A case for Proportionate Electorate System

After the Punjab fiasco Congress must have courage to look into it and ponder over Proportionate Electoral System and its benefits. India must adopt a political system which strengthen its integrity yet be more representative.

It is also a fact that if BSP support PES, it has larger chances in the electoral system. Even today, as far as vote share is concern, Mayawati has got 26% of total votes polled in UP which should have given her 105 seats in the current assembly in PES.

India will pay a heavy price if we do not shift to a better political alternative which is more representative in nature and yet unite India and its diverse communities where those who do not vote to a particular parties do not get thrashed as happening in Uttar-Pradesh at the moment., a system which give minorities their right to participate in power on equitable term and not at the mercy of a dominant community.

The current trend of democracy revolve around ‘particular’ community in each states which cobble together a few others ‘like minded’ while pitched in against those who ‘differ’. This has resulted in chaos and virtual caste war in different parts of the country which media may be reporting some time and hiding at other. Uttar-Pradesh will go through this phase now and it is the biggest challenge but then the poll results of Uttar-Pradesh and Punjab are an opportunity for those who fights for genuine representative democracy to push forward agenda for Proportionate Electorate System.

Vidya Bhushan Rawat in Counter currents. Here

Hemant Karkare, unsung hero of 26/11

In Hemant Karkare’s net (of investigations, of course) many big and small fishes of VHP, RSS, Bajrang Dal and Sanatan Sanstha (which has been found to be involved in Diwali-eve blasts in Goa last week) had been trapped. Serving and retired army officers, academics, serving and retired officials of India’s premier intelligence service were ensnared in Karkare’s fishing net. The menacing power of the latter groups, inspired by sustained anti-Muslim hate campaigns of the last six decades, gave the plot a sinister and highly destructive character.

Among the plans unearthed by Karkare was a blueprint for the assassination of 70 prominent Indians who could by a hindrance to the project of Hindutva. Interestingly, most of the persons marked for elimination would, naturally, be Hindus because it is they who primarily run the dispensation. The conspirators were also unhappy with organisations whose Hindutva they suspected to be less virulent than desired.

M. Zeyaul Huque in Milli Gazette. Here

Throw a shoe at Obama's betrayal

At 4:17pm GMT on Sunday, I threw a shoe at my television screen, aimed at US President Barack Obama, precisely at the moment he began to explain that the reference in his Thursday speech at the State Department to the 1967 borders was in accordance with the Israeli interpretation of these borders.

Not that I was thrilled with that speech either but it was at least as meaningless as his previous speeches on the topic. But at 4:17 he said there will be “no return to the borders of June 4, 1967” and the thousands who attended the AIPAC convention cheered wildly. Annexation of Israeli settlement blocs built illegally in the occupied West Bank and the creation of a small Palestinian bantustan in the spaces in between was the essence of Obama’s real vision for peace.

It was a soft shoe and all it did was to bounce off the screen. Being such a harmless weapon it was also directed at my Palestinian friends who since Friday explained, publicly, how unusual and important was Obama’s speech at the State Department.

It is tough enough to know that in the White House sits someone who betrayed not only the Palestinians, but all the oppressed people in the world and in the US he promised to engage and represent.

But I have turned on my TV set and moved to Puerta del Sol in Madrid — there where thousands of young people were reformulating the powerful message that came from Tahrir Square in Cairo and which was also heard on the borders of Palestine on Nakba Day and in London’s Trafalgar Square during recent student demonstrations.

It was a call of defiance against such political discourse and its poisonous effects. Yes, they say in Madrid as they did on Palestine’s borders, our lives are ruled and affected by smug, cynical and indifferent Western politicians who hold immense power to maintain the unjust world for years to come, but we have had enough of this and will resist it.

Ilan Pappe in Counter currents. More Here

A case of a Muslim reporter meeting a Muslim leader in jail!

Shahina K K, a journalist with Tehelka went to Karnataka to prepare an investigative report on the case on Abdul Nasar Madani, the Chairman of PDP. Madani had spend almost 10 years in Jail as an undertrial in the 1998 Coimbatore blast before he was let off without any charges on 1 August 2007. In her report ( Why is this man still in prison? , Tehelka Magazine, December 4th, 2010) Shahina tried to look into the police story that Madani had conspired in the Bengaluru blasts in separate meetings two years ago — one which took place in Madani’s rented home in Kochi and the other in the Lakkeri estate in Kodaku Karnataka.

