Courage has a face in Kunan-Poshpora

TABISH NASEER

Kunan-Poshpora (Kupwara): If courage had a face, it would resemble 50-year-old Bhakti’s. In the North Kashmir hamlet of Kunan-Poshpora, where agony and adversity to women was forced upon, on the intervening night of 23rd and 24th February, 1991, through the “weapon of rape”, she stood stoically against the perpetrators of the crime very few are capable of.

A grab from a video taken few days after the incident shows desolate Kunan village

The incident that is perhaps written as the night of “oppression and brutality” may also be inked as a night when a mother of six daughters showed unrelenting courage and braved “terror leashing men even when gods turned their shoulders and watched silently”.

In Bhakti’s words, the wintry silence was broken by the trampling noises as she was attending her ailing husband who had suffered a heart attack few days back. Then there were cries that cut through the heart of the dead night.

“I first thought there was some quarrel between neighbours and went out to see where the noise was coming from,” she says.

It wasn’t a duel between neighbours. Army’s 4 Raj Rifles of 68 Brigade C/o 56 APO had launched a search operation in the two villages situated about five kilometers from the Kupwara Township. A section of troopers, who the locals claim were in an inebriated state, had gone on a rampage.

“Men held at gun points, women fleeing homes, open air interrogations” – all this happened away from the media glare on that cold wintry night. Women ran about as if chased by “wild animals”, she exclaims.

A video grab shows villagers listening to heads during a meeting

Suddenly tentacles of fear gripped, for moments she remained unmoved. “None of my daughters were married then, they were young and when I discovered what had befallen Kunan, I became numb … my daughters were sitting around their father’s bed,” she says.

Her numbness was broken by a loud knock. A woman who was fleeing from the troopers stood at the gate shouting for help. “I could not sit and listen to her cries. Somehow I overcame fear and ran towards the door,” she recalls.

Taja (name changed) stood at the door, breathless; she lived over a hundred yards away. “They (troopers) had barged into our house and caught hold of my sister-in-law and I managed to give them a slip through the door that leads to our kitchen garden,” says Taja.

Sensing trouble Bhakhti dragged her in and bolted the door quickly. “I asked one of my daughters to get water for her and then she narrated the story. Instead of making me worried I somehow lost fear,” Bhakti exclaims.

With fear written all over her face, Taja sobbed. She was restless till a thunderous bang at the main door made her stop. “She crouched in my arms as if she was dead,” says one of Bhakti’s daughter (name withheld).

The troopers had barged into the house compound. “My mother went to the door opened it and straight away asked for the officer heading the party of troopers, we could hear it from the room we were sitting in,” says her daughter.

She stood at the door and “refused to move till she saw the officer”. A call was made on the wireless. “He came and asked me why I wasn’t allowing his men to conduct search and I sternly replied that I had six daughters and I doubted his men,” says Bhakti.

Village heads during a meeting few days after the incident

An awkward silence followed and the officer asked his men to move away. Her courage grew and she ventured out to see if she could help more women. Her neighbour, Fahmida (name changed) recalls, “Many women were fleeing from the troopers and she dared to go out and give these women shelter,” adding “she stood guard at the gate of her house and forced back the troopers while her daughters looked after their ailing father and women who successfully fled from the clutches of the troopers.”

Her confrontation with the troopers ended only when they left at dawn. The night had passed witnessing the battle between “oppressor and oppressed”. However, the day saw a battle between “courage and cowardice”. “When the army left that morning, I went to a clinic to fetch a doctor. On my way, I noticed that the troopers had installed a video camera and were forcing men to record statements in their favour,” she vividly remembers. The sight perturbed her and she yelled at the group of men who were giving out statements. “If I had a gun I would kill all of you right here and would hand your widows to the army, do you people have a slightest idea of what has happened to your wives and daughters in your homes,” she recalls shouting angrily.

Ducking their chins in their cloaks in shame, the group of men grew uneasy. Her reminder prompted them to cut loose. Perhaps this was the moment that instigated the people to seek action. Rhate, her neighbour confirms, “People started to gather immediately after Bhakti shouted at them and they started to think of police action against the army.”

It was noon, the village heads were in serious consultation thinking about the course of action. A senior official from the army walked into the village demanding clean chit. Speaking in front of the gathering, the official vouched for his men. While villagers listened carefully, Bhakti, who stood in the crowd shouted at the official, “You had 10,000 army men with you?” He nodded. She asked, “Where were they all night? You yourself were standing outside the village where our men were interrogated. How do you know what was your army doing in the village?”

Video grab shows a victim holding her baby

She gently moved an 80-year-old woman who was also a rape victim (The woman has passed away). “I bought her in front of the major and asked him, tell me isn’t she your mother… look at her torn clothes…what explanation would you offer now? All of them put their heads down in shame,” she recalls.

A few days later, the official came again, this time asking specifically for Bhakti, but she refused. Abdul Ahad Dar, the Sarpanch of Kunan while acknowledging says, “The officer came a few times probably to strike a deal and wanted to speak to Bhakti in person as she was at the forefront of the protest against the army.”

She refused bluntly, but the officer persisted upon a meeting. “It was only after some village elders convinced her to meet the officer, she relented,” Dar adds.

Bhakti says, “The officer had said to her that they had made an appeal which was granted and they were ready to pay compensation, provided villagers say that army has not done anything here.”

“Even if you give me money equaling the length and breadth of this house even then I won’t change my word. Till the judgment day the blood will ooze from our wounds,” was Bhakti’s reply.

Jan 26th: India’s Republic Day is black day in Srinagar-always!

By Pakistan Patriot

SRINAGAR (IHK): Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control and across the world will observe Indian Republic Day – today – as Black Day to convey to the international community that Indian claim of being a democratic republic is a hoax as it continues to deny the Kashmiris their right to self-determination, reports KMS.

Call for the observance of the Day has been given by the APHC Chairman, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, veteran Kashmiri Hurriyet leader Syed Ali Gilani and the High Court Bar Association.

The day will be marked by a complete strike in occupied Kashmir with all business establishments, offices, banks and courts remaining closed.

Ahead of the Black Day, tomorrow, a red alert has been sounded in the occupied territory, with Indian troops and police intensifying their search operations and frisking of pedestrians and motorists.

The areas around Bakhshi Stadium, the venue of the main official function in Srinagar, are under siege as the troops have strengthened their vigil by occupying all high-rise buildings. Surveillance cameras have also been installed around the Stadium.

On the other hand, forceful anti-India demonstrations, marked with complete shutdown, continued for the second consecutive day, Monday against the killing of a civilian by Indian troops in Kalampora area of Pulwama. Senior APHC leader, Shabbir Ahmad Shah, along with a dozen Hurriyet activists, was arrested at Kakpora while on his way to visit the family of the martyred.

The APHC Chairman, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, in a statement issued in Srinagar on Monday strongly denounced the killing of the civilian and the arrest of Shabbir Ahmad Shah. He said that withdrawal of Indian troops was imperative to bring an end to the human rights violations in the occupied territory. Kashmiris to observe Black Day today

Pakistan Times Jammu & Kashmir Desk

Muslim future in India

Khaled Ahmed

It has become a part of our nationalism to highlight communal trouble in India. We don’t realise that this kind of thinking is not good for the Muslims there. Scholars think that if India and Pakistan proceed on their hostile course and threaten each other with nuclear weapons, Muslims in India will face the possibility of subordination, expulsion and genocide.

This is gleaned from the history of what happened to such minorities elsewhere in the world. But if things remain normal, the Muslims of India will face the following four options: assimilation, pluralism, secession and dominance. This is the thesis of the volume Living with Secularism: The Destiny of India’s Muslims: Edited by Mushirul Hasan; (Manohar, India, 2007).

The following Indian states have Muslim minorities, as indicated by percentages: Assam (28 per cent), Kerala (23 per cent) West Bengal (23 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (17.3 per cent), Bihar (16 per cent) and Karnataka (16 per cent). Needless to say the largest number live in UP, where the total population is more than that of Pakistan.

Indian scholar Mushirul Hasan wrote, Will secular India survive? (2004) and challenged the doctrine of Hindutva spread around by the BJP. After 2004, Hindutva has not gone away. It threatens the Muslims more than the other communities because: 1) Muslims are the largest religious minority in India and the latter has the second largest Muslim population in the world; 2) Muslims are erstwhile rulers of India and the memory presents them as a threat to the Hindu majority; 3) Muslims are considered as members of a settler colony by Sangh Pariwar; 4) Muslims get excluded because of majoritarian nationalism with Pakistan as the ‘other’, and because Indian Muslims are seen as a separatist population; 5) Muslims are targets of all communal riots; 6) Muslims serve as instruments of Hindu unity under Hindutva because India is presented as being under threat from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir; 7) Muslims spoil the Indian monolithic identity as a Hindu Rashtra and are an obstacle in India’s unification.

What will happen to the Muslims of India? Muslim threat is expressed by the fact that their population, although only 13 per cent of the total, has grown to this number in fifty years, more quickly as compared to the Hindus. Is this fear comparable to the Christian fear of ethnic supersession by Muslims through birth rate, aroused in Lebanon after 1943, ending in the civil war of 1975-88? There is a Muslim majority in Kashmir and large Muslim minorities in West Bengal and Assam near the border of an adjoining Muslim state that equally arouses fear and loathing.

Southern and coastal India don’t hate the Muslims as much as the Indian north and northwest, but may begin to have communal riots as the BJP and its friends spread their influence there. It is possible that the Muslims may actually be squeezed into the coastal areas in the South to join the non-threatening ‘middlemen Muslims’: Memons, Khojas, Bohras, Navayats, Marakayyars, Lebais, Rawthors and Mapillas. They pose no threat to the majority dominance.

Muslims in Hyderabad, Bhopal and Junagadh are humorously equated to past elite but they are, in fact, local poor Hindu converts who can never challenge Hindus unless they step out of poverty and acquire education.

But the final solution lies in Indo-Pakistan relations. Conceptual solutions don’t appeal in South Asia because the social sciences have been neglected here. Indirect solutions, like free trade that brings prosperity to the masses, and getting rid of the paranoia of the state – read dominance of intelligence agencies – could normalise relations and remove the fear of war and save the Muslims of India from being persecuted.

The writer is a director at the South Asia Free Media Association, Lahore khaled.ahmed@tribune.com.pk

Indian pundit confesses bombing Samjhota express

NEW DELHI: Swami Aseemanand’s confession to his role in the Pakistan-bound Samjhauta Express train blast in 2007 has also exposed the hand of the ultra right wing in several other attacks.

In this 42-page confessionary statement in Hindi given to an Indian, Aseemanand has unravelled the inner workings of the terror network.

