Looking Back At Mumbai Terror Attacks

Guest Post by Rakesh Mani

Many predicted that last year's terrorist assault on Mumbai would prove a turning point in India's struggle against terrorism. But a year later the lessons learnt, and measures taken, are as ambiguous as ever.

Aside from a freshly formed Rapid Strike Unit that was brought out on parade last week, there is no real evidence that the country is better organized for a similar attack. Progress on the Mumbai probe is equally opaque; seven people were charged recently in Pakistan in relation to the attacks, but it is unclear if they are the masterminds or mere pawns in a complex political web.

When bombs ravaged other Indian cities, middle-class India was never directly harmed. The Mumbai attacks were closer to the bone. Perhaps for the first time, the well-heeled became the victims. Mumbai became about "people like us".

Yet despite all the anger, the protest-marches and the sloganeering, more than half of Mumbai did not bother to turn up at the voting booths for the Lok Sabha elections in May. And in the recently concluded Maharashtra state elections, the usual suspects have been returned to power by the masses. What happened to all the rage?

Politicians and intelligence bureaus have admitted to being ill-equipped and underprepared — which is more than we can say for India's much-trumpeted private media outlets.

Days after the tragedy, India's hyperbolic TV channels were stirring mass anger and goading the government towards war with Pakistan. Meanwhile it was the Pakistani media that exposed Ajmal Kasab's national identity — a fact that was being denied by Islamabad at the time. Few in the Indian media have paused to applaud the courage of their fellow journalists across the border.

Sadly, that is not the Indian media's only deficiency. They have failed to own up to their many faults in their coverage of last year's attack.

A year later, they are silent on allegations that their newsroom debates pushed India to the brink of war — which could have had severe implications for regional security. They make no mention of their live telecasts of police movements and reactions being seen and used by the terrorists themselves. As indeed they were, according to a recent documentary.

Dan Reed's explosive documentary Terror in Mumbai — Dispatches gives us video testimony from Kasab right after he was captured and actual CCTV footage that is peppered with audio intercepts between the terrorists and their handlers. Throughout the attack, the handlers keep their boys abreast of what the media is saying. At one point they even warn them of approaching helicopters which they could see live on TV.

No major Indian news channel has given coverage to Reed's documentary — presumably because its content shows how much the terrorists profited from the live coverage. The media became the eyes and ears of the terrorists, allowing them to follow frame by frame how their operation was unfolding.

Reed's work is both embarrassing and damaging for these Murdochian channels that wage daily battles for TRP ratings. Given the severity of this affair, the media has to chin up, give play to the documentary and apologize for their obtrusive coverage which left people endangered and disturbed.

Apologies aside, there is a way for the media to redeem themselves. That would be to explore the uncomfortable, and important, questions being raised by the widow of Hemant Karkare, the late head of Maharashtra's Anti-Terror Squad (ATS), who was killed under inexplicable circumstances on the first night of the three-day carnage. Kavita Karkare asks where her late husband's bullet-proof jacket disappeared to — videos show him wearing it earlier that evening.

Karkare was investigating terror attacks by several Hindu extremist factions when he was killed. Put in charge of the ATS after it drew lots of criticism for its functioning, he showed he meant business. He led investigations and filed a thick charge-sheet against several Hindutva terrorists before he was killed.

For the last year, several observers have pointed to inconsistencies in accounts of Hemant Karkare's killing. An author on a progressive website laid these bare:

"The earliest reports said that Karkare was killed at the Taj. If this was false, why were we told so? And why was the story later changed? Was it because it conflicted with eyewitness accounts? Indeed, screening his final moments, CNN-IBN ran footage of Karkare putting on a helmet and bullet-proof vest, and then a shootout at Metro, where an unconscious man who looks like Karkare and is wearing the same light shirt and dark trousers (but without any blood on his shirt or the terrible wounds we saw on his face at his funeral) is being pulled into a car."