Here, she not only talks of the reports about the many people who have questioned the police story - like James Varghese, the owner of Madani’s rented house in Kochi, and Madani’s brother Jamal Mohammed – but she also investigates the witnesses whose accounts have led the court to deny Madani bail. According to her investigations Shahina finds out that many of the witnesses have things to say that goes against the police story. For instance, Yoganand, a BJP worker whose testimony is recorded in the charge sheet, Shahina reports, does not even know that he is a witness in the Madani case !

Now this is a case of good investigative journalism, which has the power to unsettle the stories that are constantly being planted in the media by the police. However, just a few days after her report comes out, the Karnataka police slaps a case against Shahina under IPC 506, for “intimidating the witnesses.” No stretch of imagination allows one to view the attempt of a journalist to talk to the witnesses in a particular case as ‘intimidation.’ Yet, in this age of embedded journalism and paid news and the likes of Praveen Swamy and Burkha Dutt, this critical attempt at investigation which challenges a given police story, can easily be labeled thus and the journalist targeted. More importantly, Shahina’s case is further mediated through other important issues, which includes the political career of Abdul Nasar Madani, whose case she was investigating and her own identity as a Muslim woman.

Shahina’s attempt to investigate goes deep into the whole issue of how Abdul Nasar Madani, who holds a particular and important political position in Kerala, was incarcerated in jail for long years, without trail, and then acquitted with all charges against him unproved. This gross case of injustice was further extended when the police tried to implicate his wife Sufiya in the Bengaluru blasts that took place on 25th July 2008. Three months back, in spite of protests from various quarters in Kerala, Madani was arrested once again for conspiracy as one of the accused in the Bengaluru blasts. Later, his bail application was also dismissed considering what the court called the “nature and gravity of the offence.” The repercussions and the backlash on Shahina’s investigations are clearly connected to the case of Abdul Nazar Madani.

In fact, even to bring up the issue of Madani is to evoke anxieties about Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. In the words of Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood,
“a whole set of questionable assumptions, anxieties, and prejudices [are] embedded in the notion of Islamic fundamentalism.” (From their article: Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency.) This then is used as a bogey to deal with any kind of response, activity or political action from the location of a Muslim identity. However, no one worries that this political leader has been in jail for 10 long years without trail and that now, he is back in jail and being systematically denied bail. An issue that Shahina’s report addresses too, with its title: “Why is this man still in jail?” In fact, today, the question of terrorism and the Muslim can obfuscate all other questions about equality and justice. The Muslim, is caught in a construction that implicates him/her as inherently capable of terrorizing this country and therefore easily punishable. S/he is always already someone who can be easily pushed outside the ambit of the discourses of human rights and legal justice.

In fact, Madani is an important political voice in Kerala who addressed the question of Muslims and dalitbahujans after the Mandal-Masjid phenomenon of the 90s. Rooted in a discourse that drew from Islamic tenants, Madani’s vision focused on the inherent inequalities in Kerala society, both in terms of caste and religion. However his new political language was found 'deviant' and ignored or attacked by dominant discourses, mainly because of its allegiance to Islamic discourses and the Muslim identity. Thus Madani, who had been able to organize some of the most unprivileged sections in Kerala, is shorn of all his political credentials from within the stand point of the construction of the Muslim as the fundamentalist other of a Secular State/Culture.

The media has always stood strongly on the side of such dominant constructs all through the political career of Madani. Recently when his wife Soofiya Madani was alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy that led to the burning of a Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation bus at Kalamassery, Kochi in September 2005, reports in the media found her guilty even before Judicial processes could start. Similarly we have seen the media conniving with the Police/State on other issues concerning the “others” of Kerala. One can recall the maligning of the Dalit Human Rights Groups (DHRM) as terrorists and the false case of Love Jihad, where young Muslim men were accused of converting Hindu women into Islam after starting romantic relationships with them. However, when in May 17, 2009 6 Muslim men from a fishing community were killed and 47 others injured (27 of them had bullet injuries) in a police firing in Beemapally, most of the Malayalam media kept completely silent about this incident, which was one of the most violent incidents of police oppression that Kerala had ever witnessed. All this are surely signs of the impunity with which the Malayalam media treats issues that are related to its “others,” especially the Muslim.