Aseemanand lays bare an explosive story about the involvement of a few ultra right-wing leaders, including himself in planning and executing a series of bombings. He confesses laying down the “bomb for bomb” revenge approach.

According to him, it was not just a group like the Abhinav Bharat that engineered the blasts. RSS national executive member Indresh Kumar allegedly handpicked and financed some RSS pracharaks to carry out terror attacks.

Aseemanand claims that Indresh had deputed Sunil Joshi a former RSS pracharak of Mhow district for this job. Joshi was expelled from the RSS after being accused in the murder of two Congress activists in Madhya Pradesh in 2006. In 2007, he was murdered under mysterious circumstances.

While Aseemanand was known for his vitriolic anti-minority position, in his confession it was the massacre of Hindu devotees at Akshardham temple in 2002 that was the real reason for their retaliatory terror attacks.

In 2003, Aseemanand came in contact with Joshi and Pragya Singh Thakur. Finally, according to him, it was the terror attack on Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi in March 2006 which was the real flashpoint for them.

Return of the stone rage in Kashmir (2010 in Retrospect)

sify news

Srinagar: Over 110 people dead in firing by security forces on protesters, four months of crucial academic session washed out due to frequent curfews and shutdowns, business worth an estimated Rs.14,000 crore ($3 billion) lost — 2010 was indeed haunting for the Kashmir Valley that witnessed another season of intifada, the stone throwers’ uprising.

At the beginning of 2010 spring, as peace was dawning on a state battling years of armed insurgency, the scenic valley was preparing to welcome tourists with hopes to revive an economy in shambles. But that was not to be.

Most of the tourist season was lost to stones – volleys of them flying in the air every day almost all over the valley. And security forces countered them with tear gas shells, non-lethal weapons and even bullets.

As soon as the tourist season began to peak – some 400,000 tourists had come to Kashmir by June, the death of a teenager, Tufail Ahmed Mattoo, in firing by security forces June 11 set off a vicious cycle of stone-pelting agitations and killings.

Mattoo’s death triggered widespread agitation against human rights violations in the valley. Separatist leaders capitalised on the anti-government anger by giving frequent calls for shutdowns and asking people to hold protest marches.

In nearly five months of the uprising, 111 more civilians were killed – painting the valley blood red.

The agitation, which revived the separatist campaign, kept the valley closed for most of the five months due to repeated shutdowns and curfews.

President of a business lobby, Shakeel Qalandar, said each day of the shutdown or curfew cost Kashmir around Rs.100 crore ($22 million). The valley remained closed for about 140 days in the unrest period.

‘Our economic losses have mounted to Rs.14,000 crore ($3 billion),’ Qalandar told IANS.

He said some 100,000 people also lost their jobs in the tourism, manufacturing and retail sectors in the 2010 unrest.

The valley has witnessed frequent closures in the last 20 years of separatist war. As many as 1,950 days have been lost to shutdowns and curfews since 1990.

‘Conservative estimates put the losses at around Rs.2 lakh crore ($44 billion) during the last two decades,’ according to Qalandar.

Education was only a collateral damage in the cycle of protests – at the heart of which was the Hurriyat Conference led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani.

When schools and colleges remained closed for about 115 days, the adverse effect on education can be anybody’s guess.

However, in all this maddening cycle of violence, the valley peacefully hosted the annual Amarnath pilgrimage – the way it has been doing since ages. Thousands of Hindu pilgrims from all over the country travelled to the cave shrine in south Kashmir Himalayas.

As the year began to close and winter chill seeped in, a sort of agitation fatigue led to a somewhat deceptive calm in the valley. The common sarcastic slogan doing the rounds is – ‘Khoon ka badla June main lenge’ [We will avenge the killings – of 2010 – next June).

The central government also took some steps to resolve the political problems in the state. In September, it approved an eight-point plan for Jammu and Kashmir and released Rs.100 crore ($22 million) for grants to schools and colleges.

Three interlocutors – journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, economist M.M. Ansari and academician Radha Kumar – were tasked to hold ‘sustained and uninterrupted dialogue with all sections of the people’ in the state.

During a visit by the interlocutors to frontier district of Kupwara Dec 22, thousands of people pledged not to throw stones at security forces – not a bad idea to end the year full of violence.

But the pledge came with riders. The security forces should not stop peaceful protesters and the government should take ‘solid and concrete steps’ for resolving the Kashmir issue, they held.

This is the third successive year Kashmir has witnessed a politically hot summer. In 2008, prolonged agitations, including stone pelting, was witnessed over land allotment to the Amarnath shrine board and in 2009, the Shopian alleged rape-murder of two women triggered widespread angry protests. But the 2010 protests were prolonged and furious.

(Sarwar Kashani can be contacted at s.kashani@ians.in)

Hindutva Terror Tapes

The Malegaon blast probe threw up 37 audiotapes in which ultra-Hindu groups plot terror attacks. These tapes expose a shocking nexus between Military Intelligence men and the outfits. Two years later, why is this still unexplored, asks RANA AYYUB

Lt Col Shrikant Purohit
Military Intelligence officer

The man who procured the RDX that was used for the Malegaon blast. He is the first serving officer to be arrested in a terror case

HATE IS one of the obvious and evident yields of the Hindutva worldview. But few had imagined it could spawn a terror network until investigations into the 2008 Malegaon blast led to a series of startling arrests that included Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and Lt Col Shrikant Purohit of Abhinav Bharat, an ultra-right Hindu group. Since then, the issue of ‘saffron terror’ has entered national discourse as a fractious and heated debate.

Last week, the issue erupted once again, triggering livid responses across the political spectrum. First, senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh claimed that Maharashtra Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare – who had been investigating the Malegaon blast – had called him hours before he died on the fateful night of 26/11, saying he was being threatened by those opposed to his probes. Singh was speaking at the launch of a book by Aziz Burney, controversially titled 26/11 – A RSS Controversy? and both sections of his own party and the BJP were dismayed that his “irresponsible” remarks would play into Pakistan’s hands.

A few days later, in its ongoing exposé, WikiLeaks released a cable in which US Ambassador Timothy Roemer claimed that Rahul Gandhi had told him that ultra-Hindu terror was probably a greater threat to national security than Islamist terror. In all the furious exchanges that have followed, a crucial issue was overlooked. With the capture of Ajmal Kasab, it is undoubtedly an absurd stretch of imagination to believe 26/11 was engineered by ultra-Hindu groups, but the truth is the ‘saffron terror’ story is indeed far from being a closed book.

Maj (retd) Ramesh Upadhyay
Military Intelligence officer

He is suspected of training those who assembled the bomb that went off in Malegaon. He also headed BJP’s ex-servicemen cell

TEHELKA has found that, in the two years since the Malegaon blast, investigators have left many leads unexplored. Most alarmingly, they have failed to pin down eight Indian Army officers allegedly involved with the terror network. Why haven’t they been questioned by the army or sufficiently tracked? How far has the network penetrated sections of the army? To understand the full implication of this, it is important to recall the whole story.

IT WAS a low-intensity bomb fitted in a motorbike, but its impact was powerful. It exploded in the small town of Malegaon in Nashik district, Maharashtra, on 29 September 2008, leaving six dead and several injured. The only clue was a mangled number-plate. Forensic lab officials used a 25 MP camera for a magnified view of the number-plate. They managed to get three sets of possible numbers. Then the ATS began the chase. The first combination took them to Badayun, Uttar Pradesh, where the vehicle bearing the number still existed. The second was tracked down to Gujarat. Here too the vehicle was still in use. In October 2008, the last number-plate took them to the bike owner, a self-styled godwoman called Sadhvi Pragya Thakur

Sadhvi Pragya Thakur
Self-styled godwoman

Her cell phone call records proved to be a minefield of information about those involved in the Malegaon blast

Pragya’s interrogation and call information from her cell phone opened a pandora’s box. Shamlal Sahu, 42, a commerce graduate, was first to be arrested on charges of planting the bomb. Shivnarayan Kalangasara Singh, 36, a science graduate, was arrested for setting a timer device in the bomb. Another science graduate, Sameer Kulkarni, 32, was arrested for his role in procuring chemicals for the bomb.

But the story did not end with these arrests. Five days after Pragya’s arrest, the ATS caught a major fish: Maj (retd) Ramesh Upadhyay, 64, a resident of Pune. He had worked in the Indian Army’s Military Intelligence (MI) unit and was suspected of training those who had assembled the bombs. He had also headed the BJP’s ex-servicemen’s cell in Mumbai.

On 2 November 2008, three more arrests were made – Ajay Rahirkar, 39, for raising funds for Abhinav Bharat; Rakesh Dhawde, 35, a weapon consultant in the movie The Rising; and Jagdish Mhatre, 40, who had paid money to Dhawde for buying weapons. All these men were from either Nashik or Pune. Then came the biggest arrest. On 5 November, the first ever serving army officer, Lt Col Purohit, 37, was arrested for procuring the RDX used in the blast. The MI officer was posted at the Army Education Corps Training Centre and College in Pachmarhi, Madhya Pradesh, where he was studying Arabic at the time of his arrest.

Purohit’s role as a prime conspirator became clearer with the arrest of selfstyled seer Swami Dayanand Pandey alias Shankar Acharya alias Shukhakar Dwivedi, 40, on 14 November. Pandey had a habit of recording all his conversations with his co-conspirators on his laptop.

Terror on board The Samjhauta Express blast in 2007 killed 68 people

The ATS retrieved three videos and 37 audiotapes. These proved to be an unprecedented source of information. On 21 November, Karkare questioned Pune’s RSS leader Shyam Apte, named in the tapes.

Purohit himself wasn’t an easy case to crack. During his interrogation, he asserted that his job as an MI spy included interacting with both Hindu and Muslim extremists. At first, the army seemed to rally behind him. Soon after his arrest, the army spokesman claimed he had only been detained, not arrested. Pragya, however, disclosed that she had met Purohit in Pachmarhi, where Purohit had told her that he had executed two blasts in the past. The ATS officials suspected Purohit was hinting at the Samjhauta Express and Ajmer Sharif blasts, but this was not made public because of its diplomatic implications.

Cycle of violence The Malegaon blast in 2008 left six people dead

THE AUDIOTAPES revealed a chilling landscape. A godwoman, a seer, political bigwigs and retired and serving army officers all seemed part of the conspiracy. They spilled vitriolic hate for Muslims and even Hindus who did not subscribe to their ultra right-wing communal vision. They had set up Abhinav Bharat with the intention of infiltrating and subverting every institution in the country. This, for instance, is an excerpt of what Purohit says on the tapes about the nation they dreamed of creating:

“We must aim for militarisation of the organisation (Abhinav Bharat). Every member at all levels must have a basic knowledge of weapons. We haven’t done it so far. We should indoctrinate them with our ideology. We should establish an academy for ideological indoctrination. At the end of the course, each member will be tested and only those who pass will be finally admitted to the organisation. The level of testing is when he will be tried in ‘action’. Then our organisation will propagate establishment of all-India Hindu rashtra called Abhinav Bharat. There will be a uniform code of conduct irrespective of any caste. Reporting channels like those in the armed forces will be established. This will ensure the smooth flow of information and passing of orders. An Honour Court Committee will exist at all levels. This will ensure strict adherence to moral and ethical behaviour as decided by the core group by all the members based on our Vedas.”

