When all the analysis has been done of the stunning Bombay High Court verdict acquitting all the accused in the July 2006 Mumbai train blasts, will the two main players get any part of the blame?
The Congress-NCP government, headed by Vilasrao Deshmukh with RR Patil as the Home Minister, and the mainstream press that covered the arrests, are as culpable in destroying the lives of the 13 accused, as the Mumbai police - especially the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) - then headed by KP Raghuvanshi.
This officer has been mostly spared in the detailed coverage of the verdict, though the accused were set free only because of the flawed, and indeed, malevolent investigation carried out directly under his direction. I remember asking Raghuvanshi for his reaction to the affidavits filed by some of the families of the accused and suspects, soon after the blasts.
The affidavits detailed the torture inflicted on their family members, who had been picked up to pressurise them to turn in wanted members of their families.
Entire families were whisked away to different lock-ups; there was no formal arrest. A husband was stripped in front of his wife; a father in front of his sons; a sister-in-law’s burqa was yanked off, flung on the face of her accused brother-in-law, and trampled underfoot. The men were threatened that every woman of the family would be given the same treatment. For days after that, one of these women would get up in the middle of the night, screaming and wanting to run away, her brother told me.
These affidavits were given to me by the late advocate Shahid Azmi, in the hope that I would be able to report their contents in some newspaper. But the report would have been incomplete without the ATS chief’s reply. His reply? "It’s part of the Al Qaeda’s training manual that those arrested must make such allegations."
A Systemic Cover-up
No newspaper accepted my story; fortunately, the allegations of torture made by the accused were proved in the High Court and became one of the reasons for disbelieving the prosecution. Interestingly, the torture of the family members stopped after Samajwadi President Abu Asim Azmi took some of these family members with their affidavits to the PMO.
Almost 1,500 Muslims were picked up soon after the blasts in what the Urdu press described as "jhadu rounds’’, where cops spread out in Muslim ghettos and picked up whoever they thought fitted the bill, ex-SIMI members heading the list. Those who followed the orthodox Ahle Hadees sect were also targeted.
Police Commissioner AN Roy "explained" these indiscriminate arrests by saying that looking for the perpetrators of the blasts was like "looking for a needle in the haystack." That was as complete an admission of the failure of police intelligence as any.
When 13 men were finally identified as accused and described as members of SIMI and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the logical question that arose was: why had they not been on the police’s radar, especially since SIMI had been blamed for every blast that took place after the organisation was banned in 2001?
When a delegation of Muslims finally met the CP, he promised he would give a hearing to anyone who had been unfairly targeted. He stuck to his promise, assuaging partly the despair that was sweeping through the community.
Mockery, Solidarity, and the Erosion of Trust
Why did the CP need a delegation to tell him what his men were doing? He couldn’t have been unaware of their actions. One call centre employee who’d been picked up "for questioning" told me that when all protestations of innocence failed, he thought bravado might do the trick.
"I’ll complain to the Commissioner", he told the cop who’d been abusing him as a Muslim. "Here’s his phone number," the cop replied mockingly, "Go ahead." He was a follower of the Ahle Hadees.
Immediately after the blasts, Muslims living near the affected railway stations of Mahim, Mira Road, and Andheri, were among the first to help the victims.
"We had organised food for the victims and the commuters caught in the mayhem. This included Jain food – the packets were clearly marked so. Despite the terrible incident, the atmosphere in the city didn’t change till the arrests started. Then, we became a community marked and maligned."Maulana Dariyabadi, an influential Mumbai cleric
With the state government deaf to their appeals, the Maulana led a delegation of the community to Delhi where they met MPs from all parties in the Central Hall of Parliament. It proved fruitless.
The Continuity of Repression
By the time these blasts took place, the bracketing of the Muslim community as a whole, with terror, had begun. Bomb blasts had become a regular feature in the country, including Mumbai, since 2002. SIMI, the LeT and Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJi) were blamed for all of them, and Muslims arrested under anti-terror laws.
Nothing changed after the Congress unseated the Vajpayee-led NDA in 2004.
In Maharashtra, the party had been in power with the NCP since 1999; it was under a Congress regime that the Ghatkopar blast accused, Khwaja Yunus, "disappeared" from police custody.
Thus, when the train blasts took place, the Congress governments at the Centre and state gave the police a free hand. Complaints of innocents being nabbed didn’t bother them.
Such blind approval could explain why the ATS didn’t bother to carry out even a semblance of a professional investigation, relying on confessions alone and going out to look for evidence only after the confessions were retracted, as the judgment points out.
Hindutva Terror Ignored, Muslim Accused Paraded
Interestingly, it was in April 2006 that two young men had died in Nanded while making bombs in the house of a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) member, a retired government official. Fake beards and moustaches had been found there; and Bajrang Dal members arrested.
However, though the ATS linked them with blasts outside mosques that had taken place in 2003 in Jalna and Purnea, they remained shadowy figures for the public. The ATS didn’t profile them to the media the way they did the Muslim terror accused.
It was, therefore, hardly surprising that when the Malegaon blasts occurred in September 2006 soon after the train blasts, SIMI was blamed by the ATS and Muslims alone were picked up — even though Muslims were the obvious target.
So strong was the linkage of Muslims with terror that after the train blasts, some Muslim intellectuals and activists started talking of the need for introspection within the community; and the need to emphasise that Islam forbade terrorism. But they also stressed the need for an unbiased investigation—naively, as it it turned out.
Media Complicity and Sensationalism
This linking of Muslims with terror could not have been successful without the help of the mainstream media. After every blast, the media parroted the police’s allegations against SIMI (banned in 2001) and the LeT. After the train blasts, media frenzy reached a peak.
Every "mastermind" unearthed by the ATS was hailed as a "major breakthrough" and given front page coverage, without asking what happened to the previous "mastermind."
At least three such "masterminds" and "key links" were discharged by the agency itself within three months, saying there was no evidence against them. When the ATS claimed that the bombs were assembled in a hut in Govandi, the media did not raise doubts about the bombers choosing to carry out such activity in a densely populated area where people live cheek by jowl.
Some newspapers reported that when one of the accused was presented in court, he was unable to walk. But no crime reporter questioned the ATS about it.
This unquestioning acceptance of police claims by the media could be another factor that might have given the ATS the confidence to implicate innocents.
Dehumanisatin of the Accused
Alongside this acceptance, was the insensitivity of the coverage.
When families of the accused refused to let the media into their homes, photographs of their houses from the outside were published, with captions such as "breeding grounds for jehadis."
A school principal was picked up from his school and later let off. By then, the photograph of the school had been published. One particularly disturbing photograph was of a whole line of Muslims squatting outside the Mahim police station, waiting to be called in for questioning.
In this atmosphere, it was easy for Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) Chief Raj Thackeray to warn lawyers against defending the accused – a threat he had to apologise for when civil rights bodies went to court against him.
Proven Innocent, Still Treated Guilty
"When these accused are finally proven innocent, the headline won’t be 'Innocence proved'," one of the youngsters whose entire family had been picked up and then released, had once told me. "The headline will be: 'Terror accused walk free'."
The headlines today prove him right.
The same youth had also wished that the impossible could happen: the families of the accused should meet the families of those who died in the train blasts, to tell them that they, too, were innocents suffering for no fault of their own.
(Jyoti Punwani is a Mumbai-based journalist. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)