Showing posts with label Lt Col Purohit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lt Col Purohit. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Willful persistence in framing Muslim youths in terror

There is an alarming situation developing again in the recent arrests, killings of suspects and implicating of Muslim youths in past events of terror. They have hardly anything to do with those events and yet they have been made to pay with their life. On March 26, 2012 the Anti Terrorism Squad killed Khalil Querishi at the Wali gate of Aurangabad city. It turned out that he was an innocent boy from Khandawa in Madhya Pardesh and his real name was Azhar Qureshi. He had gone to Aurangabad in search of a job. The Madhya Pardesh police categorically denied that it was Azhar whom they were in search of. Then why did ATS of Maharashtra kill him and give him a different name? Azhar’s father Mohammad Wakil Qureshi traveled from Khandawa to claim the body of his son. He maintains that his son was innocent.
The Maharashtra police also claimed that the injured person in the encounter was Khalil Khilji. In fact he was Shakir Khalil. This change was made subsequent to the photo of Khalil Khilji issued to ATS by the MP police. So it is clear that the MP police again wanted a different man but the Mahrashtra police targeted an innocent.
Given this kind of wide spread misuse of power by the police against the Muslims time has come to compare and contrast between the number of innocent Muslims of India being killed or maimed and imprisoned with the well known figures of terror whom the US lists as wanted. Hafiz Saeed is a citizen of Pakistan it is up to Pakistan and the US to handle him. Dawood Ibrahim, Chota Rajan are Indians hiding somewhere and India is competent to get them through extradition as it did in the case of Abu Salem.
However, what the police and investigation agencies are doing to the legitimate Muslim natives of India is now acquiring a nuance in its treatment. Both the right wing Hindu governments and the Congress governments have abysmally failed to protect the Muslims falsely implicated in terror. They are frequently tortured and killed or imprisoned. It is high time that more broad based and neutral agencies join the work of detection, tracing and arresting those who are really involved in the crimes. Simultaneously there is more urgent need to free the innocent and compensate them. Mohammad Shakeel textile printer spent 14 years in prison and was acquitted almost of all the 19 crimes he was alleged to have committed. When he was sure to have walked out of the prison the police reported that he had hanged himself to death in the prison on June 19, 2009. He was from the village of Pilkhua in Ghaziabad near Delhi. His daughters were toddlers when he was arrested for serial bomb blasts in Delhi of 1996-1997. Now they are adults and have been deprived of ever seeing their father. The police had called him the alleged bomb maker and Mohammad Amir as the mastermind. Amir was set free though he was the one supposed to have identified Shakeel and was a co accused. Thus it was a bogus case. Amir did not know Shakeel at all.
There is every reason to believe that this is a make believe story invented by the police. Neither was his tongue hanging out nor was there any mark of his nails on the neck. What is even more disturbing is the finding of the magisterial inquiry that Shakeel was murdered. It was only then that the police registered a case in 2010 in which the jail superintendent VK Sight and his deputy Ramji Signh and the head constable Surveer Singh Yadav were named as accused. And still no action is forth coming against the accused police! So Muslims pay with their life even when they are found innocent while the police are found guilty and yet no action is taken!
What happened in Ghaziabad village has also happened in Aurangabad and where is the hope that the guilty cops would be ever punished!
These sinister framing of Muslims and their murders are taking place in the broad daylight as if someone in Delhi is writing the script of the murder and mayhem with reassurance vouchsafed that nothing would happen to the cops who are fortuitously playing the game of hunting the Muslims. Proof is tumbling down at your feet and crying for attention. On April 9th, 2012 the Marathi newspaper Punaya nagri from Mumbai has a report at the banner head “MALEGAON sfot chey aaropi SIMI chya nishanavar” (MALEGAON bomb attacks [of 2008] accused in the cross hair of SIMI). The report is date lined from Delhi and says that SIMI will kill Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur, Lt Col Shrikant Purohit and Dyanand Pandy outside jail. SIMI has also had the Gujarat 2002 carnage perpetrators as their target for terrorist attacks. So far there has been not even the remotest fear of threat to either Babu Bajrangi or anyone from Bajrang Dal who slaughtered and burnt Muslims in the genocide. The perpetrators have been out of jail and roaming freely. No report of any attempt to harm either any one of the three accused in MALEGAON 2008 case has come. However, the goons have at will attacked lawyers who offered to plead for the Muslim accused in terror. Fear of attack on Hindutva terrorists under police escort outside jail is a fantasy.
Interestingly the same Marathi paper had some years ago reported on front page that Jalgaon had a terror university there. This was a malicious attempt to malign the educational campus which the Muslims of Jalgaon have set up there purely for education, teaching courses that are prescribed by the North Maharashtra University and medical courses that are recognized and approved by Indian medical councils.
These goings on show that there are forces at work which are bent on destroying the country from within by sowing disaffection. If the governments do not wake up to the danger posed at least non government organizations and foreign human rights groups have a bounden duty to set our house right.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Sunil Joshi and the dragon that killed him