The conversations were alarming. The then Maharashtra Home Minister RR Patil was briefed by senior ATS officials. Other national agencies like the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and, later, the National Investigating Agency (NIA)were brought in. Initial investigations suggested that Purohit was an aberration. The investigators found it odd that despite their mentors in the army, the attackers behaved like novices. “They were so dumb they used their own motorcycle to plant the bomb. It took us just a month to catch all of them. The police have never taken such a short time to arrest terrorists,” says a senior home ministry official, requesting anonymity. How could anyone take them seriously? he asks.

Ground zero Fourteen people died in the 2007 Mecca Masjid bombing

So the sleuths deemed the Malegaon blast to be a freak incident. Over the next two years, however, a larger pattern began to emerge. First Malegaon. Then Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Sharif. The Abhinav Bharat cell was found to have a hand in all these blasts. It obviously had deeper roots.

After Purohit’s arrest, there was a lot of pressure to downplay the role of the army, reveals an ATS officer

TEHELKA first scooped and wrote about the tapes in 2008. Subsequently, a few other media organisations accessed and published parts of the tapes. However, through all this, at no point has there been sufficient focus on the army officers who figure on the tapes. They remain the big unturned stone in the investigation.

There are a total of eight army officers, retired and serving, named in the tapes. At least four of them have an MI background. Apart from Lt Col Purohit and Maj Upadhyay, who are now in jail, topping the list is Col (retd) Hasmukh Patel. A JNU graduate, Patel was commissioned into the Infantry Jat Regiment and later detailed with the MI. After 25 years in service, he retired in 2007 and joined Reliance. His LinkedIn profile says he is a specialist in threat analysis, background checks, physical- electronic-aviation security, vigilance, investigations, disaster management, negotiation and loss prevention. The NIA is understood to have questioned him recently but let him off under surveillance.

Col Shailesh Raikar is a retired commandant. He is said to be a brilliant officer who belonged to the Maratha Regiment. According to the tapes, Raikar was commander of the Bhosla Military Academy in Nashik. He allegedly provided academy facilities to Purohit and other Abhinav Bharat members for weapons training. He too is under the NIA scanner.

Others named in the tapes are Col Aditya Bappaditya Dhar (Parachute Regiment, now retired); Brig Mathur (full name not known, but he was apparently posted at Deolali Cantonment near Nashik); Maj Nitin Joshi and Maj Prayag Modak (in both cases, regiment not known).

The NIA has reportedly established contact with Col Dhar; it is yet to initiate investigations against the rest. Apart from these men, there is a Brig Lajpat Prajwal, apparently posted with the Nepal Army. According to the tapes, Purohit and he had trained together at IMA and that Purohit was in constant touch with Prajwal for logistic support. In one of his conversations with Col Purohit on the tapes, Col Dhar asks: Did you see one of my messages?

LT COL PUROHIT: Yes… About how this country should be taken over by the army?
COL DHAR: Yes, yes. I have written three lakh letters… I distributed three lakh letters among the jawans… It is not a political stunt… And I distributed 20,000 maps of Akhand Bharat among the jawans on 26 January… It is my humble attempt to sow the seeds.

Given these alarming ambitions and self-confessed acts of sedition, why haven’t their roles been probed more seriously yet? Why has the army itself not acted on them?

Maharashtra ATS chief KP Raghuvanshi, who was accused of going slow on the Malegaon probe, says: “We acted on the basis of evidence. The case against these armymen was not watertight. We did call some of them in, including Col Dhar, for questioning but there was nothing on the basis of which we could detain or arrest them.”

Interestingly, Raghuvanshi admits to a major handicap while interrogating the officers. “A MI official was always around monitoring our questioning. In the beginning, in fact, it was difficult to get hold of Lt Col Purohit because even though we presented a dossier of evidence against him the army insisted it’s their internal matter and they’d look into it themselves,” he says.

‘I gave 20,000 maps of Akhand Bharat to the jawans. It is my humble bid to sow the seeds,’ says Col Dhar

Finally, pressure from the home ministry worked and Purohit wa arrested. The army, however, has still not initiated action against its officials and court martial proceedings against Lt Col Purohit are yet to take off. Sources say the proceedings have been postponed under Section 7 of the Indian Soldiers Litigation Act, 1925. Since Purohit was serving under ‘special conditions’, the Act says a postponement is necessary in the interests of justice.

ANOTHER ATS official says, “Most of what Purohit says on the tapes about sending people to Nepal and Israel for training wasn’t taken seriously. That is the biggest blunder. The job of a MI officer posted along the Jammu & Kashmir border is to spread his net of informers, spies and get crucial information. Imagine what damage Purohit has already done while posted there. The entire truth on Purohit is still not out.”

Terror taint RSS’ Indresh Kumar was linked to Ajmer blast

That seems a very disturbing probability. The armymen named on the tapes are not mentioned casually. Sample snatches of this conversation between Lt Col Purohit, Maj Ramesh Upadhyay, Col Dhar, Dayanand Pandey, BL Sharma Prem, a twotime BJP MP, and RP Singh, an endocrinologist at Apollo Hospital and president of the World Hindu Federation.

LT COL PUROHIT:We have done two operations which have been successful and I got material support for them. On 24 June 2007, Col Lajpat Prajwal, now a Brigadier, had arranged our meeting with King Gyanendra Nobody in this country will be able to figure who is doing the work. If Major Saheb (Upadhyay) has 20 people, we (read Prajwal) will train them.

RP SINGH: King Gyanendra’s close relative sat with us in Gorakhpur… We are constantly in touch with them… Maj Prayag Modak was the one who came to our meeting. There are Col Raikar and Col Hasmukh Patel, who are helping us in the training. Prajwal is from the side of Rani Aishwarya.

Col Dhar enters the room…

LT COL PUROHIT: Namaskar Dharji… (To the others) He has been in the army since 23 years and has been with me. He’s with the Parachute Regiment. I was also posted with him. Dhar sahib, let me introduce you to the people here. We are all on the same plane, Hindu rashtra…

LT COL PUROHIT:We also have General JJ Singh, he’s from the Maratha Regiment. As you know I have also been part of the Maratha regiment…

PANDEY: Ok…

LT COL PUROHIT: Swamiji, we haven’t spoken about certain things, but two operations have been done by us. One of our own captains has visited Israel for training and meeting and there was a very positive response… We demanded four things from Israel – continuous and uninterrupted supply of arms and training, our office with a saffron flag in Tel Aviv, political asylum and support for our cause of a Hindu Nation in the UN. Israel has asked us to show something on the ground and have promised at least a supply of arms and political asylum… I have a state-wise population of Muslims in each state but I have only three AK-47s. We couldn’t buy much earlier because we didn’t have funds.

MAJ UPADHYAY: AK-47 is available at Cox Bazaar in Gorakhpur, but mostly jihadis sell the weapons…

LT COL PUROHIT: You will get very expensive AKs…

PANDEY: Arrey, you get many AK guns.

LT COL PUROHIT: The Israelis ask us to give them proof of our involvement. What more proof do they need? We have completed two successful operations.

MAJ UPADHYAY: The Hyderabad blasts were executed by our man. Colonel will tell you about that.

PANDEY: What if this organisation is banned?

APTE: We will give it an international aspect… and a covert name. We have to fight. See, if you aren’t a Hindu, you are my enemy. I will be unsafe if you are alive…

Obviously, this was not just empty bragging. Purohit goes on to talk of Khetomi Sema, a leader of the banned insurgent group, Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland. Purohit says he had saved his life and Sema has issued a letter to all his generals to support Purohit’s cause. “He has promised to give us seven years of logistic support,” Purohit tells Pandey.

Purohit’s conversations further reveal that he had been using the army machinery to serve Abhinav Bharat. He says he was in the process of indoctrinating like-minded army officers who could serve in Abhinav Bharat. He also admits to catching and killing two Maoists in cold blood in Delhi.

LT COL PUROHIT: “I bought weapons worth Rs. 4 lakh in Assam. A police officer got me the weapons. It costs a lot. I had 3 lakh and I borrowed one more. I kept one pistol with me. I sent some weapons to Nepal. Our study is on… We will soon start action. We have got a list of top 5-6 Maoist financers. We’ll kill them first…You know one Assam DIG had informed me about two Maoists who had arrived in Delhi to kill me. We caught them at the Vasant Kunj Civic Centre. We kept them in a place at Munirka through the night. You know we have encroached upon a property in Munirka that has sewer lid inside the house. We got the information out of them, then killed them and threw them in the gutter.”

PUROHIT’S CONVERSATIONS also suggest an alarming shared mindset among sections of the army. At one point he tells Pandey, “There was a captain and a major posted in Delhi. I managed to do my work with them over the phone. This work otherwise would have taken more than three months. It happened because I belong to Sangh and he was also from Sangh. I didn’t even know him. He was from UP and he did the work in one day. Tapping such people (with Sangh background) is important.”

Sample another chat between them:

PANDEY: I have to attend a programme organised by one editor of Organiser, Deepak Rath, in Orissa on 17 February. This is his personal function.

LT COL PUROHIT: Is it in Bhubaneshwar city? Let me know, I will arrange my Orissa commander to receive you…

PANDEY: Do you know Narendra Modi?

LT COL PUROHIT: I have met him once or twice, but I don’t know him well.

PANDEY:Will you be interested if I arrange your meeting with him?

LT COL PUROHIT: Why not!

PANDEY: In fact, there is one Swami Aseemanandji….
He has good relations with Narendra Modi… I can arrange your meeting through him.

(Swami Aseemanand, a Kolkata native known as Jatin Chatterjee before he donned his ochre robes, came to the Dangs district of Gujarat to start a campaign to bring Christian converts back into the Hindu fold. A RSS man, he is said to be very close to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Aseemanand was arrested recently but the police have not shared any information gleaned from his interrogation.)

Elsewhere in the tapes, Purohit elaborates on other sinister strategies the Abhinav Bharat group plans on adopting against Muslims – including shooting people under false identities to create mayhem.

“I know that the army and the BSF don’t complement each other’s action,” says Purohit. “Nor there is any coordination between the BSF, CRPF and state police. So if I buy two army vehicles from the scrap and paint them with army colours and send them along with our people in army uniform into Meerut, they can just fire and come out of the situation easily. There is so much confusion in this country.”

