“’Silence!’ ‘The court is in session.’” 7/11

Neither Vijay Tendulkar nor Shahid Azmi is around to see the drama taking place in their Mumbai soon. But the scene is set and the curtain is about to rise.
The last week of May is portentous in terms of how we fight terrorism or rather what we make of it. On May 24th the court will begin hearing in the serial blasts of 7/11 in Mumbai. On 28th and 29th the special tribunal will hear the argument on the ban of SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India). So far the government has found no credible evidence to present in the court. That was precisely why on August 5, 2008 the special judge of the tribunal removed the ban. She remarked that the government had failed to produce any concrete evidence in any one case. However, the Supreme Court intervened and restored the ban within 24 hours.
May is also the cruel month when the Rajasthan police came out with the truth of RSS-Sanathan Sanstha-Hindu Janjagran Samiti involvement in Ajmer, Mecca mosque and Samjhauta express attacks. It also saw the first ever chargesheet submitted by the maiden National Investigation Agency in the Margo blast of December 2009. That some of the Hindus like their counterpart in Muslim community can also become terrorists need not shock the likes of LK Advani and Thackeray any more.
However there is a glaring difference, some take Hindus to be so gullible to believe that they would never wage war against the country or the government. This is what they believe true despite the disclosure of Lt Col Srikant Purohit @Mithun Chakarborty. This last epithet makes the Hindu terrorist stand in the same rank as the multi aliases Muslim terrorists.
Fahmida and her husband have been convicted of the bomb blasts at Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazaar 2003. Strangely enough their life does not bear any mark of purity of purpose and zeal that you often see in the activists of SIMI. Fahmida’s eldest son had left his father and mother and established himself separately because they had a TV which he believed so much against Islam that he left them for good. No family dedicated to SIMI would have such a thing happening in it. As far as establishing a Muslim rule in India nothing can be far from truth. It would be music to their ears that this is what some are supposedly dreaming.
If not her husband and the other accused, Fahmida could have been acquitted is what late Shahid Azmi believed. This great son of India is not alive to see what he did and what he said has not only proved true but his words would haunt us as the prosecution in the 7/11 gets underway.
Shahid said that 7/11 case is based on confession under duress. What is the hard undeniable evidence then? He was one of the earliest to note that there was a pattern of arrest and implication of Muslim youth who were not criminal. Police would first arrest and then implicate them to crimes that in all likelihood others had committed and they were made to wear the cross. They were accused of crimes committed before and those committed after their arrest. So the Aurangabad arms haul seized in May 2006 hinges on the confession of one man. Then the numerous accused in it are automatically implicated in the 7/11. Because that came not only handy, but, as if the planners found out a grimmer crime to involve them. It is queer that the Aurangabad arms haul case is built up on confession and those accused in it are now slammed with MOCOCA as they are alleged to have committed the terrorist act of 7/11. In contrast those who were involved in Nanded, Parbhani, Purna bomb blasts and would be Auragabad case of April 4 2006 as well as those who were involved in Vasi and Gadkari theatre blasts and Margo blasts were from one single extremist Hindu organization known as Sanathan Sanstha or Hindu Janjagran Samiti and yet they enjoy a good level of liberality. Their organizations have not been banned and they are considered individuals committing crimes according to their whims and not a set ideology. When a judge demands government to give some solid evidence in any one real case to ban SIMI and her judgment is overturned what about the activists of the SS and HJS! The Sanstha accused have the cheeks to cock a snook at the authorities that their crimes are personal and individual and not of their organizations!
There seems to be no investigation in one set of crimes because confession were enough while in the case of the other people have died in carrying out bomb assembling and transporting bombs to designated places and other hard evidence are there and yet there is no talk of either a ban or maligning the whole community from which they come!
If there is no evidence of the actual act of planting bombs then it is much easier to implicate the Muslim youths in crime of conspiracy where only hearsay would do. This is how the police in Mumbai set out to do it so that they do not have to investigate and yet prove the crimes. The battery seller Ajmere in Mumbai saw people talking about a conspiracy at three different places in three different terrorist events. Again there is evidence. This is the gullible on platform number one at Churchgate who could see and hear what some were doing on platform number four amidst the mammoth crowd of the morning rush hour! Will any national security advisor caution the government over the implications of this as the hearing in the cases is to begin soon?
The police and investigation agencies must have been at the end of their wits to have called up this gullible because they have not been able to name any one in their chargesheet who planted the bombs in the local trains. This is fraught with misgivings about much of the so called ‘investigation’ that the police have purportedly done.
What could be the motivation of the crimes of 7/11 leads us to the muddle. That the rich merchants of Gujarat were targeted to avenge the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat 2002 is a viable proposition that the police need to prove as it runs counter to the Muslim faith. Shahid Azmi gives two reasons which foreshadow what later MS Mushrif would write. One, that those who planted bombs in the locals wanted to put blames on the Muslim community as a whole. That Muslims have a different identity is an anathema to the planters. The second linked to the first is that there were people mostly right wing Hindus who wanted even harsher draconian laws which would net in more Muslims. The accused Muslims would languish in prisons and the courts would not be able to do much as mere confessions under duress would be enough for them to be punished. History is witness to how hell-bent Advanis were on this! The stringent laws would be the whip to beat the minority Muslims. Look how Narendra Modi’s Gujarat has used Tada and Pota so discriminately against the accused in Godhra train burning while Babu Bajrangis are scot free! In this topsy-turvy world the BJP-RSS-VHP are not far behind the designated set of laws in the proposed constitution that Purohit had drafted to replace our Constitution.
And what about the confessions themselves? Faisal Sheikh the main accused in 7/11 is said to have confessed in the court. The truth is that he confessed in the house of the metropolitan judge. Even so what he has confessed must not only bear scrutiny in the court of law but also be corroborated by other evidence.
You might have heard of the blind leading the blind. Feroz Deshmukh the first caught in the arms haul case told the police “Why are you after Raheel? Faisal is a bigger catch”. We have to wait for the honourable judge to find out if Deshmukh really led the cops. If so, then who was sleeping? We the nation or the cops. If Deshmukh only used the toilet of the research centre of Dr Zakir Naik we must hold breath until the prosecution performs legerdemain and brings out real evidence. Going to neighbour’s toilet in a populous city is a common practice and suspected terrorist hiding in a ghostly deserted locality of Antop Hill is a nightmare. It is an area notorious for staged encounters for Mumbai police.
Forced confessions and facile investigation would reveal if we are serious in our fight against terrorism or is it communalism wearing the garb of terrorism.