These inconsistencies, and the resulting questions, are stories that the Indian media should be pursuing and probing obstinately. If not for playing the people's sentinel, then perhaps to make amends for their inadvertent complicity in the apocalyptic events of November last.

And if they don't, what answers can India offer Kavita Karkare?

Rakesh Mani is a 2009 Teach For India fellow, based in Bombay. He is also a writer and frequent commentator.

Here's a brief video clip of the HBO documentary: Terror in Mumbai



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Terror in India--Who Killed Karkare?

SM Mushrif, the author of "Who Killed Karkare?" and former police chief of Maharashtra state, has raised some very serious questions about the role of the Indian intelligence in the increasing violence committed by Hindutva outfits against India's minorities, and how India's Intelligence Bureau diverts attention from it by falsely accusing Indian Muslims and Pakistan's ISI, as was done in Malegaon and Samjutha Express blasts.

While the human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib by the Bush administration have been exposed, documented and condemned by the world, similar abuses of Muslims in India's "war on terror" have gone largely unnoticed. There appears to be a conspiracy of silence by the world media when it comes to the brutality against Indian Muslims practiced by officials and the right-wing Hindu extremists in world's largest secular democracy. The western media, in particular, have completely bought what Fareed Zakaria, the Indian-born Muslim editor of Newsweek International, describes as a "peaceful, stable, and prosperous" India. Even the officially-endorsed anti-Muslim violence and resulting deaths of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat have not been able to shake the faith of the Indophile western journalists. Let's see if former Maharashtra police chief Mushrif's book "Who Killed Karkare?" changes any minds:


Review by M Zeyaul Haque,

A new book curiously titled "Who Killed Karkare?"(published by Pharos Media) says a nationwide network of Hindutva terror that has its tentacles spread up to Nepal and Israel is out to destroy the India most Indians have known for ages and to remould it into some kind of Afghanistan under the Taliban.

The writer, a former IG Police of Maharashtra, SM Mushrif, has reconstructed a fearsome picture out of former Maharashtra ATS chief Hemant Karkare’s chargesheet against alleged Hindutva terrorists like Lt. Col. Purohit, Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur and others.

The chargesheet pointed towards a mind-boggling nationwide conspiracy with international support to destabilize the constitutional order and the secular democratic Indian state that upholds it, to be replaced by a Hindutva state run according to a new Constitution. For that the conspirators were prepared for a massive bloodbath, using bomb attacks on religious places to trigger an anti-Muslim holocaust.

Mushrif, who has over three decades of diligent policing behind him and whose feats include exposing the Telgi scam, has made an elaborate case out of nearly a dozen blasts over a large area of the country conducted by Hindutva terror groups of different stripes. His case: a section of India’s intelligence services, a miniscule group in the armed forces and a section of different state police forces have been compromised and infiltrated by these elements, a development that bodes ill for the future of the country.

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

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

Mushrif, who very well knows the power of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) to make or mar lives and careers, says he is prepared to face the consequences of hostility of this power hub. He musters “evidence” to show that the IB has regularly been interfering with regular police investigations to let Hindutva terrorists slip out of the net and replace them with random Muslim youth. To fudge the issues further obliging police officers in the states would not mind exterminating a few Muslim youth to be branded posthumously as “terrorists”.

There are quite a few number of such cases where such extra-judicial killing of Muslim youth has turned out to be false police encounters. All this is done to cover tracks of Hindutva terror. Mushrif says a “Brahminist” network that has its origins in Maharashtra, and is closely knit across political parties, government services, including IB, and other vital sectors of life is behind the terror that seeks to destroy the secular, democratic state. He hastens to clarify that very few Brahminists are Brahmins. Many are from other high Hindu castes, some from middle and lower castes.

Most Brahmins are fair-minded and would not like to associate themselves with hate ideologies. Hemant Karkare, too, was a Brahmin, Mushrif says. So is Mushrif’s son-in-law.