The conversations on these tapes demand extreme vigilance. These statements were not recorded under police custody or during interrogation. They were voluntarily recorded by Pandey. Therefore, there can be no accusation of coercion or manipulation with regard to them. So the question is, how far did Lt Col Purohit’s influence run in the army? How vast was the network he had succeeded in building? Was he only a small link in a bigger, more dangerous, chain within the army?

In the Mecca Masjid blast, which brought the Abhinav Bharat under the scanner, the accused had used a combination of TNT and RDX. An IB official based in Mumbai raises a pertinent question: “Do you think Purohit can smuggle RDX and weapons from Jammu Army depot on his own? Can he alone sponsor sending men for military training to Nepal and Israel?”

This question has even more alarming implications when one recalls that in the narco reports of Nanded blasts accused, Himanshu Panse and Sanjay Bhaurao Chaudhury, first published by TEHELKA in 2006, the men clearly talk of how an army man named Mithun Chakrabarty had trained them to make the IEDs for the blasts at the Sinhagad Fort. The identity of this army man is yet to be established.

A senior ATS Official told this reporter that after Lt Col Purohit’s arrest, there was a lot of pressure on them to downplay the role of the army. “We were told we couldn’t lower the morale of officers posted in sensitive positions. It could have a backlash. But with more cases involving military intelligence officials coming out, we could be overlooking a dangerous trend.”

Going slow? ATS’ Raghuvanshi says the army tried to meddle

The MI is a small but important corps, and a relatively new addition to the army structure. It is currently headed by Gen Lumba. MI officers are tasked to track spies and other security threats and, outside the country, are mostly active in China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Japan, USA and Russia. Many MI cadre officers (Lt Col Purohit was one of them) do not wear uniforms and work in conjunction with the IB, BSF (‘G’ Force) and other intelligence agencies. MI officials work in field formations and report to their respective commanders. Nobody, except the commander, would know they are part of MI.

What makes the story of Lt Col Purohit so dark is that the Indian Army has never been suspected of any communal overtones. But as an IB official says: “There was a time when the army would not think twice about religious identity when they entered the Golden Temple to arrest the terrorists holed inside. But after the 1992 Ayodhya movement, things have changed. The political climate has affected the army too in a big way, especially among officers posted along the border. Look at Lt Col Purohit. His indoctrination happened during his posting in Kashmir.”

THE UNMAPPED SCALE of the army connection, however, is not the only missing piece in the ultra-Hindu terror puzzle. In December 2007, Sunil Joshi, an RSS man suspected of a key role in the Ajmer blast and of being a link between several ultra-right groups like Abhinav Bharat, Vande Mataram and other fringe elements was mysteriously murdered. His family said he had been bumped off by his own organisation. Sadhvi Pragya confirmed this. According to her, a man named Mayank had probably killed Joshi. Despite these clues, the MP Police closed the case.

Earlier this week, however, the MP Police finally accepted that Joshi was murdered by his own friends in the RSS. They charged Mayank, Harshad Solanki, Mehul and Mohan from Gujarat, Anand Raj Katare from Indore and Vasudev Parmar from Dewas with Joshi’s murder. While Mehul and Mohan are still on the run, Solanki was brought before the Dewas court last week and confessed to the murder. (Solanki is also an accused in the infamous Best Bakery case, Gujarat 2002.) This development validates what TEHELKA had reported back in 2008.

Clued in Hemant Karkare pursued the ‘saffron terror’ angle

However, even these arrests don’t join all the dots. The MP Police have claimed internal rivalry as the motive for the murder. The CBI though believes the real culprits in the RSS behind Joshi’s murder are also the men responsible for the blasts. Their hunch is, if Joshi were alive today, most of the masterminds would have been unmasked. Joshi was known to be close to senior RSS leader Indresh Kumar. Their question is why did the two fall out?

The MP Police, Rajasthan ATS and CBI are all looking into the Ajmer, Mecca Masjid and Samjhauta blasts. However, their investigations do not have the same conclusions.

This October, the Rajasthan ATS filed a chargesheet linking Indresh to the Ajmer blasts. They said he attended a secret meeting in Jaipur on October 25, 2005 in which the conspiracy for the Ajmer blast was drawn up. The meeting was allegedly attended by Indresh, Pragya Thakur, Sunil Joshi, Ramji Kalsangra, Devendra Gupta, Lokesh Sharma and Sandeep Dange. The chargesheet hinted the same people were responsible for the Samjhauta blast. The chargesheet, however, did not list Indresh as an accused. And Dange and Kalsangra are still on the run.

The CBI, which is also probing the case, blames the Rajasthan ATS for not making sufficient headway in pinning down the role of the RSS. “They have helped RSS men like Indresh create an alibi by alerting them with witness statements that are not credible evidence in the court of law. This has allowed him time to concoct documents to prove he was not physically present at various places,” says an investigating official.

Confusingly, however, Lt Col Purohit and his co-conspirators on the tapes also curse Indresh as a sell-out and wish they could kill him.

Where, then, does the truth lie? And how far does the network sprawl? Less heated debate and more ground work might provide some real answers.

rana@tehelka.com

Enough evidence of Indian involvement in Balochistan, Waziristan

The News International

WASHINGTON: A cable from US Embassy in Islamabad leaked by whistle-blower website WikiLeaks disclosed that there were enough evidences of Indian involvement in Waziristan and other tribal areas of Pakistan as well as Balochistan.

The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha’s extension in services was termed as a good omen in one such cable and it was added that his further presence on the scene would enhance the agency’s abilities to combat anti-terror war.

An earlier cable ruled out any direct or indirect involvement of ISI in 26/11 under Pasha’s command while Mumbai’s dossier, based on prime accused Ajmal Kasab’s confessional statement was termed funny and “shockingly immature”.

WikiLeaks revealed that a cable sent from a US mission in India termed former Indian Army chief General Deepak Kapoor as an incompetent combat leader and rather a geek.

His war doctrine, suggesting eliminating China and Pakistan in a simultaneous war front was termed as “much far from reality”. Another cable indicates that General Kapoor was dubbed as a general who was least bothered about security challenges to the country but was more concerned about making personal assets and strengthening his own cult in the army. The cable also suggested that a tug-of-war between Kapoor and the current Indian Army chief had divided the Indian Army into two groups.

General Singh has also been described as “Pakistan, China centric”, with an added aggression towards China. The cable mentioned General Singh as an egotist, self-obsessed, petulant and idiosyncratic general, a braggadocio and a show-off, who has been disliked (and barely tolerated) by all his subordinates.

An earlier cable described Indian Army involved in gross human rights violations in Indian-held Kashmir while some Lt Gen HS Panag, the then GOC-in-Chief of the Northern Command of the Indian Army, was equated with General Milosevic of Bosnia with regard to butchering Muslims through war crimes.

The cable urged Washington to secretly divert UN attention towards the genocide of innocent civilians in held Kashmir at the hands of Indian Army and also suggested that US should avoid holding any joint drill with Indian Army until it stops inhuman activities in Kashmir. The cable termed one Lt Col AK Mathur as “devil’s advocate” at Srinagar.

Another cable indicated involvement of top Indian Army leadership in engaging Hindu extremist militants to carry out certain terror operations to keep Indian Muslims on the back foot and to keep pressure on neighbouring Pakistan’s Army and intelligence agencies, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence.

The cable confirmed the active presence of ISI in India but it refused to confirm any involvement of ISI in any terror incident across India and did confirm intelligence collection by its agents and operatives. Another cable confirmed that there was a nexus of top Indian Army officials and extremist Hindu outfits. This cable suggested that an Indian police officer, a counter-terror specialist with the name of Hemant Karkare, had exposed this nexus to some extent when he arrested a serving colonel of Indian army, Lt Colonel Purohit, for blazing a Pakistan bound train (Samjhota Express).

The cable suggested that Hemant Karkare held a secret meeting with a senior US diplomat in New Delhi during the national day reception of a friendly country and briefed him about the gravity and the growing depth of the nexus between top Indian Army leadership and the militant Hindu fanatic groups. Karkare sought security for him and his family from the said American diplomat as he feared that the army and establishment would eliminate him as he intended to move further to expose the network. He had further briefed the said US diplomat that a former commander-in-chief of the Central Command of the Indian army, Lt Gen PN Hoon, was heading the militancy wing of the Hindu extremists and was getting full tactical, logistic and financial support from senior army officers. The day, Karkare was eliminated in a pre-planned ambush during the Mumbai attacks, a cable sent to the US read “we have lost an important link and a vital evidence”.

Another cable sent to Washington termed Hindutva brotherhood in general and Shiv Sena in particular, as ticking time bombs with regard to militancy and terrorism. It was suggested that fundraisers like Hindu Students Council of America etc should be banned to raise funds as they were generating funds for the Hindu militant outfits under the garb of charity. Another file dubs Hindutva Brotherhood as a far bigger threat to regional and global peace than Taliban, al-Qaeda and LeT and the later three were declared as “peanuts” if equated with Hindutva Brotherhood and Sangh Parivaar and Washington was urged to take up the issue with New Delhi. Another cable expressed grave concern over the Indian government’s ability to handle Naxal insurgency movement as 80 per cent of Indian nuclear and missile facilities were present in the insurgency hit areas of India while the Indian security forces were totally helpless in ensuring the writ of the government in that particular area, known as the “Red Corridor of India”.

A cable sent from Israel described the then Israeli Military Intelligence chief, Major General Amos Yadlin as an aggressive general. He was quoted in the cable as a dire seeker of “annihilation” of Islamic Republic of Iran. In a meeting with an American diplomat, General Yadlin dubbed Iranian, Syrian and Hezbollah’s weapons as “tools of terrorism” and not war weapons. He also showed immense eagerness to attack Syrian nuclear facilities.

General Yadlin also told American diplomat that timeframe of Iran nuclear weapons preparation and timeframe to attack Iran were to be totally different issues. He also differed with Americans over the ability of Iran to prepare nuclear weapons and instead said that Iran had sufficient enriched uranium to manufacture a single nuclear device and may soon have enough for making another bomb.

Iran is busy setting up two new nuclear installations, Yadlin told the US diplomat adding that M-I has indications that work has began on the installations, but did not comment on the sources. Yadlin, who was later-on replaced by Brigadier General Aviv Kochav, also spoke of Iran as the greatest threat facing Israel, not only in the nuclear respect. “Iran is sending its long arms to aid anyone who is working against Israel,” Yadlin said. “Such assessments are undoubtedly weighing on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s mind as he considers the possible need for an Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran,” the cable said.

