Most crucial changes are in the offing as a result of the South Asia being sucked in a whirlpool of tactical moves by the unipolar world power. The US is striving to dominate the South Asian regions despite the one time leadership of India in the non-aligned movement. The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty has eroded whatever position of value based dominance India had had in the past. Therefore a little genuflecting is in the order.
There is a widening acceptance of the fact that the West is beating a dead horse in its war on terrorism. It must bequeath the onerous task of the fight to local players, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. Correspondingly there must be changes within these countries.
There is need for revamping intelligence gathering. On January 22, 2010 Intelligence Bureau gave two press releases. In the first it said that Lashkar-e-Taiba has bought 50 paragliders to attack targets in India. In another it claimed that the intelligence agency has received information that there is imminent danger of the terrorists across the border would attempt to hijack Indian commercial aircraft.
Home Minister Chidambrum got an opportunity in the wake of National Security Advisor's being shifted to West Bengal as governor. He wanted to find out the facts on which the input regarding the paragliders was made. It turned out that the parachute like glider was only three in number and they were not bought in Europe. They were actually purchased from China.
The implication of the IB input was very mischievous. One, by exaggerating the number the aim was to again turn up the hype of war on terror. Two, some one in the intelligence agency has a brief on local facilitators and wants to turn the screw of fear psychosis on the ordinary people. He is the mole planted to achieve a calculated effect of maintaining the pressure of suspence within the country against a group. For, the hiding of such huge number of paragliders and terrorists with them would make it more melodramatic.
The context in which all this was done was the arrival of the 62 Republic Day and the so called entry of two potential terrorists who were even identified with names. But the IB or their "collaborators" did not deem it necessary to disclose their identity.
Three days passed. 26 January came and passed. Nothing happened. The intelligence fudge was rushed through to win praise of its "commitment" as the IB has to live up to its reputation. It doesn't matter for our local consumption that others are also in it. How Tony Blair also fudged the intelligence in put to wage war against Iraq. Even if weapons of mass destruction were not there the war has to be fought. Even if the paragliders are not there the war on terrorism has to be fought!
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
IB needs to be overhauled and brought under democratic norms
Delivering the fourth RN Kao Memorial Lecture organized by Research and Anlysis Wing the vice president Mohammad Hamid Ansari said that internal and external intelligence in the Indian system did not report to the same minister, the possibility of entrusting this wok to the Standing Committee on Home Affairs may not meet the requirement. He argued for greater oversight and accountability of the country’s intelligence to meet the needs of good governance in a democratic society. There is also desire for openness. This sentiment of the vice president should be given serious thought, analysed and accepted after thorough objective discussion.
The need for this process was felt for quite some times. In fact it was felt right at the time of independence. There was a notice sent out to watch out for RSS chief Guru Golwalker after the Home Secretary was informed about a huge cache of weapons and details of a secret plan of RSS for attacks on the Muslims in the aftermath of the partition. He advised Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to take action. Golwalker was very much in the neighbourhood of Delhi but the intelligence field workers failed to serve the notice to him. What amazed the home secretary was inaction of Nehru in the face of actionable intelligence. In another case Rajnath Singh was the Chief Minister as well as Home Minister of Madhya Pradesh when the kar sevaks on Sabarmati express passed through his state. According to IG (Intelligence) of Gujarat BR Sreekumar the Home Minister of MP did not submit intelligence report on the behavior of the unruly passengers of the train. Thus the rowdy elements were given safe passage that emboldened them to persevere in their willful behavior like quarreling with Muslim hawkers at Godhra station and abducting a Muslim woman washing clothes in the vicinity of the tracks.
An actionable intelligence can save a situation. In Gwalior and other parts of Madhya Pradesh there were frequent attacks on Muslims leaving for Pakistan. One of the most remarkable marauders was a Punjabi youth Madanlal Pawa. Mahatma Gandhi came to know about it and prevailed upon the rulers to curb in the marauders. Pawa had to leave for Maharashtra. He settled in Bombay and moved to Ahmednager where he organized attacks on Muslim commercial establishments and collected extortion money from them. He came in contact with Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte and became a part of the crime syndicate that finally assassinated Gandhi. It is now known that Apte spent the last night with the daughter of the police commissioner of the metropolis before leaving for Delhi. Gopal Godse’s wife carried her daughter Himani to bid farewell to her husband. She and he husband were resolute in the mission. A part of the resolute nature reappeared in Himani Savarkar (nee Himani Godse) when she called for bomb for bomb retaliation. (As it ultimately turned out that the members of her own Abhinav Bharat had exploded bombs and Muslims were blamed.) All these facts are recorded in history. And yet people came to know her and her Abhinav Bharat only when Hemant Kakare arrested Lt Col Shrikant Prasad Purohit. We would not have known this but for the professionalism of Karkare. Thus the Augean stables of Intelligence Bureau (and for that matter the ATS, Crime Branch Police, the CBI or the numerous other intelligence agencies) call for purging those who have failed in the performance of their duties.
The most deplorable situation prevailing in the country is in Gujarat. Chief Minister Narendra Modi told a huge public meeting on December 4, 2007: “They want me to answer why I killed Sohabuddin. Sohrabuddin was a notorious criminal who had links with Pakistan and from whose farm house aAK 47s were recovered. So what should I have done with him? Pooja? Or should I have called up Sonia Behen before he was killed? I am thumping my chest and declaring that Sohrabuddin’s encounter had taken place on the dharti of Gujarat. If I have done something wrong, hang me.” What kind of intelligence agencies he was having in his state that even after the pogroms of Muslim in 2002 he still enjoys so much of over confidence and impunity?
Even now the Supreme Court is asking his government to supply the apex court with his speeches of September 2002. What have the IB, R&AW and crime branch of the police of the state and the Centre been doing there? Most of his speeches have flagrantly violated the constitutional acts as well as criminal laws. In September 2002 he castigated the Muslims by calling the relief camps as child producing factories producing future criminals and terrorists!
Those who have worked with R&AW or IB, as well as those who are still in service do not bother to notice that there is a subtle change. Now as never before there is a generational shift that is calling for demystifying the government agencies’ work. In the wake of Karkare’s investigation into Malegaon blast of 2008 and the circumstances of his death, the IB and ATS under Raghuvanshi as well as Crime Branch Police under Rakesh Maria have acquired notoriety of sabotaging work entrusted to them.
When R&AW had given 35 phone numbers to IB to monitor why did IB fail to comply when some of the numbers of the cell phones were used by the terrorists who attacked Mumbai on 26/11? And why did the Crime Branch Police withdraw surveillance of the Bhadwar Park landing? Hyderabad has a piquant situation where Maulana Naseerudin has just been released from prison. He was in prison for six years. The police failed to prove terrorism charges against him. His four sons are also accused but he says that they are all innocent.
Maulana Falahi’s case is even more tragic. His son Mujahid Saleem was shot dead by Gujarat police inspector Narendra Amin in the police chowki in Hyderbad where he had gone to investigate but Amin was put behind bars as he had shot dead Sohrabuddin’s wife Kauserbi and was involved in the fake encounter of Sohrabuddin. The Maulana’s wife Lateefa Begum says that the police have been targeting her family for 15 years. She had demanded (habeas corpus) the police to produce her son Mohammad Amjad Khwaja in court. The next day the police produced him in Chennai. He had spoken to her twelve days earlier and was in Jeddah doing a job. He was returning home when contact was lost. The police produced him at a press conference on Sunday January 17, 2010 and accused him of being involved in the blast at a police chowki in Hyderabad in October 2005 and conspiracy to kill right wing leader Indrasen Reddy of BJP in 2004, attack on the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, attacks on Lumbini Park and Gokul chat in 2007. He is now called the HuJi operative in India. They allegedly found foreign currency, Saudi Riyal, Bangladeshi Tikka, UAE Dirham. This is a familiar pattern of trapping Muslim youths: slamming so many charges against them that they would have lost decades in prison before they would be acquitted. That serves a purpose. That is, the Muslims are blamed and ill will is created against them. That covers up the terrorists activities of the Hindutva groups which many in the IB and ATS want.
