Mecca Masjid blast: Is there really nothing called ‘saffron terror’?
The verdict in the 11-year-old Mecca Masjid blast case by a National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in Hyderabad on April 6, acquitting all five accused is on expected lines, though many have expressed outrage on social media.
The verdict speaks volumes about the ineptitude of India's premiere investigating agencies if 11 years after the May 18, 2007, blast which killed nine people and injured 58, we do not even know who was behind the attack.
The tragedy of the blast, however, did not end with the nine dead. As people gathered to express outrage over the terror attack, police opened fire on them claiming five more lives. It didn't take authorities any time to link the blast to terror outfits such as Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) and Pakistan based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
Botched up investigation
In the first two months of investigations, Hyderabad police, which shot five, rounded up nearly 200 young Muslim youths from across the city. They finally chargesheeted 21 of them.
An alleged HuJI operative Bilal was said to be the "mastermind" of the attack, and was later killed in a police encounter. It was only in January 2009 that all of them were acquitted from the charges of carrying out the attack.
Meanwhile, then Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) chief, Hemant Karkare (later killed in the 26/11 Mumbai attack) arrested members of extremist Hindutva organisation, Abhinav Bharat, in connection with the Malegaon terror attacks of 2006 and 2008), exposing the "saffron terror" network.
Investigating agencies later linked the Samjhauta Express train blast that happened in February 2007, Ajmer Sharif Dargah blast of October 2007 and Mecca Masjid blast to the same network.
The Samjhauta train runs between Delhi and Lahore and the main targets of the attack were hence Pakistani travellers. Other blasts targeted Muslim religious sites, mosques, shrines and even graveyards. Those dead and injured mostly included Muslims. It is for this reason that the attacks appeared to have been planned to take "revenge" and teach Muslims a "lesson".
Saffron terror?
In different cases, investigating agencies arrested lieutenant-colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Bhavesh Patel, Kumar Sarkar alias Swami Aseemanand, Devendra Gupta, Lokesh Sharma, Bharat Mohanlal Rateshwar, Rajendra Choundary, among others. Except Col Purohit, who was then serving in the military intelligence, all accused had links with the Sangh Parivar.
RSS pracharak Sunil Joshi's name had also cropped up in these cases, but he was shot on December 29, 2007, in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh, allegedly by same group. (All, including Pragya Thakur, have been acquitted in his murder case.)
The NIA has already closed the 2008 Madosa case, citing lack of evidence. Samjauta case has not made much headway either, while the trial in 2006 Malegaon blast is yet to begin. Special public prosecutor in the 2008 Malegaon case, Rohini Salian, went on record to say that she was asked to go "soft" on Hindutva extremists after the BJP-led NDA government came to power at the Centre. Since then, the NIA has decided to drop charges against Pragya in the case.
In March 2017, a court convicted three accused, although it acquitted seven of them, including Aseemanad in the Ajmer blast case, despite the fact that 26 witnesses had turned hostile. This case will remain significant as all convicted persons: Bhavesh Patel, Devendra Gupta and Sunil Joshi (dead) were members of the RSS at the time of their crime.
Mecca Masjid blast case
Mecca Masjid case was transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in 2009 after the failure of the local police in making any headway. CBI charged three of people - Lokesh Sharma, Devender Gupta and Sunil Joshi. In 2011, the case was transferred to the NIA, and they expanded the investigation and named 10 accused, including Assemanand.
Only five of them - Swami Aseemanand, Devendra Gupta, Lokesh Sharma, Bharat Mohanlal Rateshwar and Rajendra Choundary - could be arrested. Two of the former RSS workers, Sandeep Dange and Ramachandra Kalsangra, are still "absconding".
It must be noted here that Swami Aseemanand had confessed to his crime in an interview to the Caravan magazine and in front of the police. He had even confessed his crime in front of the magistrate, adding that he knew he might be "sentenced to the death", but he still wanted "to make the confession". He later, however, retracted his statement, saying he made the statement under duress on part of the police.
On April 16, judge K Ravinder Reddy acquitted all five of them for want of evidence, hours before resigning from his office (he is facing corruption charges).
If even after three rounds of investigations, including by country's premiere investigating agencies - CBI and NIA - the nation does not know, who killed those nine innocent devotees and injured 58 others, it paints a very sorry picture of the law enforcement agencies of the country.
Wishful closure of cases by media
As soon as the verdict was announced, TV channels gave their verdict too: There is nothing called Hindu or saffron terror and it was all a Congress/UPA conspiracy to malign the Hindu community - and by extension India - in general, and the nationalist Sangh Parivar, in particular.
Sample the hashtags on some of the channels: Times Now: #HinduTerrorTheoryFlops, CNN News18: #NoHinduTerror, Zee News: #HinduTerrorParCongExposed, India Today: #NoHinduTerror, Republic TV: #HinduTerrorPolitics, etc. Some of them even ran Twitter polls on the same theme.
These hashtags and debates, however, conveniently ignored the Ajmer blast case where three former RSS functionaries have already been convicted. They busied themselves in their favourite pastime of blaming the Congress party (not Nehru?) for its purported attempt of maligning the Sangh Parivar.
The media that had long turned into a lapdog rather than being the watchdog, did not even dare to ask difficult questions to the government and investigating agencies about their failures in leading all these cases to logical conclusions. Or worse, interfering in these cases? Who, after all killed Joshi? Who were the people behind these attacks?
What is interesting about these cases is that within hours of the attacks some links to LeT/HuJI/SIMI/IM were shown and in days following each of the attacks innocent Muslims were incarcerated on trump-up terror charges. Many of them continue to struggle for acquittals. One can only hope that another round of incarceration for the same cases do not begin.
On social media, many have already dubbed the NIA as another "caged bird", one allegedly taking orders from Nagpur (the headquarters of the RSS), besides mocking them for aggressively pursuing the alleged love jihad case of Hadiya, while ignoring these terror cases.
Failure of the country's premiere agencies in almost all terror cases targeting Muslim religious places will only strengthen doubts in the minds of the minority community that the police hold biases against them. Justice delayed is after all justice denied.