Mossad chief Meir Dagan very proudly told Americans that his special team had eliminated Hamas top military strategist Izzadin Sheikh Khalil through a terror plot. The cable informed Washington that in fact Dagan had established a number of “hit teams” through which he was getting engaged in non-intelligence operations and also used these hit men for certain personal vendettas as well.

Dagan, in a meeting with US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, William Burns, proposed Americans a five point agenda to fix Iran. The focus of the agenda was to change the regime at Tehran and to launch an ethnic movement throughout Iran to destabilise the country before launching the final attack.

A cable from Kabul termed Afghan President as the “patron-in-chief” of the Afghan drug mafia. The cable, citing certain verified UNODC figures, stated that Karzai was living at the mercy of Afghan warlords who, with the passage of time, had transformed into drug lords. The cable stated that there was an annual drug trade of 3 trillion dollars from Pakistan while the Karzai administration was keeping mum over the same.

Another cable stated that Indian involvement in Afghanistan was increasing considerably and all was going on with the consent and knowledge of President Karzai and his administration. The cable further reads that growing Indian influence and presence in Afghanistan was focused towards Pakistan and China, both simultaneously.

Saudi Arabia proposed setting up an Arab force to fight Hezbollah militants in Lebanon with the help of the US, UN and Nato, according to a leaked document. In a meeting in May 2008 with a US diplomat in Iraq, David Satterfield, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said a “security response” was needed to the “military challenge” posed to Beirut by the Iran-backed militants.

The Saudi prince feared a Hezbollah victory against the Lebanese government, led by then prime minister Fuad Siniora, would eventually lead to Iran’s takeover of the country.

There was a need for an “Arab force” to create and maintain order in and around Beirut, he argued, saying the Lebanese army was “too fragile to bear more pressure,” according to the cable from the US embassy in Riyadh.

Such a force would be aided by UNIFIL troops deployed in southern Lebanon, while the “US and Nato would need to provide movement and logistic support, as well as naval and air cover,” the cable added.

According to a leaked document, Saudi armed forces killed Yemeni civilians when fighting Shia rebels in a brief border war despite assurances that only rebel targets were hit.

Saudi Arabia fought Yemeni rebels for several months in a border war that ended with a ceasefire in February.

In public statements during the fighting, Saudi Arabia said that only rebel positions in the border area were attacked. But the leaked cables suggest civilians died.

“Obviously some civilians died, though we wish that this did not happen,” the prince, who is also assistant defence minister, said in the meeting requested by the ambassador to relay US concerns about civilian casualties in the conflict.

Prince Khaled confirmed that Saudi forces hit a building the United States believed to be a clinic but the Saudis thought it was being used as a base by rebels.

He also said the Yemeni military had helped recommend rebel targets, the cable said.The Saudi military used “massively disproportionate force” in a campaign last year against guerrillas seen by the army as “embarrassingly long,” according to another leaked cable.

“Day and night aerial bombardment and artillery shelling have been the main instruments of what is increasingly regarded within the Saudi military as an embarrassingly long campaign,” said the memo from the US embassy in Riyadh.

The three-month operation against the lightly armed Huthi guerrillas on the border areas with Yemen was also seen as “poorly planned and executed” and “brought unexpectedly high Saudi casualties”.

“Nonetheless, the conflict has been carefully spun as a heroic and successful struggle to protect Saudi sovereignty,” the memo added.

Britain faced threats from Libya of dire consequences if the ailing Lockerbie bomber died in a Scottish prison. Threats included the cessation of all British commercial activity in Libya and demonstrations against British facilities, as well as suggestions Britons in the country could be put at risk, according to the cables.

And despite London’s attempts to publicly distance itself from the decision to release Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi – which was made by the devolved Scottish government – the cables show enormous British relief at the move.

Libyan officials warned their British counterparts that “consequences for the UK-Libya bilateral relationship would be dire were al-Megrahi to die in Scottish prison,” read one dispatch from the US ambassador to Tripoli in January 2009.

And if Washington publicly opposed the release, “the US Embassy and private Americans in Libya could face similar consequences,” read the cable from the ambassador, Gene A Cretz.

Megrahi was the only person ever convicted over the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am Jumbo jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, most of them US nationals.

He was released in August, 2009, on compassionate grounds after doctors diagnosed him with prostate cancer and gave him just three months to live, sparking outrage in the United States. More than a year later he remains alive in Tripoli, however, renewing anger in the US.

One cable showed Britain’s then justice minister, Jack Straw, told US diplomats that although Megrahi might have up to five years to live, the Scottish government appeared inclined to release him. “Megrahi could have as long as five years to live,” said the correspondence, cited in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

Indian Generals Steal From Their Own Dead Soldiers

Apartments built for widows of Kargil War martyrs allotted to living Generals | Former Indian Army Chiefs, Navy Chief, amongst the beneficiaries of the buildings built for the war widows | Indian Generals blackmailed Society management to get apartments allotted | Army, Navy knew about the scam but remained mum after getting share | CBI probes how prime Defence land was illegally sold for commercial purposes

From Christina Palmer and Ajay Mehta

NEW DELHI - While the Indians are still licking the wounds of the Kargil fiasco, the Indian Army leadership is engulfed by yet another corruption scam with Generals greasing their palms with the blood of the Kargil martyrs of the Indian Army, reveal the latest findings of The Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail’s investigations show that authorities concerned here in India are investigating as to how the Adarsh Society in upscale Colaba, Mumbai, originally meant to be a six-storey structure to house Kargil War heroes and widows, got converted into a 31-storey luxurious building.

These findings further indicate that the highrise is built on 6,450 sq metres within the Colaba naval area and was cleared on the condition of housing war veterans but now has 104 members including senior army commanders, a former environment minister, legislators and state bureaucrats.

A letter, addressed to the then Indian Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor by former CM Vilasrao Deshmukh, approves the membership of Adarsh Co-operative Housing Society Ltd

The Daily Mail’s investigations indicate that instead of allotting the apartments to the widows of Kargil martyrs, the top leadership of the Indian Army, including former Army Chief, General Deepak Kapoor, former Army ChieF General N.C. Vij and former Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Madhavendra Singh etc, with the criminal connivance of the management of the Adarsh Society managed to get their share of apartments; otherwise built to accommodate the widows and families of those who were killed during the Kargil War with Pakistan.

The Daily Mail’s investigations further reveal that the scam-hit upscale Adarsh Co-operative Housing Society was also under a CBI probe on how it got prime Defence land here, but the Society claimed the land belonged to the Maharashtra government.

Facsimile of the warning letter sent to Indian Navy authorities warning about housing scam.

Against the backdrop of the Adarsh controversy, Defence Minister A.K. Antony met Congress President, Sonia Gandhi, Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, was also present at the meeting.

The Daily Mail’s findings also show that Maharashtra Chief Minister, Ashok Chavan’s link to the Society has also caused some unease in the Congress, with the name of his late mother-in-law, Bhagwati Manoharlal Sharma, figuring in the list of its members. Chavan was not available for comment but he has sought information on the controversy.

The controversy has erupted at a time when the issue is becoming an embarrassment for the party, which is leading the coalition gov ernment in Maharashtra. Antony has already said the government was “seriously examining” the issue.

The Daily Mail’s investigations also shed more light which shows that the Society in the posh Colaba area, on its part claimed that the land where its 31-storied building stands, belongs to the Maharashtra Government and has “nothing to do with the Defence department” while the CBI said it has set a one-week deadline for the Society to provide relevant documents failing which the agency would proceed with the investigation in accordance with the law of the land.

These investigations also elaborate that the Housing Society, built on prime Defence land, has been constructed in an alleged violation of rules. The Environment Ministry of India washed its hands of alleged irregularities in the Adarsh Society and sought to blame the Maharashtra Government for violation of coastal regulation zones.

In a bid to make it clear that it never gave a green nod to the Society, the Ministry in a statement issued in New Delhi, referred to the details of the communication undertaken way back in 2003 with the Maharasthra Urban Development Department, which had sought queries on clearances.

The Daily Mail’s investigations even go deeper pointing out that the CBI was also investigating how the beneficiaries, including former services chiefs, politicians and bureaucrats, raised money to buy apartments meant for the Kargil War heroes and their families in the posh Colaba area in South Mumbai. The agency, which had begun its probe, has sought documents relating to the Society.

These investigations also establish that former Indian Army Vice Chief, Lt. Gen. Shantanu Chowdhary, former Union Minister and Shiv Sena MP, Suresh Prabhu, are among those who have been alloted flats in the 31-storey building.

“We had sought all documents pertaining to the Society from the city collector, the Society’s general secretary and authorities of the Indian Navy and Army in early October,” a senior CBI official said, when contacted by The Daily Mail.

“While we have received around a 4,000-page document from the collector’s office, there has been no response from the other concerned agencies,” the official remarked.

The Daily Mail’s findings even prove that the CBI, which has been unofficially conducting a probe into the scam, is trying to procure details of R.C. Thakur, a military sub-divisional estate officer in the Colaba division. in the year 2000. Thakur allegedly managed to influence senior officials of the armed forces to incorporate them into the Housing Society and allot them houses.

The CBI, which believes that Thakur holds the key to unearthing details of the scam, will try to probe the extent of the fraud in terms of money and how Thakur may have gained by way of commission, from those allotted flats in the Society.

The Daily Mail’s investigations indicate that in 1999-2000, when the Society came up with an application, Thakur was merely a sub-divisional officer and later went on to retire as an Assistant Defence Estate Officer of the Indian Army.

This has left CBI officials wondering how a junior officer was able to interact with officials of the highest rank in the hierarchy-conscious armed forces of India.

“It seems incredible that an official of his stature would have pulled off a scam of this level single-handedly. We even believe that Thakur could just be a front man for big fish in the armed forces or from the state,” said a CBI official.

Though the CBI is yet to be officially told to investigate the scam, it conducted preliminary inquiries and collected information, after it became known that Defence land had been converted, to develop the plot into a housing society.

Since there has been no official direction from the Government of India and it is yet to be cleared whether the land is Defence land, CBI officials have been treading cautiously.

“If it is reasonably proven that it was Defence land, we can probe every aspect of the land deal. But if proved otherwise, then the CBI can only investigate the acts and omissions of officials of the armed forces,” a CBI official named Kapoor, said.

“As of now, it is reasonably proved that the Khukri Eco Park, which was maintained and developed by the Army in 1996, was later made a part of the development of the Society.

The Army protected the park. Now we have to investigate thoroughly to know how the land was converted into a general plot from Defence land. We have also been told that the park land was demanded by the armed forces in lieu of land given up by the armed forces at Santa Cruz,” the CBI official added.