Should Khwaja also spend a good deal of his youth in prison on charges which cannot be proved except confession under duress? Lateefa’s another son Abdul Kaleem was also released after the police failed to prove anything against him. They had accused him for bombing at Mecca mosque in May 2007. In another case he was booked for shifting RDX and handling SIM cards. Incidentally it is relevant to note that Abhinav Bharat and Shrikant Prasad Purohit are believed to be responsible for the attack. The high court has already released a batch of Muslim youths who were kept in illegal detention at private farm houses and tortured and subsequently put in prison by the police.
IB’s apprehending Khwaja raises doubts because he was returning from Jedda. When his mother lost contact she approached the court /police and demanded them to produce him in court. The next day the police produced him at press conference. This follows a pattern ala arrest of Abrar Ahmed accused in Malegaon blast of 2006 in which IB and the police at the bidding of IB arrested innocent youths and falsely accused them of terrorism and made them languish their youth in jails. Why did the police wait until Lateefa approached the court? She also feared that her son would be killed in fake encounter like Sohrabuddin. After all it was Sohabuddin’s brother who approached the court and filed habeas corpus regarding his brother’s wife Kauserbi that exposed the fake encounter and extrajudicial killing.
Vice President Ansari accepted that operational intelligence does require secrecy but the history of arrests in Hyderabad, Malegaon, Ahmedabad show that IB and its field officers in the states have no credible record. To say that every country gets the intelligence agencies it deserves, as B.Raman remaked, is a slur on the people of the country. Raman was neck deep in R&AW and should know better.
The need for this process was felt for quite some times. In fact it was felt right at the time of independence. There was a notice sent out to watch out for RSS chief Guru Golwalker after the Home Secretary was informed about a huge cache of weapons and details of a secret plan of RSS for attacks on the Muslims in the aftermath of the partition. He advised Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to take action. Golwalker was very much in the neighbourhood of Delhi but the intelligence field workers failed to serve the notice to him. What amazed the home secretary was inaction of Nehru in the face of actionable intelligence. In another case Rajnath Singh was the Chief Minister as well as Home Minister of Madhya Pradesh when the kar sevaks on Sabarmati express passed through his state. According to IG (Intelligence) of Gujarat BR Sreekumar the Home Minister of MP did not submit intelligence report on the behavior of the unruly passengers of the train. Thus the rowdy elements were given safe passage that emboldened them to persevere in their willful behavior like quarreling with Muslim hawkers at Godhra station and abducting a Muslim woman washing clothes in the vicinity of the tracks.
An actionable intelligence can save a situation. In Gwalior and other parts of Madhya Pradesh there were frequent attacks on Muslims leaving for Pakistan. One of the most remarkable marauders was a Punjabi youth Madanlal Pawa. Mahatma Gandhi came to know about it and prevailed upon the rulers to curb in the marauders. Pawa had to leave for Maharashtra. He settled in Bombay and moved to Ahmednager where he organized attacks on Muslim commercial establishments and collected extortion money from them. He came in contact with Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte and became a part of the crime syndicate that finally assassinated Gandhi. It is now known that Apte spent the last night with the daughter of the police commissioner of the metropolis before leaving for Delhi. Gopal Godse’s wife carried her daughter Himani to bid farewell to her husband. She and he husband were resolute in the mission. A part of the resolute nature reappeared in Himani Savarkar (nee Himani Godse) when she called for bomb for bomb retaliation. (As it ultimately turned out that the members of her own Abhinav Bharat had exploded bombs and Muslims were blamed.) All these facts are recorded in history. And yet people came to know her and her Abhinav Bharat only when Hemant Kakare arrested Lt Col Shrikant Prasad Purohit. We would not have known this but for the professionalism of Karkare. Thus the Augean stables of Intelligence Bureau (and for that matter the ATS, Crime Branch Police, the CBI or the numerous other intelligence agencies) call for purging those who have failed in the performance of their duties.
The most deplorable situation prevailing in the country is in Gujarat. Chief Minister Narendra Modi told a huge public meeting on December 4, 2007: “They want me to answer why I killed Sohabuddin. Sohrabuddin was a notorious criminal who had links with Pakistan and from whose farm house aAK 47s were recovered. So what should I have done with him? Pooja? Or should I have called up Sonia Behen before he was killed? I am thumping my chest and declaring that Sohrabuddin’s encounter had taken place on the dharti of Gujarat. If I have done something wrong, hang me.” What kind of intelligence agencies he was having in his state that even after the pogroms of Muslim in 2002 he still enjoys so much of over confidence and impunity?
Even now the Supreme Court is asking his government to supply the apex court with his speeches of September 2002. What have the IB, R&AW and crime branch of the police of the state and the Centre been doing there? Most of his speeches have flagrantly violated the constitutional acts as well as criminal laws. In September 2002 he castigated the Muslims by calling the relief camps as child producing factories producing future criminals and terrorists!
Those who have worked with R&AW or IB, as well as those who are still in service do not bother to notice that there is a subtle change. Now as never before there is a generational shift that is calling for demystifying the government agencies’ work. In the wake of Karkare’s investigation into Malegaon blast of 2008 and the circumstances of his death, the IB and ATS under Raghuvanshi as well as Crime Branch Police under Rakesh Maria have acquired notoriety of sabotaging work entrusted to them.
When R&AW had given 35 phone numbers to IB to monitor why did IB fail to comply when some of the numbers of the cell phones were used by the terrorists who attacked Mumbai on 26/11? And why did the Crime Branch Police withdraw surveillance of the Bhadwar Park landing? Hyderabad has a piquant situation where Maulana Naseerudin has just been released from prison. He was in prison for six years. The police failed to prove terrorism charges against him. His four sons are also accused but he says that they are all innocent.
Maulana Falahi’s case is even more tragic. His son Mujahid Saleem was shot dead by Gujarat police inspector Narendra Amin in the police chowki in Hyderbad where he had gone to investigate but Amin was put behind bars as he had shot dead Sohrabuddin’s wife Kauserbi and was involved in the fake encounter of Sohrabuddin. The Maulana’s wife Lateefa Begum says that the police have been targeting her family for 15 years. She had demanded (habeas corpus) the police to produce her son Mohammad Amjad Khwaja in court. The next day the police produced him in Chennai. He had spoken to her twelve days earlier and was in Jeddah doing a job. He was returning home when contact was lost. The police produced him at a press conference on Sunday January 17, 2010 and accused him of being involved in the blast at a police chowki in Hyderabad in October 2005 and conspiracy to kill right wing leader Indrasen Reddy of BJP in 2004, attack on the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, attacks on Lumbini Park and Gokul chat in 2007. He is now called the HuJi operative in India. They allegedly found foreign currency, Saudi Riyal, Bangladeshi Tikka, UAE Dirham. This is a familiar pattern of trapping Muslim youths: slamming so many charges against them that they would have lost decades in prison before they would be acquitted. That serves a purpose. That is, the Muslims are blamed and ill will is created against them. That covers up the terrorists activities of the Hindutva groups which many in the IB and ATS want.
