The ones that got away

"The BJP and RSS have disposed of their poor volunteers like sacrificial goats while saving their big leaders," says Ashish Khetan, vice-chairman of the Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi, an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) think-tank. He was responding to the news that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had cleared Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and RSS leader Indresh Kumar of involvement in the 2007 Ajmer dargah bombing, which left three people dead and 17 injured. The NIA filed its closure report in a special court in Jaipur on April 3; a hearing has been scheduled on April 17 for the court to respond.

Before he joined the AAP, Khetan was an investigative journalist. Among his scoops was a 42-page document, purportedly the first piece of evidence of alleged RSS involvement in a series of bombings, including of the 2007 Samjhauta Express. The document was a confession by Swami Aseemanand, a suspect in the bombing of a mosque in Hyderabad in 2007, made before a judge in December 2010. Until Aseemanand's confession, many of the blasts that occurred between 2006 and 2008 were thought to be the work of Islamist terrorists. Sadhvi Pragya figured prominently in the document, and was arrested for the 2008 Malegaon bombings, in which eight died and 80 were injured. She had been a prominent leader of the ABVP, the BJP's student wing, before becoming a monk. Indresh Kumar, who once led the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, an RSS initiative to win Muslim support, was alleged to have provided the money.

Aseemanand had retracted his confession in March 2011, but three years later, in an interview with The Caravan, he said that Mohan Bhagwat, the current RSS sarsanghchalak, had told him that the bombings were necessary but must not be linked to the Sangh. The RSS has dismissed Aseemanand's statements as "rubbish" and "concocted". Last month, Aseemanand was cleared of involvement in the Ajmer bombing. In acquitting him, the court said it was giving "the benefit of the doubt". Three people were convicted-Sunil Joshi, Devendra Gupta and Bhavesh Patel. The latter two, both committed 'Hindutvawadis', were given life sentences. Joshi is already dead-he was murdered in December 2007. One of his former aides said Joshi and the newly anointed UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath met a year before the Ajmer attack. The NIA also said it found Adityanath's number in a notebook that once belonged to Joshi. However, Aseemanand, in his confession, said Adityanath had not offered support to the bombers.

The inability of the NIA to build cases possibly indicates a similar fate for seven other cases of Hindu terror that the UPA handed over to the current government. Rohini Salian, a former public prosecutor, even said that she had been asked to "go soft" against the accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts. She was removed from the case. The truth must out, she had said at the time. But it remains shrouded in circumstantial evidence and conspiratorial murmurs.