Replacement Justice

A joke about Mumbai police goes: They are asked to catch a man-eater tiger. They can’t find the tiger but catch a cat and beat it up so hard that it admits ‘yes, I am tiger, I am tiger.’

Praveen Swami writes in the Indian Express that the IB and Delhi police knew about some forensic evidence and confessions recorded by Andhra Police which indicated that the three Kashmiris arrested for a bombing in the national capital in 2005 were not the real culprits, the Indian Mujahideen carried out the attack. These three men were acquitted by the court earlier this month after they had spent over ten years in the prison.

What’s more startling is that the Delhi police and the Union Home Ministry also knew, from this secret report of AP police, that the 2006 Mumbai serial train blasts too was, possibly, an Indian Mujahideen operation. But no re-investigation was ordered. Those arrested for train blasts were duly tried and convicted. Five of them got death sentence, appeals are pending.

Some crime reporters in Mumbai used to pooh pooh the Crime Branch’s investigation of train blasts. A convincing hole in the police’s case was that the mobile phone records of the accused showed they were not in the areas where the police said they were at the relevant time. But this anomaly was dismissed off hand and the court too didn’t give any consideration to it. Worse, the ATS, another wing of the same police force, reached the conclusion a couple of years later that it was the Bhatkal – led IM which carried out the blasts. Those arrested for train bombing were SIMI members, and therefore, possibly, radical Muslims. But did they plant the bombs which killed about 170 people?

Another shameful instance of bad investigation was Malegaon blasts. It made no sense to believe that Muslim terrorists would target a Muslim area. To be fair to ATS, the existence of a Hindu terror module, Abhinav Bharat, came to light later. But did none of the ATS officers ever have doubts about culpability of the Muslim men arrested in two Malegaon cases?

And with all this, can we say that Asaduddin Owaisi, that articulate, regressive, shrill Muslim leader, is entirely wrong when he says Muslims get no justice in this country?

These investigations took place under Congress regimes. This was the despicable Congress brand of secularism all along: we will ban Salman Rushdie, avoid Taslima Nasreen like a plague, let the Muslim men have ultra-fast triple Talaq facility, and look the other way when innocent Muslim men rotted in prisons. The last kept the Hindus – traumatised and infuriated by the unending string of vicious terror attacks. – happy. Muslim terrorists (must have) carried out the attack; Muslims are (swiftly, it must be said) arrested. Justice done.

Any comments Mr P Chidambaram?