Should Khwaja also spend a good deal of his youth in prison on charges which cannot be proved except confession under duress? Lateefa’s another son Abdul Kaleem was also released after the police failed to prove anything against him. They had accused him for bombing at Mecca mosque in May 2007. In another case he was booked for shifting RDX and handling SIM cards. Incidentally it is relevant to note that Abhinav Bharat and Shrikant Prasad Purohit are believed to be responsible for the attack. The high court has already released a batch of Muslim youths who were kept in illegal detention at private farm houses and tortured and subsequently put in prison by the police.
IB’s apprehending Khwaja raises doubts because he was returning from Jedda. When his mother lost contact she approached the court /police and demanded them to produce him in court. The next day the police produced him at press conference. This follows a pattern ala arrest of Abrar Ahmed accused in Malegaon blast of 2006 in which IB and the police at the bidding of IB arrested innocent youths and falsely accused them of terrorism and made them languish their youth in jails. Why did the police wait until Lateefa approached the court? She also feared that her son would be killed in fake encounter like Sohrabuddin. After all it was Sohabuddin’s brother who approached the court and filed habeas corpus regarding his brother’s wife Kauserbi that exposed the fake encounter and extrajudicial killing.
Vice President Ansari accepted that operational intelligence does require secrecy but the history of arrests in Hyderabad, Malegaon, Ahmedabad show that IB and its field officers in the states have no credible record. To say that every country gets the intelligence agencies it deserves, as B.Raman remaked, is a slur on the people of the country. Raman was neck deep in R&AW and should know better.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
What prospect for peace when fight against terrorism is relegated to it!
A conference organized by India Times and Jang Group at New Delhi 10-12 January 2010 has churned up significant responses. Aman ki Asha (desire for peace) is patently south Asia phenomenon while terrorism that infects the region is transcontinental. To believe that terrorism in the region has provenance there only is not helpful in resolving any issue, least of all, bilateral. 26/11 happened not on account of Siachen valley or Kashmir dispute. If terrorism in the subcontinent were just confined to it the two sides would have openly and sincerely undertaken the task of jointly investigating the terror attacks instead of leveling charges against each other or talking tongue in cheek.
Believing in the role of local facilitators in it smacks of sophomoric grasp of terrorism. A Narendra Modi or Aitzaz Ahsan will keep harping on it as is their wont, hardcore communalist or the chicane liberal. It would nevertheless be disingenuous to say as did President Asif Zardari that non state actors were involved in 26/11 attacks. His country is already reeling under the relentless almost daily terrorist attacks. India is temporarily enjoying a respite from it. However, the global ambition of one and the daze of the other do not make either exonerated from the moral responsibility they owe to their citizens if they really want to live in peace.
It is alleged by a colleague of Lt Col. Prasad Purohit, Captain Nitin Joshi, that Purohit had told him about pilfering RDX from the military stock(Purohit told me about pilfering RDX:Army Capt, TOI Nov 18,2008). Is this involvement of the army an extension of religious extremism that threatens the country or a part of the army chore of anti terror and counterinsurgency operation as Purohit was working for Military Intelligence in the capacity of a liaison officer coordinating fight against terrorism? In Pakistan also there are people who are extremists and most of them are the byproduct of the US policy. In the case of India the extremism verges on India’s strategic relations with Israel formally as far as the government is concerned and with Abhinav Bharat unofficially, nay clandestinely. Thus religious extremism is fuelling terrorism on both the sides.
In the Kabul attack on Monday Januay18, 2010 again atmosphere of suspicion is aroused which is not conducive for peace because the other side is pointing an accusing finger not to the Taliban or LeT but to India. This is the result of the visit to Kabul of MI chief Lieutenant General RK Loomba just before the latest attack.(http://dailymailnews.com/0110/19/FrontPage/FrontPage1.htm )India has its military trainers there. Its stake in Afghanistan is high and of strategic nature vis-à-vis Pakistan. Call it ambition or what it is irretrievably enmeshed there. Hence, the chances of peace are like chimera.
This ongoing war on terrorism has disastrous collateral damage inflicted on the civilians. Leave alone the dead and injured, people incarcerated on flimsy ground are in thousands. They languish in prisons across the country. Haj house Imam Ghulam Ilahi Yahya Baksh in Mumbai would casually talk to a Kashmiri hawker of fruits, Haji Mohammad Ramzan, who also prayed in the mosque. Even for this so casual contact the police accused him of complicity in terrorism and arrested him. For four years he was unnecessarily kept behind the bars. Only this week he was released by the court in Mumbai because there was no proof against him. The same is the case with Maulana Naseerudin of Hyderabad who spent six years in prison on terrorism charges. He was absolved of the charges and released last week.
If this makes the extremists among Hindus elated it should be all the more a cause of concern for fellow Indians who still have some sanity and can see through the charade practiced in the name of fight against terrorism. David Headley’s role in 26/11 has shown that even with the best intention in the world your fight against terrorism may run against the interest of Uncle Sam. As the Americans propped the jihadists against the Russians, they could very well try the same trick with others. There is nothing like permanent in foreign policy so we must keep our house safe. Pakistan is going through the baptism of hellfire over this.
From across several oceans and continents the Americans have a different perspective which we have still not comprehended well. They gathered intelligence by relegating Headley to snoop on terror threat emanating from the subcontinent that might endanger their interest and pass on to us selectively what might be of interest in such a way that their nationals are not prosecuted in a foreign county or by the International Criminal Court. They are now planning to reach understanding with the Taliban and even with Mullah Mohammad Umar. They want to remove terrorist tag against him so that they have no problems at the UN Security Council. There is a bathetic low in it as you can see how the FBI transmogrified the face of a Spanish Member of Parliament Mr Gasper Llamazares into what Osama bin Laden might look today. How would Umar’s face look, may be like Obama in turban as in the New Yorker cartoon during the presidential electioneering.
But the opposite of bathos is pathos. Last time when Robert Gates visited India, Mirwas Moulvi Farooq was brutally murdered on May 21, 1990 ala the massacre of 36 Sikhs in Chittisingpora on the eve of President Clinton’s visit on March 20, 2000. Gates wanted to discuss the Kashmir issue with New Delhi. In the present case India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told on the eve of the Kabul attack on January 18, 2010 that President Barack Obama would not have any negotiation on the Kashmir dispute. Subsequently Gates arrived in Delhi. This kind vicious stimulus and response involving terrorism does not bode well for peace prospect in the subcontinent.
In Hamid Karzai India has a friend while Pakistan, a bête noir. In 2008 attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul national security advisor MK Narayanan blamed Pakistan for it and remarked “We not only suspect but we have a fair amount of intelligence (on the involvement of Pakistan). He denied that this was insinuation. “I think we need to pay back in the same coin. We are quite clear in our mind.”
For sometimes now we may not have peace in the subcontinent because of this switchback of terrorism.
tags:Indo Pak relation, peace, terrorism
Believing in the role of local facilitators in it smacks of sophomoric grasp of terrorism. A Narendra Modi or Aitzaz Ahsan will keep harping on it as is their wont, hardcore communalist or the chicane liberal. It would nevertheless be disingenuous to say as did President Asif Zardari that non state actors were involved in 26/11 attacks. His country is already reeling under the relentless almost daily terrorist attacks. India is temporarily enjoying a respite from it. However, the global ambition of one and the daze of the other do not make either exonerated from the moral responsibility they owe to their citizens if they really want to live in peace.