It is this entrenched attitude of the media that Shahina’s report tries to confront, head on. However, it is a Shahina who is doing this and not just another journalist; like Madani, she too is caught in the same issues that haunt the Muslim location and identity. In fact, Shahina herself has reported how, when she went to the village to investigate, she was stopped by the police and asked whether she was a terrorist. Many of the papers in Karnataka like Sakthi, Prajavani and Kannada also reported the incident as a “suspicious” visit by a “group of Muslims !” Here, just as Madani’s Islamic roots could tarnish the weight and importance of his political career, Shahina’s Muslim name could do away with all her other identities.

It is no wonder then that a report in the Mathrubhumi faithfully reports the police version that Shahina and the others in her group tried to “threaten” the witnesses. Such a report, without even a preliminary kind of investigation, quickly reiterates the police story, putting the blame squarely on Shahina’s shoulders. This is exactly how much of the media has behaved in the case of Madani too. In many ways, it was the media in Kerala that raised the alarm against Madani so high and shrill that it was so easy for the police to get him back in jail and keep him there. We need to think seriously about all these issues raised in connection to the Shahina case.

Surely, as Shahina writes in her status message in Facebook: “this is not a case against me as an individual, but it is a warning to the entire press community not to try to quash the cooked up stories by the police.” Moreover, this is also yet another instance where the complex and often oppressive relationship of the Indian state and the Muslim minority is clearly revealed - a relationship in which the media has always played a highly dubious and questionable role. It is not surprising then that Shahina’s alternative mediation, to investigate into this and to reveal the fissures within many of our consensus has met with such a reaction. It is important that we reflect on these issues and extend our support to Shahina and to Madani, who is still in jail, also as a result of all these various, anti-minority mediations.

From  When Two Muslims Meet: The Media(ted) Case Of Madani And Shahina an analysis by K Ashraf & Jenny Rowena in Countercurrents. More Here
Tehelka article here

Unravelling Hindutva Terrorism

When the bombs went off at Malegaon in September 2006, killing about 40 people and injuring many more who had gathered for the Friday afternoon prayer at a local mosque, the first arrests were of Muslim men who were supposed to belong to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The police claimed to have cracked the case. Less than a year later, in May 2007, when a similar bomb exploded in Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid killing nine people, the police claimed that these were "sophisticated" bombs detonated via a cellphone located in Bangladesh and the main culprit was supposed to be a Muslim man affiliated to the Harkat-ul-Jehad al-Islami (HuJI). The police arrested some random young Muslims from the city and tortured them into confessing their "guilt". Six months later, when another bomb went off on the eve of the last Friday of Ramazan, in the Ajmer shrine in Rajasthan, it was again blamed on "jehadi terrorists".

It has taken the courageous, if simple, act by Hemant Karkare, the anti-terrorism squad chief of Maharashtra police, of following the available leads to show the linkages between the Malegaon bomb blasts and Hindutva-linked groups. Without this one single act, all these linkages would, perhaps, have remained hidden behind the lies and half-truths dished out by our security establishment. As is well known now, a group called Abhinav Bharat organised this attack. This group includes some religious figures as well as a serving officer of the Indian Army. There have been other clear instances of Hindutva groups involved in bomb making in Nanded, Kanpur, Bhopal and Goa. Most of these are linked to the Bajrang Dal, which is a front of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). There is now a clear linkage between the RSS and its fronts and personnel and a series of bomb blasts. This is apart from the evidence, much stronger, which links this redoubtable organisation, to scores of communal killings, the Gujarat riots of 2002 being the last of its "big" examples.

If terror derived from religious fundamentalism has one headquarter in India, it is the RSS. Their younger siblings, the Islamic, Sikh or Christian fundamentalists, though dangerous in their own ways, cannot match the organisational network, financial muscle or political legitimacy that the RSS – its affiliates and personnel – possess. After all, India’s principal opposition party is a 100% subsidiary of the RSS and it is the shrill communal politics of this "family" which has created that political climate where any terrorist act could be, despite all evidence, linked to Muslims.

Nevertheless, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism among Muslim communities is a serious issue. It has dangerous consequences, not just for its regressive social and political effects on the Muslims themselves, and needs to be fought with vigour. Islamic fundamentalism has also incubated and nurtured terrorist organisations and initiated violent acts, not just in India but also all over the world. None of this can be denied nor can the guard against Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism be lowered.

