The Hindutva Bajrang Dal-VHP terrorists whose ‘fingerprints’ are all over the September 8 Malegaon bomb blasts in India must be tried and punished
Washington, D.C., Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - It is nothing new that weeks after the September 8 serial (three) bomb blasts in the mosques of Maharashtra’s Muslim-majority city of Malegaon in India, (situated 160 miles northeast of Mumbai and 240 miles from Nanded) which killed 38 innocent Muslim worshippers and injured over a hundred, the government is till struggling to determine the identity of the perpetrators. This, the government agencies going dumb, is normal procedure in India when the murdered victims are from any minority community like the Sikhs or Muslims or Christians or Dalits. Malegaon bomb blasts may be a wake up call for us Sikhs about the safety of our holy Gurdwara Sahib in Nanded!Examples from the past show that the Indian government is still looking for the guilty who murdered over ten thousand innocent Sikh, men, women and children during the state-supervised pogrom of November 1984 in Delhi and other parts of India. The perpetrators of the 2002 Gujerat state-sponsored pogrom in which over two thousand Muslims were murdered, and a hundred thousand made homeless, have also not been caught. The state machinery has also not been able to round up the Hindu Shiv Sena thugs of Bal Thakray who murdered thousands of Muslims in Mumbai in 1992 and so on. The People's Tribunal on the 1992 Bombay Violence, headed by Justices Daud and Suresh, estimated that 2,000 were killed during that pogrom. The Srikrishna Commission inquired into the 1992 Mumbai violence and recommended the prosecution of numerous individuals. This has not happened.
The Malegaon blasts occurred just before 2:00 pm on Friday September 8, 2006, at three different places -- nearly simultaneously -- leaving a trail of death and destruction. These explosions came less than two months after the serial train blasts in Mumbai which killed nearly 200 people on July 11, 2006. The September 8 Malegaon blasts were near the main mosque-cum-graveyard where people had come to pray for the dead on the occasion of Shab-e-Barat a Muslim festival of prayer. A near-stampede broke out immediately after the blasts as devotees, including children, rushed out of the narrow gate in panic with many of them trampling over the dead bodies and those seriously injured. Local officials said that over 100 people, injured in the blasts, were rushed to Malegaon’s Wadia Hospital, (the only hospital serving the 300, 000 inhabitants of Malegaon city) while some of the seriously wounded were moved to Nashik, about 100km from Malegaon. The devotees inside the mosques also helped the injured rush to nearby doctors on every available mode of transport including pushcarts. The central government did not send any medical relief teams but rushed over 3000 Central Reserve Police Force and Rapid Action Forces jawans besides over 500 personnel of Special Reserve Police to assist the local administration in maintaining law and order. According to reports, mobile networks remained jammed in Malegaon and Nasik, similar to the situation that developed after the Mumbai blasts on July 11. Communication amongst senior police officers also became difficult due to the jammed network.
Three weeks after the September 8 bombings, the Maharashtra Police appears nowhere near bridging these fractures with facts. So far the police have sketches of two men who purchased the cycles on which the bombs were fitted, and testimony suggesting that one spoke with a western Uttar Pradesh accent. On just who they might have been, though, there is no hard evidence - and investigators seem to be getting desperate. One Malegaon resident, textile worker Mohammad Irfan, has even claimed that the local police offered him a bribe of Rs.500,000 to admit to a role in the bombings. It is obvious that the Police is trying to protect the real culprits by trying to blame the Muslim minority for arranging the bomb blasts against their own community. It is just asinine as saying that the Sikh organizations were the perpetrators of the mass murder of the Sikh community in Delhi, and other cities of India, in November 1984.
A leading Indian journalist, Praful Bidwai, sickened by the Police attempts to cover up the obvious in the Malegaon bomb blasts story, has in his latest article, headlined, “A LITMUS TEST OF IMPARTIALITY,” published in India’s leading news magazine FRONTLINE of October 6, 2006, has said that, “Fairness of the investigations into the Malegaon blasts will decide whether the Indian state can re-establish its secular credentials and win Muslim hearts. The Malegaon bomb attacks have triggered a peculiar contest within the Indian security establishment, which is centered on how to deny the obvious. The obvious in this case is the specific and successful targeting of Muslims in significant-scale violence for the first time in India, which raises uncomfortable questions about the dominant official view or paradigm of terrorism and counter-terrorism. This paradigm holds that terrorism in this country is essentially inspired by Islamic fundamentalism and usually assisted by Pakistani secret agencies.”