It is alleged by a colleague of Lt Col. Prasad Purohit, Captain Nitin Joshi, that Purohit had told him about pilfering RDX from the military stock(Purohit told me about pilfering RDX:Army Capt, TOI Nov 18,2008). Is this involvement of the army an extension of religious extremism that threatens the country or a part of the army chore of anti terror and counterinsurgency operation as Purohit was working for Military Intelligence in the capacity of a liaison officer coordinating fight against terrorism? In Pakistan also there are people who are extremists and most of them are the byproduct of the US policy. In the case of India the extremism verges on India’s strategic relations with Israel formally as far as the government is concerned and with Abhinav Bharat unofficially, nay clandestinely. Thus religious extremism is fuelling terrorism on both the sides.
In the Kabul attack on Monday Januay18, 2010 again atmosphere of suspicion is aroused which is not conducive for peace because the other side is pointing an accusing finger not to the Taliban or LeT but to India. This is the result of the visit to Kabul of MI chief Lieutenant General RK Loomba just before the latest attack.(http://dailymailnews.com/0110/19/FrontPage/FrontPage1.htm )India has its military trainers there. Its stake in Afghanistan is high and of strategic nature vis-à-vis Pakistan. Call it ambition or what it is irretrievably enmeshed there. Hence, the chances of peace are like chimera.
This ongoing war on terrorism has disastrous collateral damage inflicted on the civilians. Leave alone the dead and injured, people incarcerated on flimsy ground are in thousands. They languish in prisons across the country. Haj house Imam Ghulam Ilahi Yahya Baksh in Mumbai would casually talk to a Kashmiri hawker of fruits, Haji Mohammad Ramzan, who also prayed in the mosque. Even for this so casual contact the police accused him of complicity in terrorism and arrested him. For four years he was unnecessarily kept behind the bars. Only this week he was released by the court in Mumbai because there was no proof against him. The same is the case with Maulana Naseerudin of Hyderabad who spent six years in prison on terrorism charges. He was absolved of the charges and released last week.
If this makes the extremists among Hindus elated it should be all the more a cause of concern for fellow Indians who still have some sanity and can see through the charade practiced in the name of fight against terrorism. David Headley’s role in 26/11 has shown that even with the best intention in the world your fight against terrorism may run against the interest of Uncle Sam. As the Americans propped the jihadists against the Russians, they could very well try the same trick with others. There is nothing like permanent in foreign policy so we must keep our house safe. Pakistan is going through the baptism of hellfire over this.
From across several oceans and continents the Americans have a different perspective which we have still not comprehended well. They gathered intelligence by relegating Headley to snoop on terror threat emanating from the subcontinent that might endanger their interest and pass on to us selectively what might be of interest in such a way that their nationals are not prosecuted in a foreign county or by the International Criminal Court. They are now planning to reach understanding with the Taliban and even with Mullah Mohammad Umar. They want to remove terrorist tag against him so that they have no problems at the UN Security Council. There is a bathetic low in it as you can see how the FBI transmogrified the face of a Spanish Member of Parliament Mr Gasper Llamazares into what Osama bin Laden might look today. How would Umar’s face look, may be like Obama in turban as in the New Yorker cartoon during the presidential electioneering.
But the opposite of bathos is pathos. Last time when Robert Gates visited India, Mirwas Moulvi Farooq was brutally murdered on May 21, 1990 ala the massacre of 36 Sikhs in Chittisingpora on the eve of President Clinton’s visit on March 20, 2000. Gates wanted to discuss the Kashmir issue with New Delhi. In the present case India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told on the eve of the Kabul attack on January 18, 2010 that President Barack Obama would not have any negotiation on the Kashmir dispute. Subsequently Gates arrived in Delhi. This kind vicious stimulus and response involving terrorism does not bode well for peace prospect in the subcontinent.
In Hamid Karzai India has a friend while Pakistan, a bête noir. In 2008 attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul national security advisor MK Narayanan blamed Pakistan for it and remarked “We not only suspect but we have a fair amount of intelligence (on the involvement of Pakistan). He denied that this was insinuation. “I think we need to pay back in the same coin. We are quite clear in our mind.”
For sometimes now we may not have peace in the subcontinent because of this switchback of terrorism.
tags:Indo Pak relation, peace, terrorism
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Media in collusion with the IB in war on terrorism
Ex nihilo nihili fit is an old saying of which the Intelligence Bureau seems to be ignorant of. It has fed successive Prime Ministers and their Home Ministers with canards. What you sow you reap. The mainstream media has been the bedfellow which has given mutual gratification. The investigation into the bomb incidents of Malegaon (2006) and Samjhauta express (2007) have reached a blind alley because of the deliberate design foisted on the public by the IB and the media. The hype created by the two incidents and many others like them have succeeded in keeping the people on the tenterhook of taking in what is coming in the garb of the 'breaking news' so much so that that have been taken in by weltanschauung of jihadi terrorism.
For the same reason the startling news from Kannad near Aurangabad has gone under the carpet of the mainstream media. On January 10, 2010 ex serviceman Gulab Rao Ram Rao Sonowne went out brandishing sword in his hand. When some panicked citizen informed the police, they overwhelmed him. Then searched his house and found two live bombs and swords. In a bizarre coincidence this seizure happens when the town is getting ready for a Jamat -e- Islami convention scheduled for 17 of the month. What can anyone infer from this? What the laity like the uninformed jury would infer does not matter for the media and the IB because their syllogism is already predetermined. This, despite the fact that the bombs were kept in a box containing a paper in Urdu. Why the bomb makers should be enamoured of the Urdu language in places like Kannad and Margao in Goa is the continuing puzzle.
Such puzzles have so much bedeviled the government that there is need for what Shashi Tharoor calls demystifying the government. Perhaps another twitter is on the way. A part of the mystification you can understand from Vijay Tendurkar's play Ghasiram Kotwal. The chitpawan Brahmins (the ilks of Nathuram Godse and Savarkars) in his play make a beeline to the mansions of the Muslim concubines while the Maratha sardars visit the Brahmin houses in the dead of the night. They observe such a code of maintaining silence that this kind of communal prostitution passes on as if no one has heard, seen or known it. But then comes the Brahmin from Benares, Ghasiram. Comparisons are odious. But does it strike someone that Hemant Karkare also playacted a wonderful role of this persona, albeit in real life?
The wall of hush hush created by Marathi language is a monumental contribution. Such a real wall must have also outraged Vijay Tndulkar so extremely that he wanted a gun to go and kill Narendra Modi. The acquittal of Moulana Naseerudin and twenty one others by the court in Ahemdabad on January 12, 2010 after their imprisonment for six years on terrorism charges, is also an instance of the hide and seek the IB and the mainstream media play. Thus the saga of suffering in the name of 'nothing comes out of nothing' goes on, as the IB and the media gratify each other while the Neros of the time fiddle.
For the same reason the startling news from Kannad near Aurangabad has gone under the carpet of the mainstream media. On January 10, 2010 ex serviceman Gulab Rao Ram Rao Sonowne went out brandishing sword in his hand. When some panicked citizen informed the police, they overwhelmed him. Then searched his house and found two live bombs and swords. In a bizarre coincidence this seizure happens when the town is getting ready for a Jamat -e- Islami convention scheduled for 17 of the month. What can anyone infer from this? What the laity like the uninformed jury would infer does not matter for the media and the IB because their syllogism is already predetermined. This, despite the fact that the bombs were kept in a box containing a paper in Urdu. Why the bomb makers should be enamoured of the Urdu language in places like Kannad and Margao in Goa is the continuing puzzle.