The Daily Mail’s investigations further disclose that the Indian Navy and Indian Army were told about the scam, but the leadership at both the Defence establishments of India remained mum on the issue, after the Naval Chief and Army Chiefs were blessed. Simpreet Singh (30), one of the whistle-blowers of the Adarsh Housing Society scam, has said that advance warnings issued by him to try and avert the scandal were ignored by the naval command. However, yesterday, the Navy took a virtual U-turn on the issue by admitting that the building was illegal.

The Daily Mail’s investigations also indicate that in 2008, Singh had sent letters to Naval authorities, stating that the building was a security threat given its sensitive location. He says that his words of caution fell on deaf ears as senior officials from the Navy claimed that the apartments had nothing to do with the Naval command.

“When I went through the documents I procured under the Right to Information (RTI)Act in 2007, I learnt about the magnitude of the scam and decided to bring it to the notice of the concerned authorities. I was hoping that they would take immediate action but my pleas were ignored,” said Singh.

He added that the same letters were sent to the Urban Development and State Environment ministries. They highlighted that the Adarsh building was being constructed violating various norms, including the coastal zone regulation, and could be a high security threat because of the vulnerability of its location, yet no action was taken.

The letter states that the complaint categorically mentioned that “Illegal action of the Navy, to accord favours to powerful private persons, by permitting private high-rise construction in Navy Nagar. Request you to stop construction of the building of Adarsh on the lines done for the small naval establishment INS Trata in Worli.”

A letter to Singh by S.H. Subramanian, Commodore, Command Works Officer, stated, that “The plot on which the 30-storey tower (Adarsh Society) is slated to come up is next to Backbay Bus Depot and is not under the Navy’s control. No NOC has been sought from or accorded by the Navy. “Had they (government agencies) acted on our information, the Adarsh building scam could have been averted,” claimed Singh.

The Daily Mail’s investigations go on to throw more light on the matter, revealing that the Indian Army had pointed out in 2005 that the Adarsh building could be a security concern and had even written a letter to the then City Collector. But, the moment Army Generals, Deepak Kapoor, and N.C. Vij, were enrolled in the list of members of Adarsh Society, even the army remained mum, a fact that proves how the Indian Army Generals blackmailed the Adarsh Society management to get their pie in the scam

IPS officer-turned-lawyer, Y.P. Singh, upon being contacted said: “The Navy is displaying double standards. It kept on protecting Adarsh illegally until a public interest litigation (PIL) was filed on March 21 this year. It then took an about turn, changed its stand and admitted that the Adarsh building was indeed a security threat.”

The Daily Mail’s investigations further establish that the applications of former Army Chief of Staff, General Deepak Kapoor and General N C Vij, initially rejected for the membership of the Society, had been approved by former Chief Minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh. The Army officials’ names are among the nine Defence personnel applicants, who were initially rejected the Society’s membership.

The former CM, Deshmukh, when contacted, however said that he did approve the “Letter of Intent (LoI)” of the 20 people, who wanted to become members of the Society but that he did so only after Ashok Chavan, the then state Revenue Minister, allegedly made a recommendation. “The list had come for my approval only for counter signature and you do it in good faith,” he said.

These findings further indicate that Adarsh Society had received 94 applications by 2008, of which the state government approved 80. The remaining 14, including nine nominations of Defence officials, and five others, were cancelled and sent for clearance to Mantralaya.

The 8 year old innocent was killed by Indian Police

Where are the so called agencies of human rights and the directors of Facebook who defend the freedom of speech against us only

The 8 year old innocent was killed by Indians during current protests. I haven’t heard any NGO protesting working for childhood protection. Have you?

Baramulla Kashmir | PEOPLE CARRY THE BODY OF NINE-YEAR-OLD TARIQ AHMAD

Can you imagine these kids can be involved in terrorism?

Would someone care about the rights children have? Where are the human rightist?

Even Indians consider Dupatta as a weapon of terrorism…………

So many cowards behind a single journalist…
Freedom of speech vocalists are silent here

Can this old man be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of Indian troops deployed in valley?

Indian paramilitary soldiers beat a Kashmiri civilian during a protest in Srinagar, India, Wednesday, June 30, 2010. Authorities brought new areas under curfew in the Indian portion of Kashmir on Wednesday to control the worst street violence in a year, triggered by the killing of 11 people allegedly by government forces over the past two weeks. (AP Photo)

A young innocent Kashmiri student, aged 22, shot dead at point blank range by the draconian CRPF. They had promised a revenge killing after a trooper was shot dead by militants in the same location: The Slaughterers awarded one hundred rupees and promotions for killing the innocent Kashmiri.

Pulling Fingernails Won’t Turn Kashmiris Into Indians, Pleads Arundhati Roy

• Pity that nation that jails those who ask for justice’
• ‘No one should be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians’

India’s most famous novelist meets with the husband and brother of two Kashmiri women raped and killed by Indian Army soldiers. All major Indian newspapers warn Roy of imminent arrest on sedition charges.

BY ARUNDHATI ROY | Monday, 25 October 2010.
WWW.PAKNATIONALISTS.COM

SRINAGAR, Indian-Occupied Kashmir-I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. This morning’s papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir. I said what millions of people here say every day. I said what I, as well as other commentators have written and said for years. Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice. I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state.

Yesterday I traveled to Shopian, the apple-town in South Kashmir which had remained closed for 47 days last year in protest against the brutal rape and murder of Asiya and Nilofer, the young women whose bodies were found in a shallow stream near their homes and whose murderers have still not been brought to justice. I met Shakeel, who is Nilofer’s husband and Asiya’s brother. We sat in a circle of people crazed with grief and anger who had lost hope that they would ever get ‘insaaf’ – justice – from India, and now believed that Azadi – freedom – was their only hope. I met young stone-pelters who had been shot through their eyes. I traveled with a young man who told me how three of his friends, teenagers in Anantnag district, had been taken into custody and had their finger-nails pulled out as punishment for throwing stones.

In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.”

Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist and Booker Prize recipient. She is opposed to her country’s occupation of Kashmir. This comment was published by SOS Kashmir

Terrorist face

ANUPAMA KATAKAM in Mumbai

The Malegaon investigations showed for the first time that Hindu right-wing terror cells exist.

MITESH BHUVAD/PTI

The Malegaon blast accused when they were produced in court at various times. (From left) Ajay Rahirkar, Lt Col Shrikant Prasad Purohit and Rakesh Dhawade (partly hidden).

FROM 2002 until 2008, there had been several minor yet noticeable bomb blast incidents in Maharashtra and neighbouring States. The involvement of Hindu right-wing members in them was alleged but there was no concrete proof of this. Then, on September 29, 2008, the Malegaon blast happened. It resulted in the death of six persons and injuries to many in the predominantly Muslim area. The State’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) went after every possible suspect and eventually hit the shocking terror trail of Hindutva-driven fundamentalists, many of whom had links to national-level political parties. Their agenda, as the investigations by the ATS showed, was to create a Hindu Rashtra by fighting terror with terror.

Within a few weeks of the blast at Bhiku Chowk, a crowded area in the small textile town, the ATS arrested 11 persons, including Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, a former member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). All of them were subsequently charge-sheeted. They have also been linked to some of the other blasts in the State, such as those in Nanded, Parbhani and Jalna; the police are yet to establish their involvement conclusively.

On July 19, 2010, the Bombay High Court upheld the charges against the Sadhvi and the others, including an Army officer Lt Col Shrikant Purohit, under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). This is the first time members of a Hindu right-wing organisation have been accused of carrying out violent, anti-national activities.

Essentially, the Malegaon investigations revealed that Hindu right-wing terror cells existed and that terror attacks were not exclusive to jehadi groups. From the charge-sheet filed in 2009, it emerges that the members of the saffron brigade, who are known to be rabble-rousers, have found other means to strike terror and propagate their agenda.

Ever since bombs exploded at masjids in Parbhani (2003), Jalna (2004) and Purna (2004), the involvement of Hindu groups in terror activities was suspected. The suspicions were strengthened in 2006 when a bomb that was being assembled in the house of a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) in Nanded exploded. The Malegaon blast, in which six people were killed, was confirmation, in a sense, of the existence of Hindu right-wing terror.

Interestingly, since the arrest of the Sadhvi and the others, there has only been one incident involving Hindutva activists. In October 2009, two men died in Margao, Goa, when a bomb they were carrying exploded. The men were linked to the Sanatan Sanstha, a right-wing group with a presence in Maharashtra and Goa. During the investigations, the police recovered two unexploded improvised explosive devices (IEDs) at Sancaole, Goa, which they believe belong to the Sanstha or a similar organisation.

The charge-sheet

After an exhaustive study of the terror trail, ATS chief K.P. Raghuvanshi and his team filed a 4,528-page charge-sheet against the group involved in the Malegaon blast. The charge-sheet was put together on the basis of evidence that included several hours of telephone call transcripts and contains explosive details of the group’s operations and beliefs.

SANTOSH HIRLEKAR/PTI

Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur; and (right) Swami Dayanand Pandey.

The 11 accused arrested are Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Prasad Purohit, Sudhakar Dwivedi alias Dayanand Pandey, Rakesh Dhawade, Sameer Kulkarni, Sudhakar Chaturvedi, Shivnarayan Kalsangra, Shyam Sahu, Major Ramesh Upadhyay (retd), Ajay Rahirkar and Jagdish Mhatra. Among the people accused but absconding are Ramji, Sandeep Vishwas Dange and Pravin Mutalik. Ramji’s capture, say the police, can unravel much more on the activities of the group.

Conspiracy

Another mastermind who goes by the name Swami Asimanand is also missing. His capture should shed more light on whether the various blasts are linked to the same group of people, say the police.

The charge-sheet points to a larger conspiracy hatched by the accused. Malegaon was their first big act of terror. The accused chose Malegaon for its high concentration of Muslims. Furthermore, they hoped to mislead the investigating agencies into going after the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) because it had been held responsible for an attack in the town in 2006.

The telephone conversations recorded in the charge-sheet give the impression that the Sadhvi was disappointed by the extent of destruction caused by the blast. She says in a phone call to one of the accused: “Why did so few people die? Why didn’t you park [the bike] in a crowded area?”

Abhinav Bharat

The charge-sheet says the accused are linked to a Hindu fundamentalist group called Abhinav Bharat. It was to be a front organisation “with the intention of propagating a Hindu Rashtra” with its “own constitution and aims and objectives [such] as Bharat Swaraya, Surajya Suraksha”. The Abhinav Bharat had put together an ambitious plan that called for a Taliban-like government that would ensure that India was rid of anyone opposed to the idea of a Hindu Rashtra.

A motorcycle placed at the bomb site to aid the explosion eventually led the police to Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur as its owner. Her arrest in Surat was the key to unravelling the Malegaon plot. Pragya Singh was once an active member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and a member of Durga Vahini, the VHP’s women’s wing.