However, it is now amply clear that our security agencies, government institutions and ministries, specially the home ministry, are deeply compromised by communal prejudice. In each of the cases highlighted above, and in many more, the prima facie evidence, both forensic and circumstantial, pointed to the involvement of Hindutva groups. Yet, unmindful of all evidence, they refused to follow open, clear leads pointing to Hindutva groups, but rather went around building fairy tales about Islamic terrorism’s involvement, picking up random Muslim men (and some women), torturing them till they accepted their "guilt" and finally claiming success in the case. As late as January this year, when the Hindutva terror link to Malegaon had been firmly established, and the Rajasthan police were already questioning the accused of the Ajmer blasts for their links to the Mecca Masjid bombs, the Hyderabad police was merrily arresting Muslims who, they claimed, were linked to the Mecca Masjid blast of 2007. The complicity of the Gujarat, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh police in the murder of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife, or the killing of Ishrat Jehan and her friends is now clearly established. There is also prima facie evidence of communal prejudice and wrongdoing in police action in cases like the Batla House encounter in Delhi. Unfortunately, the list of cases where communal prejudice by the police and security establishment is evident is so long that it can fill volumes.

While there has been some effort to recognise and address caste and gender prejudices and discriminations, there has been a certain cussedness about not accepting and redressing the discrimination and prejudice against religious minorities, particularly the Muslims. The present United Progressive Alliance government has taken some commendable steps to address this issue, primarily through reports of the Sachar Committee and the Ranganath Misra Commission. These have opened up space to discuss the structural discrimination and prejudice against Muslims in India as well as the measures needed to redress this. It is also true that the criminal link between Hindutva groups and bomb blasts has come to the fore under this regime. Nevertheless, this is not sufficient; urgent steps are needed to disinfect our security establishment of the communal virus. Whether the present Home Minister P Chidambaram can measure up to this task, and whether the Congress Party can find the political will to take on Hindutva inside the administration and state structures, is an open question.

From the editorial of EPW the Economic and Political Weekly

To read in full click here. and here

Binayak Sen, India and Justice!!

“How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness?

“One man must not kill. If he does it is murder. Two, ten, one hundred men, acting on their own responsibility, must not kill. If they do, it is still murder. But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is no murder. It is just, necessary, commendable and right. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent.

“But how many does it take? This is the question. Just so with theft, robbery, burglary, and all other crimes. Man-stealing is a great crime in one man, or a very few men only. But a whole nation can commit it, and the act becomes not only innocent, but highly honorable…

“Verily there is magic in numbers! The sovereign multitude can out-legislate the Almighty, at least in their own conceit. But how many does it take? Just enough to make a nation.…Alexander the Great demanded of a pirate, by what right he infested the seas. By the same right, retorted the pirate, that Alexander ravages the world. How far was he from the truth?”

- Adin Ballou, American social reformer and abolitionist (1803-90)

A famous story links two great Americans. When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846, the great naturalist Henry Thoreau, in an act of civil disobedience, refused to pay his taxes as a mark of protest against US actions and was sent to prison for his sin against the state. His close friend and mentor from Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to see him in jail. Emerson quipped “what are you doing inside?” Thoreau's reply made Emerson blush. “What are you doing outside ?”, he replied.

There are times when jails become one of the few places of honour left in the world. Where, after all, would you like to find yourself if robbers and murderers were masquerading before the public as magistrates, judges and hangmen?

India today finds itself crouched in one such corner of shame, wherein those with permeable skin feel out of place before the television sets in their own living rooms. The air is thick with suspicion and accusation as the odour of staggering injustices hangs about us everywhere one goes.

While well-known serial killers gamely garner tickets from national parties for the parliamentary elections and mass-murderers sagely deliver their homilies from our television screens, women and men of integrity and courage must lurk and slide in the dark alleys of our cities or in the forlorn jungles of the land. It is a state of affairs which would have appalled and nauseated decent citizens a generation ago, let alone the heroes and heroines of our freedom movement. The sad truth is that as a civilisation India 's standing in the world has suffered a precipitous fall during the last several years, even as our elated elite's vainglorious aspirations to super-power-hood never miss a morning to announce themselves. Are they out of step, or the rest of us? Time will tell, though it is as much up to us to determine which way the die of destiny will roll.

If Adin Ballou is right, and the multitude is indeed sovereign (“un punishable”, in the words of Edmund Burke), the question for us in India today becomes as to which multitude is the more important one, the one which is suffering the lies and crimes of our leaders, or the numerically far lesser one which prospers on their patronage. It is for us, the citizenry of this beleaguered country, to ensure that we find the courage to determine the morally correct order of importance. Or else, posterity will curse us.