Such puzzles have so much bedeviled the government that there is need for what Shashi Tharoor calls demystifying the government. Perhaps another twitter is on the way. A part of the mystification you can understand from Vijay Tendurkar's play Ghasiram Kotwal. The chitpawan Brahmins (the ilks of Nathuram Godse and Savarkars) in his play make a beeline to the mansions of the Muslim concubines while the Maratha sardars visit the Brahmin houses in the dead of the night. They observe such a code of maintaining silence that this kind of communal prostitution passes on as if no one has heard, seen or known it. But then comes the Brahmin from Benares, Ghasiram. Comparisons are odious. But does it strike someone that Hemant Karkare also playacted a wonderful role of this persona, albeit in real life?
The wall of hush hush created by Marathi language is a monumental contribution. Such a real wall must have also outraged Vijay Tndulkar so extremely that he wanted a gun to go and kill Narendra Modi. The acquittal of Moulana Naseerudin and twenty one others by the court in Ahemdabad on January 12, 2010 after their imprisonment for six years on terrorism charges, is also an instance of the hide and seek the IB and the mainstream media play. Thus the saga of suffering in the name of 'nothing comes out of nothing' goes on, as the IB and the media gratify each other while the Neros of the time fiddle.
Friday, November 20, 2009
“What is happening in our country!” : The politics of terrorism.
“
Woebegone widow of Hemant Karkare is at a loss to understand how could an upright, honest and a man of integrity like her husband be “martyred” and then politicking be played over him in assembly halls, in parliament, on public platforms and even in the offices of those who were policing the state differently from her husand. Kavita like many others in the country knew that Hemant was doing what is expected of an officer and that he was aware that there are no half measures in discharging your duty when the country calls on you to do your duty. How could she so traumatized know that those who played on the chessboard just moved a pawn, a person made use of by others for their own advantage! But then things began to dawn upon her.
The politics of terror is the way an organized group uses its clout to effect change in the course of events by violent means or by subterfuge for a slant of thought. What is that slant of thought differs from place to place and people to people. As we near the first anniversary of 26/11 it is easy to recall that it followed on the heels of Malegaon bomb blast of September 29—a matter of 47 days between the two. Both are events of terrorism scarring the face of India. However, much water has flowed down the river between the two. One of the most remarkable and least bothered about flotsam and jetsam was ganging up of Hindutva groups to exert pressure for reversing the ongoing investigation that Hemant Karkare was busy in. Hellbent on this were groups and their leaders like LK Advani and Bal Thackeray and Narendra Modi as well as those handpicked by them for august offices administering the country to scuttle the ATS juggernaut of unearthing the real culprits in the conspiracy of the blast in Malegaon. It threatened to give them out in their entirety, of course including Praveen Togadia.
In an epoch making discovery the ATS had found that Hindutva terrorists were behind it. Formally, this was nothing less than seismic jolt in the fault line of our very conception of terror. By the time it happened we were inured to the jihadi terrorism as if it was the whole and sole ubiquitous phenomenon plaguing nations of the world.
Karkare discovered the truth of terror but not invented it. The Hindu right would have us believe that he did the latter. There were obvious clues which no one could have afforded to ignore. When he visited Bhiku chowk, the site of September 29 blast, the local people told him and home minister RR Patil that the Muslims were not involved in the attack and they demanded impartial inquiry. He must have been struck by unanimous chant of innocent people being arrested and the guilty going scot free. The badly mangled motor cycle of Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur was the most visible proof of it. Then came the startling phone records of the sadhvi and Ramji Kalsangrah. Phones and vehicles are as much a gift of science as are bullet proof jackets both defective and good ones. If David Coleman Headley and other handlers abroad and in Mumbai itself or just across the borders could pull the strings, the local pliant players were not far behind in picking up which jackets they wanted on the occasion.
Headley’s role is ominous on account of his being a self professed Jew and a commission agent. Did anyone outsource terrorism to him living in the US? Or did he graft one kind of terrorism on another to exact maximum profit from it? The extreme orthodox Jewish centre of Chabbad house has acquired the dubious distinction that the cook Qazi Zakir Hussein there had bought a huge amount of chicken and wine as if there was going to be a big party for many people for many days while the inmates were so few. There was also celebration there when the news of the death Karkare was announced on the television. The puzzling inordinate delay in which the police reached places under attack like the Chabbad house and the efforts of the security guard from the Israeli consulate and his manhandling by the people are shrouded in mystery.
For a simple minded woman albeit well educated and a professor at that it was too much to have lost her husband and also comprehend at once the politics of terror. But she got certain things firm in the mind right from the beginning. One, that someone directed her husband to the scene of action though he was not officially obliged to directly and personally fight the awesomely armed terrorists. Second, someone spoke to him on phone at the last moment and what was the message or content of it? The authorities have not taken any care to tell the widow what her mind had questioned her. And now come more disturbing disclosures that her husband waited 40 minutes for a back up that did not come and then he was left wounded for more than 40 minutes and nobody attended him in that condition and a he a top police officer! Any cop worth his name would not have left a fellow police man at such crucial time because the bond between the officer and his men still exists unless ordered otherwise.
History is replete with the fact that the Jews have made countries fight among themselves so that they get maximum advantage from their warfare sale of arms. Moreover, the Israeli connection thanks to Lt Col Prasad Purohit’s liaison effort is veritable truth. It is no surprise that the Jews have done it again. This connection goes back to a much earlier time. Handbills pasted by Jewish groups at public places blaming the Arabs for the hardship Indians were going through had appeared in Pune in the wake of the oil embargo of 1973. The Jews were at it again.
Kavita’s exclamation at what the country is coming to was not simple exasperation at corruption. It assumes larger significance when looked against the backdrop of how India opened diplomatic relationship with Israel and then soon came the demolition of the historic mosque at Ayodhya. It is not for nothing that such things happen. Wherever Headley went there struck terror. Security officials from India have made beeline to Israel to study the Israeli strategy in fighting terrorism and the intifada of the Palestinians and the acquiring and occupying of more and more of the Palestinian land in the occupied territories. In fact a high ranking Israeli military official had given his official view of how to deal with the land acquisition in Kashmir valley which one of the terrorists at Chabbad house had warned India not to follow. This is no simple matter as superintendant of police in Malegaon Mr Rajwardhan and other police officers visiting Abrar Ahmed, an accused turned approver, had promised him land anywhere in India but outside Kashmir valley if he toed the police version on terrorism in the case of September 8, 2006 attack. This smacks of the grouse of Abhinav Bharat and other extremist groups of the Hindu right on the dispute of land in Jammu and Kashmir. The allotment of land for Amarnath pilgrims and the revocation of it and the bloody scenes that followed are in the back ground of what was happening in Maharashtra in the name of the so called terrorism. There is something of Sudhakar Pandey in this as well as of Purohit who was posted in the valley and from where he sourced the RDX for use in Malegaon and on Samjhauta express.
The basic apprehension of Kavita Karkare is that what happened to her husband is what we call insider’s job much like insider trading. The deliberate hiding of the telephone conversation of the callers to her husband and the mysterious disappearance of the bullet proof jacket and the plethora of discrepancies in the postmortem report and the real wounds on his body not to speak of the staggered delay in complying with his call for back up and the designed dereliction of duty in leaving him bleeding for more than forty minutes at the scene of action. The abduction of the fisherwoman who saw the ten terrorists pass through the fisherman’s shanty on the sea beach. She was taken to the US and mysteriously brought back by the FBI.