SHASHANK PARADE/PTI SHIRISH SHETE/PTI

Retired Army Officer Ramesh Upadhyay, Rakesh Dhawade (behind him), and (right) Sudhakar Chaturvedi, three of the accused in the case.

Interrogation indicated that in the past few years, she had been a member of various right-wing organisations and had been in touch with godmen, Hindu spiritual leaders and those inclined towards Hindu extremism. Defending herself in court, she said she and the two others arrested along with her were innocent and claimed that they were being implicated as part of a larger game to defame the Hindutva movement.

Soon after her arrest the police made a major breakthrough with the arrest of a serving Army officer, Lt Col Purohit. He allegedly provided the RDX (Research Department Explosive, also called cyclonite) for the bomb and, along with Ramji, masterminded the operation.

Purohit was the main planner and trainer, says the charge-sheet. At Abhinav Bharat meetings held in Ahmedabad, Ujjain, Faridabad, Kolkata, Bhopal, Jabalpur, Indore, Pune and Nashik, Purohit would recruit people for carrying out attacks. He even managed to raise Rs.21 lakh for the organisation.

The investigation into Purohit’s background led the police to the Bhonsala Military School in Nashik, which the RSS apparently uses to train its cadre. Purohit had attended a short-term course here long ago and in the recent past he allegedly held a few meetings at the school. According to information available on the school, its founder, B.S. Moonje, was influenced by fascist leaders such as Mussolini and had decided to establish an institution to further this ideology.

Teesta Setalvad, an activist with the Committee for Peace and Justice, insists that the school is a hotbed of RSS activity and has called for its scrutiny in the Malegaon blast case.

The other attention-grabbing aspect of the Malegaon case is the involvement of Himani Savarkar, a niece of Nathuram Godse (Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin) and daughter-in-law of Narayan Savarkar, the brother of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Himani is a member of Abhinav Bharat and was present at the meeting in which the Malegaon conspiracy was hatched. She is yet to be questioned and the police do not want to comment on this angle.

It is not entirely clear where the perpetrators sourced their funds for the operation. What is clear is that money was not a problem. The use of RDX, the training given to people in handling weapons, and the indications of the presence an extensive network are enough proof of that.

Raw Video: Protest Turns Violent in Kashmir

SO WHY ARE THESE MEN IN JAIL?

Pragya Tiwari

Thirteen persons have been arrested in Gujarat as Maoists since February. But they are merely human rights activists, not Reds.

Climate of fear Shrinivas Kurapati, an employee of NGO Darshan, arrested from Ahmedabad in May

ALL OF June 17, Anju had no idea where her husband was. She couldn’t have imagined even in a nightmare that 41-year-old Abdul Shakeel Basha had been picked up from near his house in RK Puram by the Special Cell of Delhi Police as he was leaving for work.

Later that evening they brought him back to his house. The plainclothes policemen told her nothing except that they were from the Special Cell, taking her to a separate room for interrogation. After a thorough search, they confiscated Basha’s passport, credit cards, laptop and some books. No search or arrest warrant or seizure memo was produced, and despite Anju’s pleas she was not told why her husband was being taken away again.

Through the night, Basha’s wife and friends including some lawyers tried to ascertain whether he was detained by the Special Cell and why. No information whatsoever was forthcoming. Next morning, they woke up to media reports that a ‘wanted’ Maoist by the name of Shakeel Pasha had been arrested in Delhi.

Clearly, police sources were less reticent in telling the media about Shakeel’s arrest than they were in letting his family in on it. But there was more than one discrepancy in their account. To begin with, his last name is Basha, not Pasha. He is known to Delhi’s civil society as anything but a ‘Maoist’.

In the preceding months, similar stories have played out in several homes in Gujarat. Basha is 13th in a line of people arrested under FIR number 1-37/2010 Police station Kamrej, Surat range, dated 26th of February, u/s 120(B), 121(A), 124(A), 153 A&B of the IPC, and Sec 38, 39 and 40 of the UAPA, 2004. The police claim all the detainees are involved in a conspiracy to start a Maoist revolution in Gujarat and parts of north Maharashtra. But there is little evidence to support this claim. On the contrary, most of these people are widely known for their social activism in one of two areas – tribal welfare or rights of industrial workers.

In December 1992, as Mumbai burnt, Abdul Shakeel Basha, the son of an army man from a middle- class family, decided to take a break from postgraduate studies and volunteer to help rehabilitate riot victims. Soon he would travel to Gujarat and take up the cause of mill workers, moving on to campaign for legal justice for victims of the 2002 Godhra riots as part of Nyayagraha, (a campaign by Aman Biradari, an NGO started by writer and member of the National Advisory Council Harsh Mander.)

‘Modi’s agenda is a bhelpuri of Hindutva, regional parochialism and Vibrant Gujarat – his brand of anti-poor development’
ACHYUT YAGNIK, Political analyst and writer

In 2004, he got married and moved to Delhi to set up home. Hereon he worked extensively to alleviate the plight of the homeless – first as part of Aman Biradari’s Dil Se campaign for street kids and later as the architect of an independent programme called Haq for homeless adults.

As he moved from one cause to another, he strengthened the faith of colleagues. Nyayagraha in Gujarat is still fighting 200-odd cases for the victims of state terror – a fact that underpins the myriad ironies of Basha’s story, as his family and friends struggle to garner legal and civil support to get him out of Surat jail, where he is serving time with the other 12. Even before his first hearing, it is apparent that getting out of jail would be a difficult proposition. To call the accused, the reader announced: ‘Maowadi ko lao’ (Bring the Maoist), sealing the smear campaign that was all over the national media even before a chargesheet had been filed.

SO FAR, chargesheets have been filed in 11 out of the 13 cases. Shrinivas Kurapati, 34, arrested from Ahmedabad, awaits his chargesheet along with Basha. On May 30, he was picked up from near his in-laws’ house in Gomtipur. End-June, the Gujarat police called his wife Hansa’s uncle Ambubhai Waghela for questioning. Ambubhai, a widely known cultural activist, has taken on the VHP and RSS head-on to counter their attempt to polarise Dalits against Muslims in the ghettoes they cohabit. He assured the police of Shrinivas’ innocence and offered to bring him to the police station to clarify. The police refused this offer, choosing instead to pick him up themselves, creating a spectacle for the local media to broadcast.

Hours after his arrest, Hansa’s entire family including her little sisters and old aunt, were summoned to the police station. While the others were allowed to leave late that night, Hansa and Ambubhai were illegally detained for two nights and three days for further questioning. Soon the local newspapers started carrying reports saying Hansa was forced into marrying Shrinivas by ‘Maoists’ and that she would possibly be the prime witness against him. Huddled with her family in a tiny ground floor flat, Hansa tells a very different story. “I married Shrinivas because I fell in love with him after we met at a protest march. He spent all his time outside of work with me and our son Viplav, cooking dinner and helping me with chores. When would he have time to plan Naxal activities?”

‘All major allegations are innocuous and attached to non-violent social acts like association with certain organisations’
KIRIT PANWALA, Defence counsel in 10 of 13 cases

HIREN GANDHI who runs Darshan, the NGO where Shrinivas worked, remembers the man came to him in 2006 tormented by poverty and asked for any work at all. “There is no way he was involved in Maoist activities during the time he worked with me. He borrowed money from everywhere to buy a simple house. Would he be so hard-pressed if he were with a movement?” he asks.

But where answers do not exist, they can be manufactured. Hansa says she was beaten up in detention and made to sign statements she did not read: “In Ahmedabad they hit me with a danda (baton) when I got confused answering a question. In all they must have struck me about four times but I didn’t cry,” she says, leaving one speechless.

The case of Avinash Kulkarni (57) is even more baffling. For over 20 years, Kulkarni, an MPhil in Political Science, currently writing his PhD thesis, has been working in the Adivasi district of Dangs. There is hardly anyone in the academic and civil circuits of Gujarat who will not vouch for him personally. From 1998, the saffron brigade led by Swami Aseemanad (now wanted in the Malegaon blasts case) unleashed its two-pronged communal agenda in Dangs – superimposing Hindutva on tribal culture on one hand and attempting to instigate tribals against other minorities on the other. Kulkarni fervently opposed this agenda with his colleagues, succeeding in checking divisions and riots in the areas he was active in.

As part of organisations like Adivasi Mahasabha and Dangi Mazdoor Union, Kulkarni campaigned for the land rights of tribals. Instrumental in the passage of the Forest Rights Act 2006, he later helped tribals file claims to land. Raju Solanki, author of Blood Under Saffron, a book on the communal agenda of the state, says about Kulkarni, “One day he told me: ‘I hope the PWG don’t land up in these forests. What will become of the villagers then?’ How can he be accused of being a Naxalite?”

Kulkarni is spoken of as pacific and upright to a fault. Which must be right, for two months ago when some prisoners broke out of the barrack Kulkarni was imprisoned in, he stayed back. It was once said of Binayak Sen (the public health activist arrested in Chhattisgarh in 2007 on charges of being a Maoist) that even if his supporters stormed the jail to free him, he would stay back. If that hypothesis was testimony for Sen’s character, this incident certainly establishes Kulkarni’s.

EARLY WARNING SIGN

This Gujarat government publication of 2006 says on its cover Activiston Savdhan – Aa Gujarat che (Beware Activists – This is Gujarat). Inside there are cartoons projecting Medha Patkar as anti-development and anti-tribal welfare. On the last page is a poem lampooning activists, written by Bhagyesh Jha who was then the director of information in the government. Roughly translated its first few lines read: We (activists) twist/What the meaning of good and better/That is our manifesto/What to do? All you need/Is some borrowed English/A plain car, some slogans, some crowds/And a dirty old sari

BHARAT PAWAR (40) also arrested from Dangs, was a local resident who housed Kulkarni. Jesuit priest Father Stanley Pinto knew Bharat from when the former was researching his PhD in the area. He says, “Bharat knew every government official around. He would walk into offices and demand an explanation when there was injustice.” Bharat worked for the rights of bamboo workers, tribal farmers, village lawkeepers (Police Patils), and housed victims of communal riots. His wife would cook for all of them despite a hand-tomouth existence. His daughter, who works as a tailor, is the sole breadwinner of the family.

Similar narratives echo when you talk to the family, friends and colleagues of the others arrested. Makabhai Chaudhuri (49) and Jayaram Goswami (52) fought for the rights of quarry workers and diamond labour, organising them to protest and fight legal battles in the Songadh area of South Gujarat. Their wives, less articulate, tell the story of their husband’s arrests, which mirror the tales told by Anju and Hansa.