The case of Dr. Binayak Sen

After six decades of freedom from colonial rule, India is still a largely poor country. One of the most severe forms of deprivation suffered by the poor is with respect to health, particularly so in a time when the cost of drugs, tests and health care has shot up so dramatically, thanks to the “liberalization” and privatization of the health sector. In such a context, it is worth asking how many Indian paediatricians one can name who have given 30 years of their lives – as a volunteer – in unstinting service to the needy poor in the countryside. At a guess, the actual number is in three figures, or perhaps even in two digits. But the name of Dr. Binayak Sen surely figures prominently among them.

Are we just going to sit and watch?

A universe of human struggle for dignity stands between rule by men and the rule of law. Some of the more glorious chapters in the history of the world since the American and the French revolutions occupy this universe.

Today in India we live – de facto – under the rule of men, rather than under the rule of law. As the moral decline of the Indian justice system keeps pace with the decay of the polity (there are over 25 million pending cases in our courts), are we going to keep sipping beer and munching chips while watching the IPL on Television every night? How long before the government admits that – election or no election – it can never assure the security of sportsmen and women again, the state Pakistan has already reached?

22 Nobel Laureates – including 9 in medicine, 9 in Chemistry, 2 in Physics and 2 in Economics – signed a petition a year ago asking for the unconditional release of Binayak Sen. They expressed “grave concern” that Dr. Sen has been held in prison for the peaceful exercise of fundamental human rights. They point out that this is in contravention of Articles 19 (freedom of opinion and expression) and 22 (freedom of association) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which India is a signatory. They also point out that Dr.Sen is charged under two internal security laws that do not conform to international human rights standards.

There was not a single Indian name in that list . Does that say something about us?

Our outrage at the perpetrators of injustice needs to be louder and more relentless. We need to subject state functionaries to the same standards that they reserve for us citizens. Our judgment of truth and falsehood, right and wrong have suffered enormous reverses since the days of globalization and 24/7 entertainment began. If you think I am exaggerating consider taking a little quiz.

What is common to the following group of people? Socrates, Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, Kwame Nkrumah, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Binayak Sen

Irom Sharmila, Martin Luther King Jr., Henry Thoreau, Bertrand Russell, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Leon Trotsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin.

Write your answer down.

Now consider a second group of people and try to see what they have in common: Mullah Omar, Osama Bin Laden, Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar

H.K.L Bhagat, Narendra Modi, Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjea, Bal Thackeray, George Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, John Howard, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Ferdinand Marcos

Idi Amin, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Write your answer.

Now you can compare your answers with the right one. The first group of people all belong to a set who went to prison for speaking up against the injustices of their respective governments. The second group of people are mass-murderers who have been so fortunate as to never have to stand trial for their crimes. It is time to find our moral balance.

To read the rest of the article click here.
Aseem Srivastava could be contacted at aseem62@yahoo.com

Just The Tip Won't Do: Expose The Whole Iceberg

Kavita Krishnan has said explicitly and boldly. The following is the excerpts from her article on Latest developments:

No longer can the Sangh Parivar and BJP ever disown its role in terrorism. A former firebrand ABVP leader and so-called 'sadhvi', Pragya Singh Thakur, has been arrested for her role in the Malegaon blasts of September 2006 as well as in the more recent Modasa blasts. Even more ominously, two ex-Army officers are implicated in the blasts, and it has come to light that an institution called the 'Bhonsala Military Academy' in Nagpur has been imparting arms training to the Bajrang Dal.

The Sangh Parivar has reacted by disclaiming its links with 'sadhvi' on the one hand, and on the other, by suggesting that it is inconceivable that a 'sadhvi' could be a terrorist. BJP spokesperson Venkaiyya Naidu has reminded us that according to the rule of law, the sadhvi is innocent till proven guilty, and the BJP has objected strongly to the term 'Hindutva terrorism.'

For a minute, imagine if the story were the same – with just one detail changed: replace the 'sadhvi' with a 'maulvi.' Then imagine the righteous roars that would be voiced by the BJP, demanding blood. In the Jamia Nagar blasts case, the BJP would not allow teenage boys the benefit of 'rule of law;' they castigated the Jamia VC for arranging legal aid, and in UP, Sangh cadre have beaten up lawyers taking up cases of blast-accused. Muslims accused of terrorism, it seems, are guilty even if proven innocent, and are certainly not entitled to the opportunity to prove themselves innocent!