Why the police cannot come out of it clean is the irrefutable truth that the insider is capable of having knowledge of what is happening on the ground, manipulating action and covering up what is undesirable and unwanted. The media people who told her that she would never know the full truth made a mistake. For they forgot that a surmise can tell you as much truth as hard evidence can which the police (or the two saffron clad men who picked up and put in a car a man without injury or blood on him resembling in dress that Karkare wore) could have attempted to destroy. And even Shakespeare’s wise man Polonious also tells that through indirection you can find the direction out.
Therefore some detour: on September 1, 2008 ATS officers Jaiswal, Sachin Kadam and Rajwardhan (then posted at Malegaon and now a deputy commissioner of police in Mumbai) had gone to meet Abrar in jail. They told him “hum logon ka ek mission hai. Do dhai mahine men pura ho jayga. Phir beech kay kuch log jo tang ada rahen hain koi nahin rahey ga.” Then they specified the mission: “hum nay 2006 men jo tahkikat ker kay chargesheet bani thi use wo log badal dal rahe hain. Isi liya unhain beech may se hatana jaroori hai.” In substance it would mean that there are two groups of officers. One which includes the above three as well as the boss of ATS Raghuvanshi had already prepared the charge sheet in the case of the September 2006 blast in Malegaon. But the others preeminently Karkare had begun making changes in the charge sheet. It was the mission of the first group to obviate the second.
There is no need to make it out anymore melodramatic than what it already is. But if you read the original it is gory tale of a clique. Moreover this is what Abrar has put in in his affidavit to Judge YB Shinde. The court is competent enough to disabuse us or Abrar of the macabre surrounding the same. Even so there is internal logic that cannot be denied. For example Rajwardhan had given more than twenty five lakh rupees to the father in law of Abrar to accept the police version and forget what he had told earlier of what he had overheard at the Medi care hospital that the blast was the work of Hindu right and Dr Rajinder Amin, Dr Bipin Parekh and Someshwar Shanker and others were behind it. Abrar was kept in hotel Pritam at Dadar in Mumbai and taken out for shopping, then his junket to Indore, Ujjain and other places at the expense of the ATS. The costly mobiles given to him and his wife by Rajwardhan and his interaction on phone with that worthy cop are bizarre to say the least. At one time Abrar boasted that he had more than fifty lakh rupees and an Indica car to drive him around towns of Madhya Pradesh. This fabulous amount of wealth could only come from the Jews for the Israeli officials did promise Purohit monetary support. It mocks the country which cannot afford good quality helmets and bullet proof jackets for honest officers has such treasure trove available for a song to such who have sworn to defend the country like the serving lieutenant colonel, Purohit. This is what the country is coming to!
To his consternation Karkare found no evidence of involvement of SIMI or local Muslims in the blasts of 2006. Interestingly the CBI has just told the high court in Mumbai that they have no evidence against the acused prompting the judge to exlaim why shouldn’t they be then given bail! A day before he was assassinated he had told Indian Express reporters in confidence: "I don't know why this case has become so political," "The pressure is tremendous and I am wondering how to extricate it from all the politics."
Was the pressure telling on the investigation, what with someone who could be the next prime minister of the country questioning the credibility of the ATS?
"Of course," was the answer. "We are being very very careful. In fact, when we want to question a suspect and if he or she has any Hindutvawadi connections, we make sure once, twice, thrice, that we have enough reason and evidence to even question. Normally it is not like that. We are able to freely question anyone we suspect."
This revelation is crystallized by the anguish the people who had gathered at the Taj hotel with burning candles had felt as well as the well meaning people of the country. Could Kavita avoid feeling the angst? Or, we? This would be the richest tribute from our hearts for this wonderful son of India! May his soul rest in peace for the service he did to the country!
Woebegone widow of Hemant Karkare is at a loss to understand how could an upright, honest and a man of integrity like her husband be “martyred” and then politicking be played over him in assembly halls, in parliament, on public platforms and even in the offices of those who were policing the state differently from her husand. Kavita like many others in the country knew that Hemant was doing what is expected of an officer and that he was aware that there are no half measures in discharging your duty when the country calls on you to do your duty. How could she so traumatized know that those who played on the chessboard just moved a pawn, a person made use of by others for their own advantage! But then things began to dawn upon her.
The politics of terror is the way an organized group uses its clout to effect change in the course of events by violent means or by subterfuge for a slant of thought. What is that slant of thought differs from place to place and people to people. As we near the first anniversary of 26/11 it is easy to recall that it followed on the heels of Malegaon bomb blast of September 29—a matter of 47 days between the two. Both are events of terrorism scarring the face of India. However, much water has flowed down the river between the two. One of the most remarkable and least bothered about flotsam and jetsam was ganging up of Hindutva groups to exert pressure for reversing the ongoing investigation that Hemant Karkare was busy in. Hellbent on this were groups and their leaders like LK Advani and Bal Thackeray and Narendra Modi as well as those handpicked by them for august offices administering the country to scuttle the ATS juggernaut of unearthing the real culprits in the conspiracy of the blast in Malegaon. It threatened to give them out in their entirety, of course including Praveen Togadia.
In an epoch making discovery the ATS had found that Hindutva terrorists were behind it. Formally, this was nothing less than seismic jolt in the fault line of our very conception of terror. By the time it happened we were inured to the jihadi terrorism as if it was the whole and sole ubiquitous phenomenon plaguing nations of the world.
Karkare discovered the truth of terror but not invented it. The Hindu right would have us believe that he did the latter. There were obvious clues which no one could have afforded to ignore. When he visited Bhiku chowk, the site of September 29 blast, the local people told him and home minister RR Patil that the Muslims were not involved in the attack and they demanded impartial inquiry. He must have been struck by unanimous chant of innocent people being arrested and the guilty going scot free. The badly mangled motor cycle of Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur was the most visible proof of it. Then came the startling phone records of the sadhvi and Ramji Kalsangrah. Phones and vehicles are as much a gift of science as are bullet proof jackets both defective and good ones. If David Coleman Headley and other handlers abroad and in Mumbai itself or just across the borders could pull the strings, the local pliant players were not far behind in picking up which jackets they wanted on the occasion.
Headley’s role is ominous on account of his being a self professed Jew and a commission agent. Did anyone outsource terrorism to him living in the US? Or did he graft one kind of terrorism on another to exact maximum profit from it? The extreme orthodox Jewish centre of Chabbad house has acquired the dubious distinction that the cook Qazi Zakir Hussein there had bought a huge amount of chicken and wine as if there was going to be a big party for many people for many days while the inmates were so few. There was also celebration there when the news of the death Karkare was announced on the television. The puzzling inordinate delay in which the police reached places under attack like the Chabbad house and the efforts of the security guard from the Israeli consulate and his manhandling by the people are shrouded in mystery.
For a simple minded woman albeit well educated and a professor at that it was too much to have lost her husband and also comprehend at once the politics of terror. But she got certain things firm in the mind right from the beginning. One, that someone directed her husband to the scene of action though he was not officially obliged to directly and personally fight the awesomely armed terrorists. Second, someone spoke to him on phone at the last moment and what was the message or content of it? The authorities have not taken any care to tell the widow what her mind had questioned her. And now come more disturbing disclosures that her husband waited 40 minutes for a back up that did not come and then he was left wounded for more than 40 minutes and nobody attended him in that condition and a he a top police officer! Any cop worth his name would not have left a fellow police man at such crucial time because the bond between the officer and his men still exists unless ordered otherwise.