Seventh of September 2006 saw a resurgence of Hindutva movement around reviving the issue of the controversial national song of Vande Matrum. It was deliberately crafted around the worked up anniversary of Bankamchand Chaterjee’s novel Anand Muth. It fits well in the core strategy of Rashtrya Swayamsevak Sangh. The song eminently excludes Muslims as true citizens of the country as they can never sing the song since it violates their fundamental belief of worshipping Allah and no one else and rejecting idolatry.
As a town with sizable Muslim population, Malegaon saw this as a convenient way of whipping up communal passion against them. Thus the meeting at the famous temple at Mosampul in Malegaon included Shiv Sena leaders Dada Bhuse, Sanjay Dusane, Rama Mistry, Pramod Shukla, Anand Bhika Pawar, Narendra Maharaj, Raja Ram Jadhav, Kailash Teesge, Tarabai Shirsat, Chayabai Shewade. Bhuse and Pawar pointedly said that the national song was against the British and its reactionary fervor was still not dead as others had taken the place of the British in modern times. (Malegaonvi shiv sena turfe wande matrum, Lotkmut 8-9-2006)The basic approach of RSS, Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena and VHP and their later day avatar of Jai Vande Matram, Abhinav Bharat, was to target Muslims by means of terrorism. By then terrorism had acquired the weltanschauung of anti Muslim connotation.
It was primarily this worldview that led to the attacks on Muslims on September 8, 2006. Sunil Joshi played a crucial role in it. It would be preposterous to say that he was an associate of SIMI and he used Muslims to bomb Muslims. However, the innuendo has got currency that well motivated and devoted members of Students Islamic Movement of India let him penetrate their movement. In the first place the government at Delhi could never produce a single instance of SIMI involvement in bomb blasts. It prevailed on the Supreme Court to continue banning SIMI after every two years. Sunil Joshi was a hardcore communalist and would not divulge anything against the right wing extremists of Hindutva. To say that Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur organized the second terrorist attack in Malegaon on September 29, 2008 to avenge SIMI’s alleged killing of Sunil Joshi is simply subterfuge.
The only link assumed in the second attack is that the Sadhvi’s motorcycle was parked under the SIMI office at Bhiku chowk. She wanted to give a warning to SIMI that she was capable of taking them on according to the pet ideology of the Hindu right of bomb for bomb. The well designed plot did not have the SIMI office at all as a target. Those who brought the motorcycle of Joshi (she had sold it to him) to the chowk did not want to park it there. They tried their best to park it at their designated centre at the Nukud corner where the crowd of Muslim women buying bangles and tawdry ornaments for Id was thickest. That would have caused a huge casualty in thousands. But the lady police which had cordoned off the approach from Bhiku chowk to Nukad corner had steadfastly refused to let the motorcycle riders enter the corner. It is this approach lane to the Nukad corner that is aptly named after Martyr Hemant Karkare.
Both the terrorist attacks of 2006 and 2008 were mounted by inner core group of Bajrang Dal which has the temerity of changing names to avoid detection and bad publicity.
Similarly, saying that Joshi’s “overall behaviour was something not expected by a woman (read Pragya)" and that is why she got him killed is dodging and diversion.
Then the question ultimately asked is who really got him bumped off. And why. It could be that Pragya let herself play in the hands of someone far superior. It could be a well placed man like Indresh Kumar or equally doughty Parveen Togadia. They have the enormous sums at their disposal. Of course, Harshad Solanki took instructions from her on the day he and his cohorts killed Joshi. The pugmarks are still there but the dragon is someone still elusive.
The dragon could be an organization or agency or its individuals working as splintered entities. This comes handy for the purpose of avoiding detection or later manipulation. The assassin of Mahatma Gandhi, Nathuram Godse, had got circumcised in JJ Hospital of Mumbai. He had never left RSS and according to his accomplice and brother and father of Himani Savarkar, Gopal, his whole family was nurtured on the ideology of RSS.
In those days there was no group like Bajrang Dal to take on more extensive destructive work. Bajrang Dal is the armed wing of RSS. It is this group which has the expertise of making bombs, using advanced weapons of mass murder and training to carry out difficult tasks. It has suicide squads and splintered groups designed to carry out violent attacks and deflect attention from the parent body as well as the mother of all groups, RSS. Durga Vaheni is the female counterpart of Bajrang Dal and Pragya rightfully belonged to it.
If description of Mithun Chakerwarty matches Lt Col Purohit, it was he who had trained and supplied RDX from his flat in Pune. He gave it to not just the Bajrang Dal activists of Nanded but also those who attacked Malegaon Muslims in 2006 and 2008, be they Abhinav Bharat or Jai Vande Matrum. Attacking Samjhauta express was even more daring. It shows all India recruitment of terrorists.
The definite and sure involvement of the army is very much there. Shrikant Prasad Purohit was in the intelligence wing of army working in the so called counter terrorism section. On October 15, 2008 even before his name appeared anywhere for 2008 attack in Malegaon the lieutenant colonel had sent a letter to his superior. In it he wrote not to report but to confide to a sympathizer and obtain advice from him. The lieutenant colonel wrote to Major Bhagirath Dey "The blasts which took place in Gujarat and Malegaon are on the same day and same time using the same technique. I had learnt that it is Mr Indresh Kumar of the RSS, who is instrumental in carrying out these actions. It is likely that senior RSS officials like Indresh Kumar are playing in the hands of ISI, knowingly or unknowingly." (Malegaon blast case: Purohit's letter indicts Indresh, Sadhvi Pragya. India Today March 3, 2011).
This disclosure reads like a report of an intelligence officer to his superior. But the army’s silence over more than two years would amount to either Purohit trying to save his skin or mutually worked out strategy of bailing out a fellow officer from a seemingly disastrous situation. This would lend to different explanations. That the army is itself neck deep in it or RSS is.
The headquarters of RSS at Nagpur was the Camelot of different assignment in different parts of the country. The visor, the armour and the swords and spears were replaced by bombs and bomb makers. According to Swami Asimanand, Indresh Kumar had told him that bomb making was not the work of the swami, it was for Sunil Joshi. He had given 50000 rupees to Joshi for the work. ('RSS leader Indresh provided money for making bombs' Zee New January 8, 2011)True to its nature the modern day Camelot was in touch with its knights in shining armour. The reports were coming in from someone (“Pophale”?) on duty in the police control room of Malegaon on September 8, 2006.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