Satyamrao Ambade (47) and Niranjan Mahapatra (37), arrested from Surat, worked with textile workers’ trade unions. Living in a single room with no electricity, Mahapatra also edited a local magazine. He was extremely popular for his work with migrant labourers. Textile workers are exploited by their contractors who deny them permanent status and wages prescribed by law despite making them work 12 hours a day. Today, sources who refuse to be quoted for fear of harassment say some of these workers are being coerced by the Gujarat police to testify against Mahapatra and Satyamrao. They have been threatened with arrest if they don’t toe the police line.

KN Singh (47), arrested from Bhavnagar, worked for a mix of local and migrant industrial workers, representing individual cases in labour courts. Alang and other parts of Bhavnagar are notorious for the abysmal conditions of workers in the area. Prakash Patel, an advocate from Bhavnagar who has known Singh since the 1980s and is named as a witness in the chargesheet, vehemently denies Singh’s involvement in any kind of violent activity.

EACH ONE of these people has worked for years in specific regions of Gujarat to look for solutions to problems of the poor within the framework of law. All of them were overground and known to Gujarati civil society and the administration. Why then have they suddenly been branded enemies of the state and put behind bars?

This question should be answered when the chargesheet, remand applications and FIR are read in conjunction. Instead, it becomes more pronounced in the process. None of these people have any previous criminal record nor have they been charged with any specific instance of violence. No weapons have been recovered from any of them.

Kirit Panwala, defence counsel in 10 of the 13 cases, says, “All major allegations are innocuous and attached to non-violent social acts like association with certain organisations. 10 out of the 13 were alleged members of the CPI (Janashakti) party, which the police claim is a front for the banned People’s War Group.” But Janashakti is an overground party that contests elections. Panwala explains, “The case under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act does not hold because the Act clearly states that for an offence to be committed the organisation should be banned under the schedule, which Janashakti is not. As for PWG associations, they are all alleged before 2004 when the Act which outlaws the PWG had not come into place.”

The most serious charge is that a few of the detainees attended training camps for warfare. However, the chargesheet does not give any details or evidence of this activity. Other charges are pegged on alleged ‘secret’ meetings and recovery of incriminating literature. The police claim that Shrinivas and Basha helped draft a document that lays out a conspiracy to start a Maoist revolution in Gujarat, called the Surat Perspective Plan.

Panwala points to lack of evidence yet again, “Under Section 120 (b) of the IPC very little evidence is required to establish conspiracy. Kehar Singh was executed in the Indira Gandhi assassination trial with meagre evidence. But even in that case, there was an actual event to link the evidence with. Given that nothing has been executed here, the charges of conspiracy will be difficult to prove.”

The most gaping hole in the prosecution’s case is the absence of any prominent instance of Maoist violence in the state of Gujarat. But there is little chance the accused will get bail. Veteran Ahmedabad- based lawyer Girish Patel says, “One could have even tried to quash this faulty FIR if the Centre had not politicised the issue so much.” Panwala adds, “10 years ago it would have been easy to get bail in the case, but the judiciary in Gujarat no longer believes in personal freedom as laid out by Article 21 of the Constitution. There is presumption of guilt until proven innocent.”

Colin Gonsalves, Founder of Human Rights Law Network, expresses concern over the logic of this case: “When all over the country actual Naxal warriors are being offered money and rehabilitation to surrender, why is the Gujarat police anxious to prosecute social workers whose alleged connection with Maoists and that too of many years ago is highly disputed? “

Political analyst Achyut Yagnik offers a disturbing answer to this question, “Modi’s agenda is a bhelpuri of Hindutva, regional parochialism and ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ – his brand of anti-poor economic development. By putting away activists who advocated the rights of tribals and labourers, he wants to improve the investment climate of the state.”

Uttam Parmar, activist for social justice is more specific. “The state wants the tribal corridor from Omargaon to Ambaji cleared of activists so the land can be usurped for corporates,” he says. This claim is backed by a statement made at a press conference in April by Tushar Chaudhary, Union Minister of State for Tribal Affairs (elected from Bardoli) who accused the Gujarat government of sabotaging the Forest Rights Act by denying claims under it en masse.

Mukul Sinha, eminent lawyer from Ahmedabad says, “Ignorance can be due to lack of information or absence of actuality. My ignorance of any such movement in Gujarat is due to the latter. With POTA the government was ‘producing’ terrorists rather than ‘preventing’ them. One gets a sense the same thing is being done with the UAPA in the case of these so-called Naxals. The problem with the Act is that it criminalises any sort of connection with a banned organisation – financial, ideological, perhaps even a pat on someone’s back!”

Civil rights activists are comparing this to the Emergency era when Indira Gandhi used oppressive laws to suppress political rebellion. But perhaps this is worse in that it seeks to curb not just political but also social dissent.

Yagnik believes Modi thrives by creating a fear psychosis to project himself as a saviour. “Muslimand Pakistan-bashing are passe now and are alienating him from the Western markets, so a new enemy has been invented,” he says. The propaganda also promises to legitimise attacks the state has been making on activists for years now.

Consider an incident that took place in Bhavnagar district in February. The government had sanctioned land from the fertile area of Mahuva to Nirma Ltd for a cement plant and limestone mining. The project is likely to have an adverse effect on the lives of over 50,000 people who live there.

AFTER A year of unheeded peaceful protests, 11,115 people signed in blood on a petition to the CM. On the 20th of February 2010, some 8,000 people took out a silent march in the district. Police lathi-charged this procession, injuring a number of villagers. A day later, local MLA Kanubhai Kalsariya who was supporting the protesters was attacked by assailants believed to be company goons, landing him and his wife in hospital. Incidents like this are commonplace in the state, where land is constantly being acquired for industrialisation at the cost of small farmers and farm labourers.

Earlier this month, the Gujarat government asserted that less than 10 percent of claims by tribals under the FRA are genuine. Prasad Chacko, human rights activist, believes this outrageous statement has not met with opposition from the tribal leadership because of the climate of fear created by these arrests. With rumours of a spate of prospective arrests in the air and major NGOs and academic institutions under the scanner, there is apprehension that even speaking for the poor can brand you a Naxalite.

Meanwhile in the forests and industrial underbelly, the poorest of poor are running out of representatives in our democracy, even as the state’s oppressors intensify the attack on their lives and livelihood. This is exactly the kind of circumstance that proponents of violent movements look for. If their frustration is not allowed legitimate channels, Modi might soon really be up against the wolf of extremism he has been crying about

‘They led double lives by hiding their past’

AK Singh, IG Surat Range, says the police conducted thorough investigations before making arrests

The general mood within civil society is that the activists who have been arrested are being persecuted for the good work they have done. How would you respond to that?

I don’t agree that this is the general mood because a large amount of reports in the media put our work in correct perspective.

But there have been protest meetings and marches all over the state by activists who knew a lot of these people personally.

Many of these people got entrenched in various roles which had an external appearance. So it is quite natural for people who have come into contact with them to base their judgement on that. But we added another perspective based on the covert life which they had led. Now civil society – and more importantly the judiciary – have to make up their minds based on the [covert] roles they played.

At a time when the GoI is looking for channels to talk with the Maoist leadership and giving actual warriors incentive to surrender, even if it can be proved that these people have had associations in the past, don’t you think they should be given another chance given that they are now working as activists for the poor?

I am only a law enforcement officer and I have a limited brief and a limited role, but in my personal capacity I feel very positively about any surrender or reform policy that can contribute to a national resolution of this issue.

But let us not give credit to any of these people by saying they had reformed because none of them came clean to a law enforcement agency and said ‘We were so-and-so and now we want to give up.’ In contrast there were some others in Surat itself who have surrendered to the police in Andhra Pradesh and are being given the benefit of a surrender policy. There is a difference between someone who comes clean about what he believed in once and someone who continues to lead a double life by hiding his present and past.

Militants open fire in Sopore, curfew continues in Valley

Srinagar: Two policemen were injured in two separate attacks by militants in Jammu and Kashmir’s Sopore town, while an indefinite curfew continued in Srinagar and other major towns of the Kashmir Valley on Friday, officials said. “Militants fired at the State Bank of India building in Sopore town late Thursday, injuring one policeman. In another incident, militants fired at a police vehicle in the same town early Friday and the driver was hurt,” a senior police officer said.

Army soldiers in a truck patrol a curfew-bound locality during a flag march in Panthachowk

“Both have been shifted to hospital and doctors say they are out of danger,” he added.

Curfew continued for the third day in all areas of Srinagar city, Sopore, Ganderbal, Handwara and south Kashmir’s Anantnag, Pulwama, Kakpora and some towns along the Jammu-Srinagar highway.

“Restrictions have been imposed in other towns like Baramulla, Qazigund, Bijbehara, Kangan as well,” another officer said.

“The situation is being closely monitored. A decision about relaxating the curfew would be taken after reviewing the situation later,” he added.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has convened an all-party meeting here Monday to discuss the situation in the state.

The army was requisitioned by the civil administration for assistance here Wednesday, a day after widespread violence in the city following the recovery of a teenager’s body, who relatives allege had been forcibly drowned by security forces during clashes.

Three more people, including a 25-year old woman, were killed in Tuesday’s violence.

The army carried out flag marches at many places in the city in the last two days.

RSS sends SOS to BJP on ‘saffron terror’

NDTV

New Delhi: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has consistently denied its involvement with saffron terror despite it being linked to it on various occasions. Now, as part of an internal audit it is conducting, it has sent an urgent plea for help to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) asking for help to clean up its tarnished image.

It started with Sadhvi Pragya Thakur who had a RSS connection and is an accused in the Malegaon blast. At that time, the RSS and the BJP had shrugged off the charges but after the Pragya arrest, more charges started flying thick and fast. In the Ajmer blast too the accused had a Sangh connect, though distant.

Recently a senior Sangh functionary was interrogated by security agencies. To make matters worse, political opponents have started raising the spectre of Hindu terror.

So as a part of damage control, top RSS leaders met the BJP top brass including Nitin Gadkari on Tuesday and told them to counter the Hindu terror charges politically.

“We have condemned violence of any kind. But we see a pattern emerging – to connect acts of terror to the Sangh and the BJP,” said Nirmala Seetharaman, BJP Spokesperson.

The Sangh is tightening up its gates to stop fringe elements from getting in as it feels its matrix is weakening and it’s screening system, the shakhas were being bypassed.

Through careful internal audits the Sangh is identifying men who could have a terror connect. Some pracharaks in four states have been relieved of their duties.

The RSS feels politically ambitious elements have been using the saffron platform for an early rise. The Sangh is telling its cadres – what Dattopant Thengdi once said – that short cuts will cut you short.

The Sangh’s other worry is political. It realises that strident elements like Pramod Muthalik and Pragya Thakur have given the Sangh and Hindutva a bad name.

To bring back the voters to the BJP, the Sangh is taking the first steps to tone down the colour of its politics.