History is replete with the fact that the Jews have made countries fight among themselves so that they get maximum advantage from their warfare sale of arms. Moreover, the Israeli connection thanks to Lt Col Prasad Purohit’s liaison effort is veritable truth. It is no surprise that the Jews have done it again. This connection goes back to a much earlier time. Handbills pasted by Jewish groups at public places blaming the Arabs for the hardship Indians were going through had appeared in Pune in the wake of the oil embargo of 1973. The Jews were at it again.
Kavita’s exclamation at what the country is coming to was not simple exasperation at corruption. It assumes larger significance when looked against the backdrop of how India opened diplomatic relationship with Israel and then soon came the demolition of the historic mosque at Ayodhya. It is not for nothing that such things happen. Wherever Headley went there struck terror. Security officials from India have made beeline to Israel to study the Israeli strategy in fighting terrorism and the intifada of the Palestinians and the acquiring and occupying of more and more of the Palestinian land in the occupied territories. In fact a high ranking Israeli military official had given his official view of how to deal with the land acquisition in Kashmir valley which one of the terrorists at Chabbad house had warned India not to follow. This is no simple matter as superintendant of police in Malegaon Mr Rajwardhan and other police officers visiting Abrar Ahmed, an accused turned approver, had promised him land anywhere in India but outside Kashmir valley if he toed the police version on terrorism in the case of September 8, 2006 attack. This smacks of the grouse of Abhinav Bharat and other extremist groups of the Hindu right on the dispute of land in Jammu and Kashmir. The allotment of land for Amarnath pilgrims and the revocation of it and the bloody scenes that followed are in the back ground of what was happening in Maharashtra in the name of the so called terrorism. There is something of Sudhakar Pandey in this as well as of Purohit who was posted in the valley and from where he sourced the RDX for use in Malegaon and on Samjhauta express.
The basic apprehension of Kavita Karkare is that what happened to her husband is what we call insider’s job much like insider trading. The deliberate hiding of the telephone conversation of the callers to her husband and the mysterious disappearance of the bullet proof jacket and the plethora of discrepancies in the postmortem report and the real wounds on his body not to speak of the staggered delay in complying with his call for back up and the designed dereliction of duty in leaving him bleeding for more than forty minutes at the scene of action. The abduction of the fisherwoman who saw the ten terrorists pass through the fisherman’s shanty on the sea beach. She was taken to the US and mysteriously brought back by the FBI.
Why the police cannot come out of it clean is the irrefutable truth that the insider is capable of having knowledge of what is happening on the ground, manipulating action and covering up what is undesirable and unwanted. The media people who told her that she would never know the full truth made a mistake. For they forgot that a surmise can tell you as much truth as hard evidence can which the police (or the two saffron clad men who picked up and put in a car a man without injury or blood on him resembling in dress that Karkare wore) could have attempted to destroy. And even Shakespeare’s wise man Polonious also tells that through indirection you can find the direction out.
Therefore some detour: on September 1, 2008 ATS officers Jaiswal, Sachin Kadam and Rajwardhan (then posted at Malegaon and now a deputy commissioner of police in Mumbai) had gone to meet Abrar in jail. They told him “hum logon ka ek mission hai. Do dhai mahine men pura ho jayga. Phir beech kay kuch log jo tang ada rahen hain koi nahin rahey ga.” Then they specified the mission: “hum nay 2006 men jo tahkikat ker kay chargesheet bani thi use wo log badal dal rahe hain. Isi liya unhain beech may se hatana jaroori hai.” In substance it would mean that there are two groups of officers. One which includes the above three as well as the boss of ATS Raghuvanshi had already prepared the charge sheet in the case of the September 2006 blast in Malegaon. But the others preeminently Karkare had begun making changes in the charge sheet. It was the mission of the first group to obviate the second.
There is no need to make it out anymore melodramatic than what it already is. But if you read the original it is gory tale of a clique. Moreover this is what Abrar has put in in his affidavit to Judge YB Shinde. The court is competent enough to disabuse us or Abrar of the macabre surrounding the same. Even so there is internal logic that cannot be denied. For example Rajwardhan had given more than twenty five lakh rupees to the father in law of Abrar to accept the police version and forget what he had told earlier of what he had overheard at the Medi care hospital that the blast was the work of Hindu right and Dr Rajinder Amin, Dr Bipin Parekh and Someshwar Shanker and others were behind it. Abrar was kept in hotel Pritam at Dadar in Mumbai and taken out for shopping, then his junket to Indore, Ujjain and other places at the expense of the ATS. The costly mobiles given to him and his wife by Rajwardhan and his interaction on phone with that worthy cop are bizarre to say the least. At one time Abrar boasted that he had more than fifty lakh rupees and an Indica car to drive him around towns of Madhya Pradesh. This fabulous amount of wealth could only come from the Jews for the Israeli officials did promise Purohit monetary support. It mocks the country which cannot afford good quality helmets and bullet proof jackets for honest officers has such treasure trove available for a song to such who have sworn to defend the country like the serving lieutenant colonel, Purohit. This is what the country is coming to!
To his consternation Karkare found no evidence of involvement of SIMI or local Muslims in the blasts of 2006. Interestingly the CBI has just told the high court in Mumbai that they have no evidence against the acused prompting the judge to exlaim why shouldn’t they be then given bail! A day before he was assassinated he had told Indian Express reporters in confidence: "I don't know why this case has become so political," "The pressure is tremendous and I am wondering how to extricate it from all the politics."
Was the pressure telling on the investigation, what with someone who could be the next prime minister of the country questioning the credibility of the ATS?
"Of course," was the answer. "We are being very very careful. In fact, when we want to question a suspect and if he or she has any Hindutvawadi connections, we make sure once, twice, thrice, that we have enough reason and evidence to even question. Normally it is not like that. We are able to freely question anyone we suspect."
This revelation is crystallized by the anguish the people who had gathered at the Taj hotel with burning candles had felt as well as the well meaning people of the country. Could Kavita avoid feeling the angst? Or, we? This would be the richest tribute from our hearts for this wonderful son of India! May his soul rest in peace for the service he did to the country!
Monday, October 26, 2009
Terrorism and the new line of investigation
The investigating agencies are notorious for changing horses in the mid stream while probing terror incidents in the country. Somewhere someone in the hierarchical structure does not feel comfortable if the line of investigation is in the right direction. For example, RDX found in Samjhauta express attack could have come only from military stock. This makes sense when Lt Col Prasad Purohit admitted that he had pilfered 60 kg of RDX from Jammu and Kashmir army godown. A part of it he had given to one Bhagwan for use in Samjhauta incident.
This disclosure so much shocked the national security advisor MK Narayanan that he warned the government of the consequences of this on the bilateral relationship between India and Pakistan and the much vaunted weltanschauung that India was victim of terrorism from across the borders. That of course derailed the investigation.
Muslim youths who had nothing to do with the attack were arrested from Rajasthan and other places and are still languishing in prison. The suit cases, bottles and batteries were of course bought in Indore. Then happened Malegaon, thanks to Hemant Karkare.