It is pertinent to note that “Brahminism” and “Brahminical order” first appeared in Dalit protest vocabulary in the Dalit uprising movement in Maharashtra towards the turn of the 20th century. Mushrif, who appropriates part of this vocabulary for the present discourse, says that Maharashtra still remains the centre of this ideology that, among other things, has the dubious distinction of killing the Father of the Nation.

The power establishment that really runs the affairs of this country (Mushrif says it is not Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh or Rahul Gandhi) does not want to expose the Hindutva terrorists. One example is the blasts in Samjhauta Express, which the IB said was carried out by Pakistan’s ISI. Mushrif quotes a report in The Times of India that said, “the Centre had blamed the ISI on the basis of the IB’s findings.” However, during a narco-analysis test under Karkare, Lt. Col. Purohit had admitted having supplied the RDX used in the blast. The IB, which draws its power from its proximity to the Prime Minister (its director briefs the PM every morning for half an hour), did not want Karkare’s investigation that blew the cover off the IB’s shenanigans, to continue.

Once Karkare was removed from the scene, the IB moved in to fill his position with KP Raghuvanshi, a pliant police officer with extremely low credibility among Muslims for his record of letting off known Hindutva terrorists and implicating innocent Muslim youth even in bomb attack cases on mosques.

There are quite a few interesting vignettes here, like Raghuvanshi and Col. Purohit’s association with Abhinav Bharat in Maharashtra, whose hand was evident in a series of blasts across the country. It has old connections with men like Veer Damodar Savarkar (whose relative Himani Savarkar leads the Abhinav Bharat movement), Dr Munje, who led the Hindu Mahasabha, and other Hindutva luminaries. It is at the Bhonsala Military Academy run by these groups that Purohit trained police officers, including Raghuvanshi. Mushrif asks a pertinent question: Will Raghuvanshi pursue the investigation against Purohit, his guru? A plausible answer is, perhaps no. Already charges have been dropped by a special court under MCOCA against 11 accused, including Purohit, on the grounds of insufficient evidence produced in the court by the prosecution.

This was just the beginning of the undoing of Karkare’s painstaking investigation. Mushrif says slowly the system is working to undo all of Karkare’s work and let off the terrorists who over the years destroyed scores of lives and wreaked irreparable economic damage. The ATS team under Karkare had pointed out VHP leader Praveen Togadia’s role in the blasts. The ATS under Raghuvanshi dropped the investigation against him saying (please hold your laughter) they do not know who Togadia is!

A number of investigations have been thus sabotaged by the powers that be and the tracks of the Hinduta terrorists duly covered. The 319-page book is crammed with such information.

But what about who killed Karkare? Mushrif says two teams were at work on 26/11 – one which did the maximum damage, and was from outside. The smaller team took advantage of the confusion of the moment and acted only on the relatively small CST-CAMA-Rangbhavan stretch that killed Karkare. It was a desi unit that wanted Karkare and his men out of the way.

(Courtesy: The Milli Gazette)

Unfortunately, the Indian government has miserably failed, and continues to fail to investigate the allegations that are very very serious. The author, by raising these issues, adds his heavy weight by virtue of his inside knowledge and the position he held, to the extremely serious allegations.

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Radical Hindu Government in Israeli Exile?

NEW DELHI // The alleged conspirators of a series of fatal blasts in Maharashtra state last year had plans to create a Hindu state and approach Israel, Nepal and Maoist groups for help, state police have claimed in a charge sheet filed with a Mumbai court.

Police claim Abhinav Bharat, the Hindu radical group blamed for the blasts, which killed seven and wounded more than 100 in Malegaon, had designed a flag and written a constitution and was preparing to form a parallel Hindu government in exile operating out of Israel.

“To form this ‘Hindu rashtra [state]’, they were prepared to approach the Israeli government for support, but largely wanted to attract like-minded people into their organisation. From our investigations, we have come to learn that some of the accused had met King Gyanendra of Nepal twice to seek his help,” K P Raguvanshi, the additional director general of Maharashtra police, told a press conference in Mumbai last week.