There is ample proof that the sadhvi has campaigned for the BJP in elections, and has appeared in public gatherings with BJP President Rajnath Singh and MP CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan. Under POTA, as under the Chhattisgarh Special Security Act, those who are associated with or have known the accused can be prosecuted as 'conspirators.' Will the BJP tell us why Rajnath and Shivraj should not be prosecuted as 'conspirators' according to the principles espoused by the BJP itself? Surely there is more ground to prosecute Rajnath or Shivraj of conspiring with saffron terrorists than there is to prosecute Dr.Binayak Sen for links with Maoists?

What were Pragya Thakur's known activities? Her role in the communal pogrom in Gujarat 2002 is indicated: in fact, she campaigned for the BJP in Surat in 2002 and again in 2007. Her father, defending her, offers proof of some of the noble work she was known for: "Pragya and her organisation Jai Vande Matram would rescue girls who eloped with boys of another community, sometimes bring them back to their parents." So, like the notorious Babu Bajrangi, Pragya was involved in terrorising, kidnapping and coercing women who had married of their own accord outside their community. Pragya is proof positive of the fact that the same forces who openly indulge in communal pogroms and obscurantism violence against women could in fact be secretly involved in terrorism.

This said, it is also important to ask why the above facts were kept hidden from us for the past two years. Soon after the Malegaon blasts, in nearby Nanded, Bajrang Dal activists were accidentally killed by their own bombs, and investigation had revealed fake beards and 'Muslim-looking' clothing in their home. In other parts of Maharashtra and the country – Parbhani, tenkasi, Kanpur, Faizabad – there have been leads linking saffron forces to bomb blasts. Had these leads been pursued, is it not possible that some subsequent terrorist incidents could have been avoided? The state and ruling establishment is criminally guilty of ignoring these vital leads.

We are everyday asked to believe as gospel whatever is peddled as 'fact' by the police via the media in a terror investigation: to question is to be branded 'anti-national.' It is worth recalling that on November 26, 2007, less than two months after the Malegaon blasts, Director General of Police P S Pasricha had claimed to have 'solved' the case. Several Muslims were arrested and paraded, the names SIMI and Lashkar were bandied about, involvement of Pakistan and training received by the 'masterminds' in Pakistan pointed to. The police over the next two years have confidently given us detailed 'facts' about how the 8 arrested conceived of and executed the blasts. Those arrested were also linked with the Mumbai train blasts, according to the police. The ATS has prima facie "ruled out the involvement of Hindu fundamentalist groups in the Malegaon blasts" claiming that "RDX is only available to Islamic terrorist outfits." (TOI, 12 September 2006) Three of the accused were said to have "confessed" to the crime.

Now, we are told that the motorbike used in the September 29 Malegaon bomb blasts was registered in Pragya's name, and this led to her arrest. Are we to believe that the police took two years to find out the registration details of a bike involved in the blasts? The same police that just have to take one look at a bomb site to tell us confidently the exact nationality and organisational affiliation of the perpetrators? Is there any material at all – including RDX – that ex-Army men cannot easily have access to? Will the police explain to us how the 'confessions' of three Muslim men were secured (will they admit to torture)? Who will restore freedom, and apologise for character assassination and torture, to those who for the past two years have been blamed for blasts they did not do? Most importantly, are we really to believe that the Governments at State and Centre did not know all along about the activities of the Bhonsala Military Academy, and the fact that it was openly holding arms training camps for Bajrang Dal goons from all over the country? Blasts aside, how come such training camps for communal outfits were not deemed illegal and banned even as Bajrang Dal brigades repeatedly conducted anti-Muslim and anti-Christian violence?

The recent revelations in the Malegaon blasts put every ongoing blast investigation under a cloud and a question mark. Clearly, the police suppressed all the trails that led to Sangh outfits and BJP leaders – allowing these terrorists to roam free and contest and campaign in elections – while misleading the nation by framing innocents of a minority community. Is it not all too possible that this is happening in every single blast investigation?

To read more, click here. Thank you, counter currents!!
Also read : Malegaon, Mecca Masjid and Justice!!
Also read : The cat is out of the bag!
Also read : Abhinav, Godse and bombs!!