Karkare admitted on August 18, 2008 that he had found no trace of SIMI in the bomb attack on September 8, 2006. Next month Malegaon suffered another attack on September 29 2008. He caught the real culprits and then someone again stymied. ATS found the mobile phone number of Dr Bipin Parekh with sadhvi Pragyasingh and Ramchandra Kalsangra. The line of investigation did not go any further. But the approver Abrar Ahmed mentioned in his April 2009 affidavit that Parekh along with Dr Rajender Amin and others had caused the blast in 2006.
However, strangely the phone records of Malegaon accused Ramchandra Kalsangra lifted veil from the secrecy of those who had actually bought suitcases, bottles and batteries from Indore that were in fact used on Samjhhauta express on February 18 2007. Pranav Mandal not only had close association with Kalsangra alias Ramji of sadhvi Pragyasingh but was a member of another of the uncountable and ever expanding Hindu right outfits, Shivaji vikas mandal. Indeed so many of these are there that a thesaurus of terror would be half filled with them. Accidental bomb explosions in Goa, Kanpur, Nanded (twice) have played havoc with the numbers. Thus the new line of investigation by the CBI is pertinent but we have to wait and see if it is also persistent.
Goa blast was also accidental. However, what were more persistent and pertinent were the ominous repots over the years how Goa was used to train the terrorists of the Hindu right. No significant action was taken in this regard. Could all this add up to what SM Mushrif argues in his book "Who Killed Karkare: the real face of terrorism in India", that the driving force of Hindu right terrorism is to put innocent Muslims in the dock and bring a bad name to Muslims of the country?
This disclosure so much shocked the national security advisor MK Narayanan that he warned the government of the consequences of this on the bilateral relationship between India and Pakistan and the much vaunted weltanschauung that India was victim of terrorism from across the borders. That of course derailed the investigation.
Muslim youths who had nothing to do with the attack were arrested from Rajasthan and other places and are still languishing in prison. The suit cases, bottles and batteries were of course bought in Indore. Then happened Malegaon, thanks to Hemant Karkare.
Karkare admitted on August 18, 2008 that he had found no trace of SIMI in the bomb attack on September 8, 2006. Next month Malegaon suffered another attack on September 29 2008. He caught the real culprits and then someone again stymied. ATS found the mobile phone number of Dr Bipin Parekh with sadhvi Pragyasingh and Ramchandra Kalsangra. The line of investigation did not go any further. But the approver Abrar Ahmed mentioned in his April 2009 affidavit that Parekh along with Dr Rajender Amin and others had caused the blast in 2006.
However, strangely the phone records of Malegaon accused Ramchandra Kalsangra lifted veil from the secrecy of those who had actually bought suitcases, bottles and batteries from Indore that were in fact used on Samjhhauta express on February 18 2007. Pranav Mandal not only had close association with Kalsangra alias Ramji of sadhvi Pragyasingh but was a member of another of the uncountable and ever expanding Hindu right outfits, Shivaji vikas mandal. Indeed so many of these are there that a thesaurus of terror would be half filled with them. Accidental bomb explosions in Goa, Kanpur, Nanded (twice) have played havoc with the numbers. Thus the new line of investigation by the CBI is pertinent but we have to wait and see if it is also persistent.
Goa blast was also accidental. However, what were more persistent and pertinent were the ominous repots over the years how Goa was used to train the terrorists of the Hindu right. No significant action was taken in this regard. Could all this add up to what SM Mushrif argues in his book "Who Killed Karkare: the real face of terrorism in India", that the driving force of Hindu right terrorism is to put innocent Muslims in the dock and bring a bad name to Muslims of the country?
Terrorism in Goa: the plot thickens
Malgonda Patil who died in the Margao explosion was from the Sangli unit of the Sanatan Saunsthan. Sangli and Miraj had recently been scenes of communal riots over the controversy of the gory depiction of Shivaji killing Afzal Khan. The purpose of the display was obvious: provoking people on a sensitive historical divisive event and sowing seeds of hatred. In Miraj the SS had distributed literature that was starkly communal. During the riots Patil had been traveling between the headquarters of SS at Ramnathi and Miraj. By carrying out bomb attack on the eve of Diwali the calculated aim was creating communal disharmony, suspicion and hatred. The target was an age old local tradition of competition of effigies, Narakasura, which is not a canonized tradition of Hinduism. Hindutva ideology is urbanized middle class drawing room creation of a monolithic Hindu society. Patil was in touch with one of the accused in Mahrashtra bombings of last year. Vikram Vinay Bhave. The scooter was traced to the wife of a Goa, minister. Jyotil Dhavalikar was known as a sympathizer of SS and yet the police did not do much. It could also be weak motivation, or bias.
The bomb blast in Margao and the other at Sancoale surely indicate how organized the Hindu right terrorists are. They also enjoy patronage within the governmental set up and the police and even the investigating agencies. A full year after the exposure of the Sanatan Sanstha's involvement in Thane and Vashi, Mumbai, and Panvel bomb attacks the governments and the police not only did not take any action like banning the organization but let it and other such organizations of the Hindu right flourish. This is in sharp contrast with swift ban of SIMI and branding by the Maharashtra government of the whole Ahlehadesh section of Muslims as extremist involved in terrorism. The central government followed suit.
There is too much of self justification on the part of the office bearers of the SS and it surely smacks of the self justification of Himani Savarker of the notoriety of bomb for bomb strategy. Could this too much self assurance be the product of the general support they enjoy among the power that be?
The other disturbing factor is how the explosives reached there. It is plausible that the arms haul of October 10, 2009 at Bhatkal found its way to Margao through sea route. Nagaraj Somaya Devadiga, Jattayya Devadiga and Anand Manjunath Devadiga were arrested. Although 1200 kg of ammonium nitrate, 3000 electric and 500 non electric detonators recovered from them, this loose end was not tied to the subsequent blasts in Goa. Even so coastal security police officer LH Nandesh does say that the ammunition was brought by the sea. There is also misgiving that the coastal security police have accepted bribe to suppress the matter. People in Bhatkal fear that this is repeat performance of Hubli court blast where Hindu right terrorists were involved and yet the Muslim youths picked up by police are still languishing in prison.
The bomb blast in Margao and the other at Sancoale surely indicate how organized the Hindu right terrorists are. They also enjoy patronage within the governmental set up and the police and even the investigating agencies. A full year after the exposure of the Sanatan Sanstha's involvement in Thane and Vashi, Mumbai, and Panvel bomb attacks the governments and the police not only did not take any action like banning the organization but let it and other such organizations of the Hindu right flourish. This is in sharp contrast with swift ban of SIMI and branding by the Maharashtra government of the whole Ahlehadesh section of Muslims as extremist involved in terrorism. The central government followed suit.
There is too much of self justification on the part of the office bearers of the SS and it surely smacks of the self justification of Himani Savarker of the notoriety of bomb for bomb strategy. Could this too much self assurance be the product of the general support they enjoy among the power that be?
The other disturbing factor is how the explosives reached there. It is plausible that the arms haul of October 10, 2009 at Bhatkal found its way to Margao through sea route. Nagaraj Somaya Devadiga, Jattayya Devadiga and Anand Manjunath Devadiga were arrested. Although 1200 kg of ammonium nitrate, 3000 electric and 500 non electric detonators recovered from them, this loose end was not tied to the subsequent blasts in Goa. Even so coastal security police officer LH Nandesh does say that the ammunition was brought by the sea. There is also misgiving that the coastal security police have accepted bribe to suppress the matter. People in Bhatkal fear that this is repeat performance of Hubli court blast where Hindu right terrorists were involved and yet the Muslim youths picked up by police are still languishing in prison.
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