Police claim that the prime suspect in the Malegaon blast case, Lt Col Prasad Purohit, an officer in the Indian army, confessed during his interrogation that he sought Israel’s help to create a Hindu nation as he believed the constitution of India was incapable of dealing with “Islamic militancy”.

The main source of evidence against Lt Col Purohit is a recorded conversation allegedly between him and a co-conspirator, Dayanand Pandey, found on Mr Pandey’s laptop.

“I have contacted Israel. One of our captains has been to Israel, eliciting a very positive response from their side. They have asked us to show them something on the ground because we have just shown them everything on paper right now. They said wait and watch for six months,” Lt Col Purohit is quoted as saying in the recording and on the charge sheet.

“We had asked for four things: continuous and uninterrupted supply of equipment and training; secondly, to allow us to start our office with a saffron flag in Tel Aviv; thirdly, political asylum; and finally, to support our cause in the United Nations that a Hindu nation is born.”

The accused mastermind met Nepal’s former king, Gyanendra, and several Maoist leaders in 2006 and 2007, the charges read, based on the recorded conversation.

“I had proposed and the king had accepted that 20 of my men will be given officer training every six months. In a year I will get 40 people and 200 of my men will train for soldiers,” Lt Col Purohit is heard saying.

“You being an independent nation ask for AK-47s from the Czech Republic and we will pay for the ammunition. The king had accepted the proposal. Just imagine if that happens.”

Mr Pandey and Lt Col Purohit along with the other members also discussed how they “were hoping that Cambodia, Nepal, Thailand, Bhutan, Japan and Korea become one Hindu nation”, at a meeting said to have been held on Jan 26 2008.

Besides Lt Col Purohit and Mr Pandey, police arrested nine men. Three people are at large. The arrests were made after police traced a motorcycle used in the blasts to one of the men.

In 2006, 36 people were killed in a bomb blast near a mosque in Malegaon, a town nearly 290km north-east of Mumbai. Police had blamed Simi, the Students Islamic Movement of India, for the attacks. Malegaon has long been the scene of violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims, who make up 75 per cent of the impoverished town’s half a million residents.

Police said the Hindu group wanted to frame Simi for the blasts.

Police are also investigating whether Abhinav Bharat played a role in the bombing of the India-Pakistan friendship train, the Samjhauta Express, in 2007 in Panipat, India. More than 70 people died in the blasts, most of them Pakistanis. The Indian government had blamed Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammad for the blasts.

The police claim that the 60kg of RDX explosive used in the train blasts came from Lt Col Purohit while he was posted in a military intelligence unit in Kashmir.

Police are also investigating the possible role of a Delhi-based doctor, many army officers and Himani Savarkar, a niece of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. A witness has told police that he, along with 15 members including Ms Savarkar, attended a meeting in Bhopal where they discussed bombing a site in Malegaon. Police have now made Ms Savarkar a witness in the case.

The investigations into the blasts were dealt a blow after the death in the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November of Hemant Karkare, who was head of Mumbai’s antiterrorist squad. Many people, including a federal minority affairs minister, demanded an inquiry in to the circumstances that led to Karkare’s death, alleging a right-wing Hindu group might have been behind it.

“Basically this is much more rooted in the society. Lt Col Purohit is just the face which has been exposed. The case is almost closed after the filing of the charge sheet. It’s obvious they were not working in isolation,” said Maroof Raza, an expert on security-related issues.

Although some radical Hindu groups are alleged to have been involved in terrorist attacks in India since 2006, their terrorism links became public only in October with the arrest of Lt Col Purohit and his supporters.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party, alleges that the arrests and accusations of the existence of a radical Hindu right-wing network, are politically motivated.

“We have to wait and watch how the investigations are carried forward and how much justice is delivered. Major political parties like BJP, Shiv Sena and other right-wing parties are supporting the accused and if BJP comes to power the course of the case may change,” Mr Raza said.

Source: The National Newspaper, UAE

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