Bidwai goes on to say in his FRONTLINE article that, “The dominant view cannot countenance the possibility that Hindutva militants belonging to extremist outfits like the Bajrang Dal or Vishwa Hindu Parishad might be the culprits in Malegaon. So it minimizes, as it must, vital clues and pointers - including the timing of the explosions after Friday prayers in a crowded mosque, during the Shab-e-Barat observances, which draw huge numbers of pilgrims and beggars into Malegaon; the discovery of bicycles with Hindu names painted on them, on which the bombs were planted; a local history of Hindu-Muslim tension and intense communal polarization; and, above all, the involvement of Bajrang Dal extremists in bomb fabrication efforts in the Marathwada region, which is adjacent to Malegaon and in many ways similar to the North Maharashtra area in which the town is itself located. Equally, the dominant paradigm must resort to increasingly convoluted explanations: Islamists executed the Malegaon attacks to provoke a violent reaction and widen the communal divide so as to destabilise India; their general motive is always to spread randomly ‘mayhem, confusion and fear’; Islamist terrorists have never had any compunctions about killing large numbers of other Muslims, however devout, especially if they do not follow rigid Wahhabi Islam; jehadi terrorists need have no location-specific motive; they are forever willing to kill, even commit suicide, to advance their fanatical cause; they are profoundly irrational, or downright mad, and blinded by hatred; they commit violence, because, well, they are terrorists. None of this is very convincing. Indeed, the more convoluted the explanation, the less plausible it sounds.”
“Sound political judgment must supplement forensic evidence,” says Bidwai. “And that judgment tells us that Hindutva fanatics can be as capable of causing terrorist violence and mayhem as jehadis. Ever since the Ayodhya mobilisation in the mid-1980s, Hindutva fanaticism has left a trail of blood through numerous States and cities, Mumbai in 1992 and Gujarat in 2002 being the two ghastliest episodes. The number of people killed in each of these, roughly 2000, greatly exceeds the casualties in any terrorist bombing in this country. Close to Malegaon, both literally and figuratively, lie Nanded, Parbhani, Purna and Jalna, all in Marathwada, which have over the past three-and-a-half years witnessed bomb attacks (or preparations for attacks) targeted at Muslims and specifically at mosques. The culprits in each case appear to be Hindutva fanatics. There is clinching evidence of this in Nanded, where two Bajrang Dal activists Naresh Rajkondwar and Himanshu Panse were killed on April 6 while attempting to fabricate a bomb along with fellow-extremists Rahul Pande, Yogesh Deshpande, Maruti Wagh and Gururaj Tupttewar. The incident occurred in the house of a known RSS activist and Bajrang Dal-VHP member. It was investigated by the Secular Citizens' Forum and People's Union of Civil Liberties, Nagpur. There is convincing photographic evidence to show that the Bajrang Dal was indeed running a bomb-fabrication operation. Some of the pictures also showed that the local police tried to cover up Bajrang Dal-VHP involvement by planting fire-crackers - to suggest that the blast was caused by crackers, not bombs - and false beards. These findings were corroborated by K.P. Raghuvanshi, head of Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad. In an interview to Communalism Combat (June 2006), he described the Nanded bomb-fabrication as a "terrorist act" by "Hindus": "It is clear that these bombs were not being manufactured for a puja. They were being manufactured for unlawful ends to wreak violence through terror."
Praful Bidwai makes a very convincing argument when he says that, “It is of the utmost importance that the police investigate the Malegaon incident and the events leading up to it with scrupulous objectivity and impartiality and make full public disclosure of all relevant facts after completing the investigation. Any slip on their part will generate suspicion that they are shielding a particular group out of communal prejudice. The Malegaon police force is a classic embodiment of "institutionalised communalism", which has repeatedly clashed with and punished Muslims. Three days after the bombings, it gratuitously got into a confrontation with a Muslim gathering and opened fire. It must be restrained and its criminal investigations must be supplemented with the very best expertise available in the country from among officers with proven secular credentials. The mood among Maharashtra's Muslims is one of sullenness, despondency and resentment at their harassment by the police. This default, and many other injustices and iniquities reflected in the exclusion of Muslims and the discrimination against them, will have terrible consequences. Today, Malegaon has become an all-important litmus test. The Indian state must begin to decommunalise its counter-terrorism strategy and reaffirm secularism and pluralism. It must win back the confidence of the Muslim community by proving its secular credentials. Malegaon is the place to do it.”
We Sikhs endorse Mr. Bidwai’s solid argument about the course of action the Indian government should take to find the guilty responsible for the September 8 Malegaon bomb blasts as we Sikhs too, as a minority community, await a similar action to locate the guilty who killed thousands of Sikh, men women and children in November 1984 state-supervised pogrom all over India.