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Arvind Lavakare may be 71, but the fire in his belly burns stronger than in many people half his age. The economics post-graduate worked with the Reserve Bank of India and several private and public sector companies before retiring in 1997. His first love, however, remains sports. An accredited cricket umpire in Mumbai, he has reported and commented on cricket matches for newspapers, Doordarshan and AIR. Lavakare has also been regularly writing on politics since 1997, and published a monograph, The Truth About Article 370, in 2005.

It ended in a whimper but not without creating a political tsunami and leaving on the nation’s secular credentials a very ugly scar that will require consummate plastic surgery to remove, if at all.  

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The Union Minister for Minority Affairs created a gale all right last week when he insinuated that the Pakistani terrorists’ bullets which killed Hemant Karkare, chief of Maharashtra’s Anti-Terror Squad, at Cama Hospital on the black 26/11 may well have been the outcome of a conspiracy of radical Hindus seeking revenge for his targeting them in his squad’s investigation into the bomb blast in Malegaon town this September.  

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What the Union Minister was insinuating was that some Hindus ( supposedly police colleagues) had calculatedly arranged to send Karkare to the Chhatrapati Shivaji (Train) Terminus instead of letting him go the Taj or Oberoi Hotel where the action was more hectic on the night of 26/11. Why Karkare and two senior colleagues were traveling together in the same car that night was beyond his imagination, said the Minister. 

That this “conspiracy” and “unimaginable” suspicion ultimately ended in the minister having to eat crow does in no way wipe out the initial verdict that despite more than fifty years in politics Abdul Rehman Antulay had let his innate ideology triumph over available information, allowed stark communalism to win over commonsense. Such, we are told, is the passion embedded in Islam and its Qoran/Hadith et al. 

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It’s lamentable that sections of Antulay’s community welcomed him as a hero when he went to pray at the mosque outside the Lok Sabha where he had a little while earlier exposed his perverse and inflammatory thought process. Equally pitiable was that the Communists as a block and several Congressmen had sided, however glibly, with Antulay’s suspicion of the majority community’s inclination towards terrorism. 

The basic fact ignored by Antulay --- and all supporters of his “brave plain speaking” --- was that before he made his infernal innuendo on December 17, he had all the time and all the clout to ascertain all the required info on Karkare’s death on 26/11. As a Union minister and as the ex-chief minister of Maharashtra, Antulay could well have used his free Member of Parliament’s air travel pass to come to Mumbai, enjoyed the state’s VIP guest house hospitality, summoned Maharashtra’s chief minister, Director General of Police and all seniors connected with Karkare’s ATS and obtained a written authoritative account of how exactly Karkare, Assistant Commissioner of Police, Kamte, and Police Inspector Salaskar had been slain by the bullets from Pakistan’s two terrorists near Cama Hospital that is just half a kilometer away from CST. 

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If Antulay had just come down to Mumbai on a fact-finding exercise, he would have learnt of the following events of 26/11 excerpted here from a report in The Times of India, Mumbai, December 19, 2008, penned, and let this be noted, by two Muslims, S.Ahmad Ali and Mateen Hafeez: 

