SIMI:Presumption of guilt and its havoc

Justice Geeta Mittal has ordered the ban on SIMI to be lifted for lack of enough evidence against it. The judge told the centre “You say that SIMI is connected to bomb blasts, riots, destructive activities. Place specific material before me, you cannot presume their involvement.”
This is a historic judgment. There is more to it than meets the eye. It is the identity that the authorities, like the investigating agencies and the police, choose to give a group irrespective of its bona fide otherwise. It has to live down that identity. When you are presumed to be what the authorities stereotype you to be you are doomed.

As the court was hearing the case and drawing its conclusion the reporters of a leading newspaper carried out a survey of Malegaon which was rocked by bomb blasts on September 8, 2006. They came out with finding that is an eye opener.

Remember that SIMI was blamed for the blasts in a mosque of the main cemetery and another place called Mushawarat chowk. Nearly 50 people. mostly children and beggars, had perished. Most of the accused were not connected to SIMI at all. They were ordinary workshop employees with no criminal records. But the man who turned approver and accused others in the complicity was an inveterate police informer and their confidant. Abrar was parasitic dependant on the police. Even his father had disowned him. He was ‘lost’ to the world until his lawyer brother filed habeas corpus in the high court and the police had to produce him in the court. He had also expressed fear for his life. There was another man who had seen the crime but was alleged to have ‘committed’ suicide. Another accused, Makhdoomi, wrote from the jail that the accused were all innocent and they were framed. Can this case stand in any court with the kind of people who are material to the case in the eye of the police?

Strangely enough someone close to the CBI has told DNA : “The local police had messed up, and now CBI is stuck.”

This would only mean that the investigating agencies have ‘evolved’ the case only on confession under duress. If the cops have evidence, perhaps that is classified. As the local people know the accused well they do not buy the police version. But the predilection of the officials is self evident. To the surveying reporters a senior police officer said: “This is the worst possible place that a policeman can be transferred to. It feels like you have stepped into a different country altogether." What that different country is, is an open secret. Why does the officer not feel at home in Malegaon. It is not the people who are alienated from the police but the police themselves. Or else why they grope in dark in a place where every fifth person seems to be an informer.

In this fantasy town the horses control the men. "In many states, there seems to be an unwritten law not to keep Muslims in the intelligence. It hampers investigations. And we have also not been able to reach out to the Muslim community which could help us prevent and probe attacks." If the officers believe that SIMI is behind the Malegaon blasts then how come they have discovered it without being able to penetrate the Muslims community? There are two inspectors of police who speak Urdu well. Malegaon is plum posting place. Where would the cops get time from their beats of ‘duty’ of material interest that matters more than intelligence? Their ‘duty’ consumes all their time and energy. There is nothing left for much. Confessions come easier. In fact a senior ATS officer had allegedly told a unani doctor to confess for the sake of the police, at least once.
Like the cops even the reporters are sucked into the common belief that SIMI thrives here, what with the overflowing gutters and road strewn over with muck in the dingy impassable sheltered interior shut off from the sunny world that is outside. If terrorism was the harvest of ghettos Mohammad Atta et al should not be living in Heidelberg or other western pockets of affluence. They should be wallowing in the garbage and sewer.
The home department at the centre like the home department in Maharashtra has been presumptuously blaming SIMI. Former home minister Chaggan Bhujbal and the current home minister RR Patil have never lost any time in blaming SIMI. What proof except presumption is the base? This is more convincing when we know that one of the nine accused was in police custody at the time of the blast and another was leading Friday prayer more than 500 miles from Malegaon. But the agencies assume that the one in jail had preplanned everything behind the bars or even before that and the other was in Malegaon and his ghost hundreds of miles away.
Lifting the ban does not mean exoneration of all blames. The first home minister of India, Sardar Patel, and since then others have also lifted bans on RSS. But the blame sticks, an American centre of research in North Carolina has curiously dubbed RSS as a terrorist organization. Home minister Shivraj Patil would appeal against the lifting of the ban. But the same did not happen in the other case.
Apart from torture of the innocent, humiliation because of their religious identity the most horrific havoc that presumption plays is disaffection it sows among the people. This should attract stringent action against the investigation agencies in the context of the Article 153 of the Indian Penal Code. Some of the accused in the twin blasts of Hyderabad August 25, 2007 had horrifying experience which pales into insignificance the extraordinary rendition even. Abdul Rahim had his beard pulled with tufts of hair coming off, his religious faith abused on the top of physical torture. Mohammad Shakeel was hung from the ceiling and ala Abu Gharib he was given electric shock in the penis. Like the others, Arshal Ali Khan was also taken blind folded to a farm house where he heard others screaming in pain and the interrogators asking him to name others. His burn marks prove his own suffering. In spite of two narco test he has not been booked because there is no proof. Maulana Aleem Islahi’s son Mujaid was shot dead by the police when he protested the arrest of one Maulana Nasiruddin. The neighbours deny that he did anything to prevent the police from arresting Nasiruddin. Maulana Islahi’s youngest surviving son Mohtasim was also picked up and tortured and told to confess. Some thirty women protested against the arrest. They were canned and detained for a night along with two babies they had with them. Two men carried away Ibrahim Ali Junaid like the others. They pulled apart his legs and placed heavy stones on them and tortured to make his confess to have caused the blasts. They could not book him for lack of any evidence. There was no offence that Naseeruddin Khan had committed except being a witness o the shooting of Mujahid Islahi.
Behind this blame and torture exercise is a plan to force the innocent young men from poor neighborhoods of Hyderabad to give confessions to implicate themselves.