National and international implications of Indresh Kumar’s involvement in terror

A secret meeting of October 31, 2005 is drawing attention of many and still eludes the attention of the government and its highest level intelligence gathering agencies. If an executive member of the national policy making body of the Rashtrya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS was present in it why have they failed to unearth the depth of involvement of RSS into terror related plots. Even a third rate politician has his movement tracked by the police. Indresh Kumar was not alone, there were six others from the RSS present in the cabal meeting at the Gujarat guest house of Jaipur. Among the other RSS functionaries was Devendra Gupta who was an important office holder of the RSS and directly involved in the Ajmer shrine blast of 2007.
Indresh had advocated mass killings of Muslims. That has grave implication for the national security and stability of India. His advocacy for mass murder fits in the central framework of the workings and ideology of the sangh. There is nothing novel about it. Golwalker, the second RSS chief, had distributed maps of Muslim localities in the central provinces to his cadres for attacking and destroying them. He had also given weapons. The Home Secretary informed the then Prime Minister Pandit Nehru about it. A warrant notice was issued against Golwalker. Such was and is the complicity of the government officers that he was in the same area of Delhi and yet the police could not take any action against him. Had the attacks gone according to the conspiracy they would have left fewer Muslims in the north of the country. Had Sunil Joshi succeeded in bombing the Ijtema gathering at the central mosque of Bhopal it would have been a mammoth bloodbath paling even the gory mosque attacks of Pakistan. Had the Kanpur 2008 bombs hit the targets thousands of Muslims would have died in the attack! The police commissioner remarked after the RSS workers assembling the bombs accidentally blew themselves up, that the bombs would have blown up half of the town. Nanded blasts of 2006 also were miscarried. These accidents happened in the houses of those who were not only active members of the RSS but were hell bent on killing Muslims en mass.
To defend Indresh Kumar, the advocate of en mass killing, the RSS chief Bhagwat has this to say: “By calling names of some persons an effort is being made to prove that sangh is terrorist outfit. People against whom allegations are being made have an open character. They are the people who serve the country and teach others how to become a good citizen.” As Muslims—the “others”--are not considered part of the cultural nationalism of the Sangh, they are deemed as enemies of the country and hence killing them is patriotic. Teaching them to become good citizens means that they accept themselves as Hindus and live like the Hindus. But the Sangh runs into difficulties here. The Constitution of the country does not consider the Muslims as aliens or second class citizens as does the RSS. In defending Indresh the RSS is doing nothing but simply defending its own policy and ideology.
The greatest blunder the RSS commits is its desire to kill Muslims but it also believes that the international community would stand by and let this happen. However, there are enough Indians of all hue and colour who are opposed to such extremism and would oppose it tooth and nail.
At the national level Indresh’s conspiring in the mass murder is a serious and immediate threat to communal harmony in the country. At the international levels there are many Muslim countries and organizations which would turn hostile to India if the thoughts of Indresh are allowed to gain ground.
Indresh cannot wash his hands of the blood of the innocent people killed and injured during the Amarnath stir which he planned and actively participated in. The Jammu and Kashmir government had revoked the land allotted to Hindu pilgrims going to the Himalayan temple of Amarnath. Jammu saw some very bloody scenes when Hindus protested against the Kashmiri Muslims. The violence was not restricted to Jammu, it also spread to many towns of Madhya Pradesh.
The national and international ramifications merge at points. Sunil Joshi was an important functionary of the RSS both in his home state of Madhya Pradesh as well as the new state of Jharkhand. The SIM cards recovered from the accused in Ajmer shrine blast and Hyderabad mosque bombing site have addresses of Jharkhand towns as well as Madhya Pardesh. This national scope slowly merges with the international boundary of India. The acquiring of arms by the RSS is even more ominous. It is alleged that Malegaon 2008 bomb attack accused and serving LtCol Srikant Purohit and Shyam Apte of Pune had given a gun to one Alok and the Kolkata Hindutva activist Tapan Ghosh on April 11 or 12, 2008, to kill Indresh Kumar. This they obviously did to purge him of his favouring the Maoists of Nepal rather than the king of Nepal. Purohit and his terrorist outfit Abhinav Bharat felt outraged over the death of Hindus as a result of favouring the godless Maoists and not the Hindu royal family. Even if there was some truth in it their desire to purge India of Muslims and other minorities does not change. Killing Muslims in India on a large scale or supporting the Maoists in Nepal has the potential in wreaking havoc in altering the political map of the subcontinent.
When the RSS pracharak Devendra Gupta and Lokesh Sharma were arrested, the RSS distanced itself by removing them from membership. But Indresh was a different kettle of fish. He was the executive member of the decision making body of the RSS. He was in the know of several terror plots. It is strange that the ATS of Rajasthan has named him a principal conspirator but has not named him as an accused! The matter must be so serious for the organization that it is for the first time in its history that the chief of the RSS Mohan Bhagwat attended a protest rally against the naming of Indresh in the charge sheet of the ATS.
The others who figure in the charge sheet are Devendra Gupta, Lokesh Sharma, Chander Shekar Lave, Sandeep Dange, Ramji Kalsangre and Sunil Joshi. Those who attended the secret meeting included Indresh Kumar, Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thackur, Swami Aseemanand, etc. Sunil Josh had booked the rooms in the Gujarat guest house of Jaipur in 2005 under an assumed name of Manoj Kumar. Joshi’s diary carries the phone number of Indresh Kumar.
An important witness is a photographer Bharat Bhai of Valsad who along with Sunil Joshi had visited Chitranjan, Mihijam where Devenrda Gupta was the RSS Pracharak. From there they had gone to Gorakhpur and stayed in the house of the BJP Member of Parliament, Yogi Aditya Nath. All of these to the last person belonged to the RSS. The travel was undertaken at the request of Swami Aseemanand. After this tour Joshi phoned Bharat Bhai to watch the television to see that he had ‘burst the cracker’. It was the Ajmer bomb blasts of 2007. How much and for how long can the RSS deny these?
Even more disturbing is the involvement of these people in the bombing of the Samjhauta express in 2007. All the victims of the attack were citizens of Pakistan returning home after their visit to India. India made it out that it was the work of Pakistan terrorist groups. This kind of fudging of evidence and intelligence reports has put a question mark on India’s seriousness in fighting terrorism.
How much more can the RSS expect India to fudge? With the arrest of Swami Aseemanand in Hardwar on Friday, November 19th there seems to be crossing of the Tiber. The Swami is the counterfoil of Indresh. If Indresh wanted more numbers to be killed, Aseemanan or Jatin Chatterji wanted mosques and other places with Muslim crowd to be targeted. It would be in the fitness of things to have Indresh arrested to send clear signal that now at last India is serious about fighting terror.