• Around 9.45pm, the city police control room flashed a message saying there was a terror attack at CST railway station.
• Hemant Karkare, having dinner at his home in Dadar (about 15 minutes by a red beacon car from CST) reached there and donned a helmet and bullet-proof jacket. Additional DGP (Railways) K P Raghuvanshi also joined him. But, while Raghuvanshi stayed back, Karkare, along with his four policemen, first went to the CST station's platform number 1 but found it deserted, with no trace of any terrorists.
• According to the city police commissioner, Hasan Gafoor (another Muslim, be it noted), “A fellow policeman informed them (Karkare and Raghuvanshi) that the terrorists were spotted walking towards (the nearby) Cama Hospital.” (This hospital’s rear entrance is half a kilometer from the start of the quiet, ill-lit lane adjoining The Times building which itself is bang opposite the CST; the hospital’s front entrance is alongside a busy footpath beside the city’s session’s court housing a police station.)
• Meanwhile, Karkare received a wireless message, saying, “Additional police commissioner Sadanand Date is injured at Cama Hospital. A bodyguard is seriously injured, while another constable is dead.”
• Karkare, accompanied by four constables, made for Cama Hospital while the Z-security guards were instructed to take position outside The Times building.
• “Later”, as stated by Akhtar Shaikh, (another Muslim be it noted) who was Kakare's orderly and who was present along with Karkare that night, “Inspector Vijay Salaskar and additional commissioner Ashok Kamte, who met at CST, arrived on the scene. Salaskar was accompanied by five of his subordinates.”
• According to the text in the diagram accompanying the above mentioned Times of India report, Kamte got the same message as Karkare got at 9.45 p.m. and left his Byculla residence for CST. Salaskar, residing at a distant suburb, Goregaon, got a similar message, but en route a senior officer asked him to go the Taj hotel. By the time he got there, operations against the terrorists had begun, and joint commissioner of police, Rakesh Maria, told him on the cellphone to go to Colaba police station where, reportedly, two terrorists had been caught. Finding that two Israelis, rather than terrorists, had been apprehended by Colaba police station, Salaskar informed Maria accordingly and was then told by him to report to HQ. While reaching there he got a message from an officer about ACP Date lying injured in Cama Hospital. Hence his arrival and meeting with Karkare near Cama.
• “As we headed towards the rear entrance of Cama Hospital, we heard gunshots. Kamte returned the fire, and the terrorists threw a grenade at us, but it fell within the hospital premises,” continued Shaikh.
• Inspector Nitin Alaknure, Salaskar's colleague, said, “Karkare, Kamte and Salaskar were discussing their next step. Kamte then suggested they enter the hospital from the main gate. They got into a police Qualis stationed there, and later, as they approached the special branch (of the Mumbai CID which is on the road to Rang Bhavan and Cama Hospital rear entrance) Salaskar took over the driver's seat,” Alaknure recalled.
• Rakesh Maria, Mumbai crime branch chief, said, “They (Karkare’s trio) got a wireless message that the terrorists were hiding behind a red vehicle near Rang Bhavan. They started looking for the red vehicle and suddenly spotted one terrorist, who was later identified as Mohammad Ajmal Kasab. Kamte and Salaskar opened fire.” (Karkare didn’t fire, be it noted)
• The officers were about to get down from the vehicle when all of a sudden, another terrorist showered bullets from his AK-47, injuring all the cops. Kamte and Karkare died on the spot. The terrorists then threw the three policemen out of the car, and hijacked the vehicle. It was Arun Jadhav, the lone survivor, who later informed the control room about the incident. (Apparently, there were only four occupants of the Qualis and only Jadhav survived to tell the tale of death.)
• Former intelligence chief V N Deshmukh said he had visited the spot where the shootout (which claimed Karkare's and cops' lives) happened. “I spoke to several witnesses and officers. I am convinced it was not a conspiracy,” he said.

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Five conspicuous points emerge from the above newspaper report. One is that Karkare, the chief, entered battle himself instead of devising a strategy to trap and outnumber and arrest the terrorists. Two, he let Kamte decide that the team should enter the front gate of Cama Hospital. Three, he let Kamte and Salaskar travel with him instead of in separate vehicles. Four, he let his two colleagues fire on the lone terrorist they saw instead of working out a plan to corner him into a trap. Five, the trio did not even conceive of a second terrorist hiding near that red car, and firing at them with an AK-47. 

The above paragraph leaves you, and Abdul Rehman Antulay, to draw conclusions that are too embarrassing to be put down here. 

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Oh yes, there’s Antulay’s crucial question: “Why did Karkare go to CST where there was nothing (in his words) and not to the Taj or the Oberoi?” Well, well, Antulaybhai, the Taj hotel attack began at 10.03 p.m., i.e. 18 minutes after the CST attack was intimated to Karkare having dinner at his home. If the Home Minister’s Lok Sabha statement on your insinuation doesn’t enlighten you on this time of the attack on the Taj, please see the front page of The Sunday Express of December 21, 2008.

The views expressed in the article are the author’s and not of Sify.com.

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