Bogey Of Hindu terror

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/bogey-of-hindu-terror-samjhauta-express-blast-verdict-acquittal-nia-5661310/

Written by Arun Anand |

Updated: April 6, 2019

In Samjhauta case, the guilty were let off, and a spectre created.

Samjhauta express blast: A total of 43 Pakistan citizens were killed in the terrorist attack.

The bogey of “Hindu terror” stands busted with the acquittal of Swami Aseemanand and others in the Samjhauta blast case by a National Investigation Agency (NIA) special court on March 20. This verdict is another testimony to the fact that the Congress led-UPA government manipulated and misused the official machinery to create a false notion of “Hindu terror”. Most importantly, while doing so it ignored the national interest by letting the real culprits off the hook.

The NIA was forced to file false cases in the Malegaon, Samjhauta and the Mecca Masjid incidents against innocent Hindus while suppressing evidence against the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiyyba (LeT) and key players in the terror apparatus such as Arif Qasmani, David Headley and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Information was available in public domain regarding involvement of Karachi-based businessman Qasmani, the LeT and al Qaeda, Headley and his third wife Faiza Outalha with assistance from SIMI terrorists from Indore. But the investigation during the UPA decided to not only ignore this information but sought political capital from a national security issue.

The NIA had filed the chargesheet in the Samjhauta case on June 20, 2011, charging five Indians — Naba Kumar Sarkar alias Swami Aseemanand, Sunil Joshi (now dead), Lokesh Sharma, Sandeep Dange alias Parmanand and Ramchandra Kalasangra alias Ramji alias Vishnu Patel with having conspired and committed the blast.

Long before the chargesheet was filed, there was evidence of the involvement of terrorists from across the border. The US Treasury Department had announced in July 2009 that Qasmani, the chief coordinator of LeT, worked to facilitate the Samjhauta attack. A month earlier, a UN Security Council sub committee declared that Qasmani had worked with the LeT.

In January 2010, Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, publicly admitted Pakistan’s involvement in Samjhauta. In November 2010, The Washington Post carried investigative articles in which it reported that Outalha told US intelligence agencies in 2008 about Headley’s role in the Samjhauta blast while confessing her own involvement.

The narco-tests carried out in Bengaluru in April 2007, three months after the Samjhauta blast, on the general secretary of SIMI, Safdar Nagori, his brother Kamruddin Nagori and Amil Parvez revealed that SIMI activists had helped to carry out the Samjhauta blast. They confessed that the attack on Samjhauta train was carried out with the help of Pakistani nationals. Against this background, it’s clear that the NIA chargesheet was filed to suit the plan of creating a hoax of Hindu terror.

The NIA chargesheet relied primarily on Aseemanand’s confession, which he had retracted. Interestingly, the highly confidential retraction was “leaked” and conveniently published by a magazine, further helping the Congress to raise the pitch of Hindu terror.

R V S Mani, an officer in the home ministry, has given a detailed first-hand account of how Congress leaders, ministers and certain bureaucrats joined hands to create false propaganda in The Myth of Hindu Terror: Insider Account of Ministry of Home Affairs: “The so called secular narrative attempted to be propagated between 2004-2013 had the potential to tear India’s social fabric to shreds. In order to reap political benefits, one religious section (read Hindus) was projected as overbearing bullies and blamed for certain unfortunate occurrences. To this extent, a nation hostile to the country was partnered. The global narrative was reversed and the victim religious grouping was projected as the oppressor, the perpetrator.”

The way the Samjhauta blast case and some others were manipulated for political gain and fixing its rivals proves that Congress has succumbed to what German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michel called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. It states that all forms of organisation, regardless of how democratic they may be at the start, will inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies. As a democracy, we should reject such oligarchic tendencies.

It is also time to start asking: Who should be held accountable for letting the real perpetrators of Samjhuata blast case off the hook and targeting the innocent Hindus?

The writer is CEO of Indraprashta Vishwa Samvad Kendra. Views are personal