly with relevance to our country that the statements made by the BJP and RSS spokespersons are plain inaccurate. Besides Gandhi being shot by a Hindu fanatic, Indira Gandhi was murdered by Sikhs, and Rajiv Gandhi by terrorists belonging to the LTTE, whose religion was not a factor in the killing, but clearly they were not Muslims. The Maoists who routinely blow up military convoys in the interiors of Dantewada are also not Muslims.

Neither are the various militant groups that have operated in the Northeast. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who led Punjab into a bloody phase of militancy, thankfully contained, was not by any stretch a Muslim.

The point here is that we have dealt with all forms of terrorism in India. We cannot whitewash certain crimes by saying members of a particular religion cannot engage in acts of violence (we live in a world where the phenomenon of Buddhist monks becoming terrorists has been chronicled in Myanmar). Majority terrorism is something the world is familiar with. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, one of the deadliest terror attacks on US soil, was done by Christian fundamentalists. In 2011, Europe was shaken by the killing spree of Anders Breivik in Norway that claimed over 70 lives. Both these countries investigated and prosecuted. They did not whitewash the crimes.

(The writer is an independent journalist)