Malegaon Blasts: The Death of a Lie

A NEW CLASS OF INDIAN now emerged on the scene. He was the khaddar-clad, Gandhi-capped, black-marketeering patriot,” wrote DF Karaka in 1950 in his serial exposés of the first Congress government of independent India. He further showed that “black-marketeering” was the least of Congress’ sins, compared, for example, to this: “…some of the office-bearers of the Congress party had formed a company to trade in arms and ammunition and had given the address of Congress House [Bombay] as being that of their company. Congress House had virtually become an ammunition dump.”

Karaka also predicted how this newly minted species of the “khaddar-clad, Gandhi-capped, black-marketeering patriot” would infect the whole nation like an epidemic that would corrode us from the inside and correctly diagnosed India’s in­dependence as a betrayal.

Emergency gave the firsthand taste of the corrosion on a national scale—from Opposition leaders to the street beggar. But Congress, far from learning any lesson from it, let alone showing any remorse, became wiser in the only way it knows. On the surface, it appeared that Indira Gandhi had mellowed in her second coming in 1980 but that coming came at the cost of creating Khalistani separatism which in turn cost her life.

The Congress genocide of Sikhs that followed in the aftermath once again showed that the corrosion had merely changed its paint; its core was intact. But the more visceral outcome of the Sikh genocide was the nonchalant manner in which its chief perpetrators—all of them, Congress leaders—not only remained unpunished till the end but maintained their clout unimpaired.

The contrast could not be crueller.

It took 17 years of ordeal for a former, ranking Army officer and former MP to be acquitted in a false case of terrorism foisted by pow­erful forces in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.

The spectacle of Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Prasad Purohit, who was accorded a hero’s welcome in a grand public proces­sion in Pune, elicits dark memories of a recent era. While justice seems to have been served in his case, the price he had to pay has been enormous.

His implication along with Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and five others was a defining trait of the UPA government. The tales of torture that both underwent at the hands of the ATS (Anti- Terrorism Squad) were part of a larger, sinister script that began playing out in the latter part of UPA’s first term and continued unabated till the end of its second.

UPA was far more lethal in its character and far-reaching in its consequences than Emergency. State-sponsored brutal oppression like Emergency naturally invited an equal and opposite reprisal. But silent and creeping terror is of a different magnitude because it is largely invisible and does not have a single point of failure.

The Congress-led UPA government had elevated its legacy politics to an art form. The old ways of socialist plunder of public money was now paralleled by an all-out assault against the very roots of Hindu civilisation whose main weapon was the planned dismantling of its society. Earlier, Congress had restricted itself to Muslim appeasement and Hindu-baiting. The new era was inau­gurated by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s public dec­laration that Muslims have the first right over India’s resources whose documented proof is the Sachar Committee Report. Not coincidentally, in the new era, the combined forces of the Islamist, missionary, NGO, and far-left lobbies working in tandem, silently acquired wider and deeper clout at all levels of the governmental, bureaucratic and judicial apparatus. This frightening power was the zeitgeist of the decade-long UPA government.

The slew of hasty and questionable judgments delivered by the courts during that period in realms sacred only to Hindu society showed another practical manifestation of this clout. This is apart from legislation targeting and threatening the very survival of Sanatana Dharma in the land of its birth.

As a result, at no point in India’s history was Hindu society as vulnerable as it was between 2004 and 2014. It is estimated that, on average, there was a jihadist terror attack every six weeks on Indian soil during that period. It’s a laundry list including but not limited to the following:

2005: Ram Janmabhoomi grenade attack by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists; Jaunpur train bombing; Delhi serial bomb blasts during Diwali.

2006: Ahmedabad railway station bombing; Varanasi serial blasts; Mumbai train blasts; Malegaon blasts.

2007: Samjhauta Express bombing; terror attack in Lumbini gar­dens, Hyderabad; simultaneous blasts in Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad courthouses by the sleeper cells of the LeT and Jaish-e- Mohammed (JeM).

2008: Bangalore serial blasts; 17 serial blasts in Ahmedabad; seven blasts in various market areas of Delhi; Malegaon blasts; terror attacks on Taj Hotel, Leopold Café and other locations in Mumbai.

The year 2008 was particularly interesting. Apart from the Male­gaon blasts and 26/11, it witnessed the gunning down of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, an 80-year-old monk working to pre­vent Christian conversions as well as reconverting tribal Hindus in Kandhmal, Odisha, by evangelical organisations which used Maoists as hired guns. He remains unmourned and forgotten.

Add to this the heightening of Maoist terror in intensity, ex­panse and frequency plus the spread of urban Naxalism and we get a fairly accurate picture of UPA’s disregard for national security.