The Genocidal Gang

Genocide is a matter of number. How many are killed and injured. The people who commit it are sustained in their hate and violence campaign because they enjoy a kind of impunity their victims cannot have. They are also resourceful and have official cover to an extent even in a democracy.

Gujarat 2002 will go down in history as a three-day lease of terror enjoyed by the Hidutva groups thanks to the largess of the chief minister Narendra Modi. His lieutenants included Swami Asimanand, Praveen Togadia, Babu Bajrangi, etc. Voter lists and sales tax records helped the murder and arson committed on the minority Muslim community. This was an accentuated and well-organized genocide campaign of Hindutva groups in alliance with the state police and administration. But there was another in the making.

9/11 gave the impetus to wreak havoc on the Muslim minority in Gujarat and elsewhere. The Prime minister of that time Atal Bihari Vajpayee found a good deal of common instinct of revenge with President George Bush and Samuel Huntington. They believed that the Muslims do not live with their neighbours peacefully and hence the need to show them their place. Opportunities had to be created if not available. The torching of the Sabarmati express or the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre came to them handy. So did terrorism.

(a basic knowledge of arms-an academy for ideological indoctrination-tried in ‘action’- uniform code of conduct-reporting channels like those in the armed forces for smooth flow of information and passing of orders-Honour Code Committee- my humble attempt to sow the seeds.Dhar We are all on the same plane, Hindu rashtra…….

The 37 audiotapes that have been accessed by some news magazines show that terrorism practiced by the Abhinav Bharat or RSS in league with the army is far more serious as it is supported by many in the army than was thought before.

Among the serious charges against the genocidal gang of Abhinav Bharat and RSS is: hatching conspiracy with a foreign country to kill the innocent citizens of India. Lt Col Shrikant Purohit, responsible for Malegaon blasts as well as Samjhauta express attack, told RP Singh and others of Abhinav Bharat that he had established contact with Brigadier Lajpat Prajwal stationed with the Nepal army. They had a meeting with King Gyanenedra of Nepal. The king had agreed to train under Prajwal, jawans who would work for the establishment of a new nation, Abhinav Bharat, by over throwing the government of India by armed struggle. Or, what else was the arm training with Nepal meant for? At the behest of the Israelis Purohit and his Abhinav Bharat had exploded bombs on Samjhauta express and in Mecca mosque which had killed more than seventy people and injured many more. Therefore the expected help from Israel was over due. This included continued arms supply, a flag of Hindu Rashtra on the office of Abhinav Bharat in Tel Aviv, and safe sanctuary.

