India is Only Country That Says Satyamev Jayate, Yakub Would Say

Yakub Memon believed being innocent of a crime has more weightage than his infamous surname, writes S Hussain Zaidi.

• Yakub Memon was the only one who came back to India to clear his name.
• The general perception is that Yakub Memon is guilty because the prosecution have deemed it fit that he is guilty enough to be hanged.
• It does not matter that Yakub Memon did not take part in the March 12 blasts’ conspiracy meetings.
• That a man should be hanged because of the collective angst of a society that is baying for some blood is not right.

Over the years, covering crime and terrorism, I realised that there are no two kinds of terrorists. There are only one kind. Those who believe in a certain ideology, plant bombs and kill and maim mindlessly. During my years at The Indian Express and while researching for Black Friday, I realised to my horror much after I had made up my mind to believe in the prosecution theory, that among all the 100 odd accused, one man stood out.

Yakub Memon did not fit the bill.

It was not Yakub Memon’s erudition, his demeanour or his personality that made him different. It was simply the circumstances of his return and his immense faith in the judiciary and the Indian government.

While all the other accused were the ones who landed in the police dragnet, Yakub Memon was the only one who came back to India to clear his name and he ensured that his family (the ones who were ideologically on his side) returned too. If he was the mastermind as is suggested, why would he return? Wouldn’t he, like Tiger Memon, have preferred the safer environs of Pakistan even though it was stifling under the ISI’s glare? If he was an accomplice or an abettor in the blasts, even remorse would not find him lurking anywhere near India.

It might seem naïve, and many CBI officers have told me this, that he was naïve enough to trust that he would be spared. But in his naivete he believed that being innocent of a crime has more weightage than his infamous surname. “This is the only country that says Satyamev Jayate”, he told me in one of the numerous encounters we had at the Arthur Road Jail which doubled up as a TADA court for the trial.

In the past few days, I have been thinking about how the average Indian is so convinced that Yakub Memon’s hanging is the only thing that will offset the pain and suffering of the 257 families whose lives were shattered after the March 12, 1993 bomb blasts. Even Salman Khan’s defence of Yakub Memon and the intellectuals urging for the President to intervene, have not been spared.

The problem is that we want to punish any Memon with the remotest suspicion of guilt. We want to avenge every act of terrorism that fundamentalists have wreaked on India. We want to avenge the 2006 train blasts and we want to avenge the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

So it does not matter that Yakub Memon did not take part in the March 12 blasts’ conspiracy meetings, that he was not part of the group that formed the landing brigade. His brother Tiger Memon had physically helped in the landings of the RDX. It does not matter that he did not train the boys who planted the bombs like his brother Tiger Memon.

For us as a nation, our main grouse against the Memon clan was that they disappeared on the eve of the blasts. So they are all conspirators. Few know that two of the brothers Suleman and Ayub were already residents of Dubai at the time. Suleman’s wife, Rubina Memon, whose Maruti van was used was not even in Mumbai and had shifted to Dubai bags and baggages eight months prior to the blasts. She also chose to come back on Yakub Memon’s beckoning and is now serving a life sentence.

Just prior to the blasts, the rest of the clan was slowly shifting in batches to Dubai as the preceding communal riots in Mumbai forced the family to do their Ramzan in Dubai. When the senior Abdul Razzak and his wife Hanifa left on March 10 and when Yakub and his family and the other brothers Essa and Yusuf left on March 11 with their families, it was not an unusual occurrence as is made out. Tiger had no plans to zero in on March 12 as the day for the blasts.

It was the unforeseen arrest of Gul Mohammad, one of the recruits who had participated in the training in Pakistan, in a communal riots case by the Mumbai police, that made Tiger Memon advance the date to March 12. He felt that Gul Mohammad would spill the beans to the police. Tiger Memon left India on the morning of March 12.

The general perception is that Yakub Memon is guilty because the prosecution have deemed it fit that he is guilty enough to be hanged. Nobody has seriously examined the charges against him. That he is more guilty of handling his brother Tiger Memon’s hawala business as a chartered accountant and not planning or executing the bomb blasts. The other charges against him were only based on confessions that were retracted.

B Raman, the late intelligence officer’s disclosures on the circumstances surrounding Yakub’s return and the top CBI officers and senior bureaucrats from the Ministry of External Affairs who were involved in the operation to bring back the Memons from Dubai can throw light on Yakub’s keenness and cooperation in the investigations.

What I am surprised and shocked at is the vehemence of the hoi polloi and their desire to see Yakub Memon hang. This is so far removed from our culture and history, we being from the land of Valmiki and Angulimala and Ashoka. All of them hailed as heroes despite their barbaric past. Their old sins did not cast long shadows instead their reformation and awakening catapulted them into the exalted status of a hero fit for veneration.

That a man should be hanged because of the collective angst of a society that is baying for some blood is not right.

In terms of sheer numbers, the people who planted the bombs did more harm. It has been held that they were only the puppets.

I just believe that an unreliable or retracted confession and no tangible evidence and the circumstances of Yakub’s return along with his family should have been taken into account. All over the world, cases abound of convicted individuals who have been cleared of the crime and exonerated long past their execution. In Yakub’s case we know the grey area, yet we chose to be silenced by the shrillness of the masses.

(S Hussain Zaidi is a senior journalist based in Mumbai)