The Mumbai 26/11 attack was the tipping point in this saga of unabated jihadist terror. It was widely reported back then that even while the assault was happening in Mumbai, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil was busy changing his attire. His resigna­tion owed more to public outrage than any self-realisation.

It is now widely known that the arrests of Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya and others were part of a broader ploy to manufac­ture a nonexistent narrative of ‘Hindu’ or ‘Saffron’ terror to serve a twofold purpose. First, to deflect the nationwide fury against recurring waves of jihadist terror. Second, to finish off organ­isations working for Hindu causes—specifically, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal, etc—by making them villains. Indira and Sanjay Gandhi had merely imprisoned members of all these Hindu organisations during Emergency. The UPA-era Congress had planned something far worse in the long term. On the political plane, this single-minded targeting of Hindu organisations would also hurl an already weak Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) almost into oblivion in the upcoming 2009 Lok Sabha elections and beyond.

The Hindu terror bogeyman was manufactured in earnest and would have picked up steam but for 26/11.

The timeline is telling.

Sadhvi Pragya Thakur was arrested on October 27, 2008; Colonel Purohit on November 5, 2008; and the rest on November 12.

A fortnight later, Mumbai was attacked by an LeT terror squad comprising a paltry 10-mem­ber force which wreaked mayhem for four days. The real shame of 26/11 was not lax security that allowed them free pass inside India but UPA’s weak-kneed response. One recalls then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s condemnation of Manmohan Singh who, “instead of teaching Pakistan a lesson in its own language, wrote love letters to America.”

Meanwhile, the strawman of ‘saffron ter­ror’ was being disseminated from all platforms. The political was led by former Home Minister P Chidambaram, former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh, and former Maharash­tra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan. A pliant section of law enforcement agencies was thickly involved. Likewise, Congress-friendly newspapers and news channels provided favourable coverage to embellish this narrative.

The phoney ‘saffron terror’ narrative manifested in other ways as well.

A WikiLeaks exposé in 2010 told the world how, in July 2009, Rahul Gandhi, at a lunch with Hillary Clinton, mentioned that “the bigger threat [to India] may be the growth of radicalised Hindu groups, which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community.”

On December 28, 2010, Congress General Secretary Digvijaya Singh released a book titled 26/11 RSS Ki Saazish? (26/11, An RSS Conspiracy?) authored by Aziz Burney, editor-in-chief of the Urdu Sahara newspaper.

The final objective of this narrative arrived in 2011 in the form of the Communal Violence Bill, which sought to hold only the Hindu community as the guilty party in every case of communal violence—guilty until proven innocent. Even worse, if the Hindu community was the victim, the Bill made no provision for legal redress. The Congress-led government immediately retreated in face of severe opposition but it was dogged in its witch hunt against the Hindu community. In a last-ditch move, it revived the Bill as late as February 2014 by fielding Kapil Sibal in Parlia­ment to argue in its favour. It was roundly defeated in this second and final attempt. The authors of the Bill were drawn from the unconstitutional National Advisory Council (NAC).

In light of all this, the implication, torture and sustained ha­rassment of Purohit and others was the most audacious facet of the UPA government’s project of undoing Hindu civilisation through a concerted assault on all fronts. His ‘crime’ was deliver­ing inspirational lectures to students of a patriotic Hindu organ­isation named Abhinav Bharat, founded by a retired Army major.

His testimonies to the special NIA (National Investigation Agency) court leave us horrified. Contrary to popular percep­tion, he claims that it was Sharad Pawar who had coined the term ‘Hindu terror’ in August 2008—one-and-a-half months before the Malegaon blast.

Purohit was illegally detained by the ATS for a full week before formally showing his arrest; especially damning are his revela­tions about senior IPS circles. Hemant Karkare (deceased) and Param Bir Singh (fugitive) emerge in shameful colours for their torture of Purohit, forcing him to implicate Yogi Adityanath and senior leaders of RSS and VHP. One is again reminded of another prediction of Karaka: “[The] deterioration in the integrity of the police force which took place after the Congress took over from the British was directly traceable to the Congress-controlled organizations which were harbouring… black-marketeers and allowing them to move about freely in governmental and social circles… if the [police] took a broad view he stood to gain finan­cially and materially, and if the accused were a man of power and influence [he] stood to gain quick promotion.”

Congress has indeed descended a long way from those rather humbler methods of corruption to indulging in borderline treason.

Colonel Purohit, who stoically battled to clear his name, stands exonerated and deservedly feted. And in what can only be called poetic justice, Sadhvi Pragya Thakur won handsomely against Digvijaya Singh in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. It appears that the Malegaon blasts case has finally unravelled. Well, almost, because its real masterminds remain unpunished. Just like the perpetra­tors of the 1984 Sikh genocide.

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