In addition to Nepal and Israel, Purhit had also contacted Khetomi Sema, the Naga rebel leader whose Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland was fighting against India for a separate country for the Nagas. The Naga leader had told his militia to give logistic support to Abhinav Bharat for seven years. So deep runs the hatred for Muslims of the land! Even the insurgents are welcome in Hindutva’s fight against the Muslims of the country.



Second serious charge: sending Indian soldiers stationed in Jammu and Kashmir and other parts to Israel and Nepal for clandestine training. Military Intelligence(MI) has no constitutional power or military rule to do so. RP Singh has said in a tape that the members of Abhinav Bharat present in a secret meeting held at Gorakhpur included: a close relative of King Gyanendra, Maj Prayag Modak, Col Raikar and Col Hasmukh Patel. So was Prajwal, deputed by the queen of Nepal, Rani Aishwarya.

Genocide was in the mind of Purohit and also the aim of those who met at Gorakhpur because he said: “I have a state-wise population of Muslims in each state but I have only three AK-47s.” This parallels the pre pogrom survey that Mordi government conducted of Muslim business in Gujarat. They were later targeted, looted and burnt and Muslim owners killed.

The extremists among the Hindus have different organizations for the same purpose: extermination of the minorities especially the Muslims. RSS is a hydra headed monster, Abhinav Bharat is another name of it and if it is banned? Another AB activist had this to say: Shyam Apte: “We will give it an international aspect... and a covert name. We have to fight. See, if you aren’t a Hindu, you are my enemy. I will be unsafe if you are alive…” Apte also had the same thought of killing Muslims en-mass because they would not change their religion. The shared ideology of hatred for Muslims is the common raison d’ etre of the two, RSS and AB. Who says that the Sangh or RSS is not involved in terrorism? Purohit himself says about how he gruesomely killed two Maoists with his hands and threw their bodies in the deep gutters of Vasant Kunj Civic Cenre in Delhi. “There was a captain and a major posted in Delhi. I managed to do my work with them over the phone. This work otherwise would have taken more than three months. It happened because I belong to Sangh and he was also from Sangh. I didn’t even know him. He was from UP and he did the work in one day. Tapping such people (with Sangh background) is important.”

How deep is the penetration of the Abhinav Bharat into the army is evident in Purohit offering to arrange Sudhakar Pandy’s visit to Bhubhaneshwar with the help of a serving commander of the Indian army posted there! Pandey wanted to attend a progrmme of the editor of the RSS mouthpiece Organiser, Deepak Rath.

Of all the leaders of the RSS Modi remains the focus of attention because he has been tested in ‘action’ against the Muslims of Gujarat 2002 genocide. Pandey wanted Purohit to meet Modi with the help of Swami Asimanand. Modi knew the swami because he had donated lakhs of rupees to the holy man whom Purohit had nicknamed Bhagwan. Asimanand had received eight kilos of RDX from Purohit to blow up the Samjhauta express compartments. That had killed 68 Muslims and injured many more.

How would the Ahinav Bharat execute genocide of Muslim is also a tried and tested method: “if I buy two army vehicles from the scrap and paint them with army colours and send them along with our people in army uniform into Meerut, they can just fire and come out of the situation easily. There is so much confusion in this country.”

Purohit would have liked to strike in the nick of time utilizing the opportune time of confusion. The gang of Abhinav Bharat and RSS was in a hurry as Col Aditya Bappaditya Dhar had already sent letters of Abhinav Bharat to 3,00, 000 serving army personnel and distributed among the army men 20,000 copies of the map of the Hindu Rashtra. (Dhar:“It is my humble attempt to sow the seeds.”)

How we are dealing with this kind of terror is evident in what happened in Nagpur, the headquarters of RSS. On ninth of December 2010Nagpur police detained two Muslims from UP because they were carrying a magazine in Urdu with the picture of Indresh Kumar. They had stayed in a mosque in Mominpura and collected fund from Muslim areas of Jaffernager, Ehbab colony and Chhaoni. This background was enough. Their Muslim identity made the cops believe that the duo was out to kill Indresh Kumar! Instead of unearthing genocide plan in which Indresh Kumar was involved and had attended a meeting with other conspirators on October 25 2005, the cops are more interested in hunting the duo Muslim on suspicion! (Cops try to unravel mystery of youths from UP, TOI December 11, 2010)

Lest we still refuse to be disabused, it is enough to know that what is a gang today will swell into an organized government militia to execute in action what has been in their hearts. Their target of killing remains the Muslims. Overwhelming numbers of the minority Muslims still humbly sing with the poet: “khake watan ka mujhko her zarra deota hai.” (Every speck of my motherland is a god, worthy of worship) Like the contemporary situation in Ivory Coast the houses and commercial establishments have been marked and the time to strike is ticking in a crescendo. The “confusion in the country” has the hallmark of the prevalence of the saffron brigands.