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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.
Malegaon has become a maze --- a maze wherein it’s become impossible at this stage to differentiate between what is true and what is fictitious about the bomb blasts in that town in Maharashtra on September 29 this year.
‘Malegaon explosion was bomb blast’
Over the last few weeks, the state’s Anti-terror Squad has probably created a record of sorts for the India police with almost one startling public revelation a day, only to have egg on its face soon enough.
At the moment of writing this, it seems as if the Maharashtra ATS has not only been out of its depth on the matter but out of its head as well. Sad to say, even our daily media, supposed to be the fourth pillar of democracy, has been sucked in by sheer sensationalism into that mindless whirlpool.
Complete coverage of Malegaon blasts probe
In the beginning one had accepted the possibility, however remote, of a sadhvi being one of those who had a hand in the Malegaon blast. The first news had said that it was her motorbike that was used to plant the bomb. But it soon enough transpired that she had sold the two-wheeler four years ago to a man named Sunil Joshi and signed the relevant papers for transferring its ownership. Even then the ATS kept pointing at the sadhvi with a finger of guilt, publicly disclosing that it had a transcript of her several phone calls expressing her apprehension over the sale of her two-wheeler. One still thought it possible that the sadhvi had something to hide, especially when the chief district judge in Nashik (a city in Maharashtra) granted the ATS demand for remanding her to police custody.
Images: Who is sadhvi pragya thakur?
The shocking truth came when Mahesh Jethmalani, an eminent crime lawyer, came on Times Now television and told viewers that the police remand applications against the sadhvi had absolutely no evidence against her. When asked about the telephone transcripts which the Maharashtra ATS had publicly spoken about, the lawyer smiled and said that there was absolutely no mention of any telephone conversation in the remand applications.
An aside in the above TV news item was the TV anchor’s perverse persistence on knowing why Jethmalani had chosen to represent the sadhvi. The latter’s reply was polite, saying that the accused’s family had approached him; he would have been justified in telling the anchor that why he took the sadhvi’s brief was not his business and beyond the subject of the question being debated. The little incident showed up how our media looks with dark suspicion even on something that doesn’t concern it.
ATS out to kill me: Malegaon accused Purohit
Jethmalani’s disclosure on the utter lack of evidence against the sadhvi opened up a can of worms regarding the Maharashtra ATS investigations” in the Malegaon blasts of 2008.
See, for instance, the ATS giving the sadhvi two forensic tests --- psychological profiling and polygraph (lie-detector) --- even without elementary evidence of guilt. And, as it later transpired from the sadhvi’s affidavit on oath, the 38-year-old woman was detained by the police from October 10 but was formally arrested only on October 24 --- a shocking illegality on the face of it. A queer associated event was that Sunil Joshi, (the alleged buyer of the sadhvi’s ), had reportedly been shot dead by two men exactly 10 months before the Malegaon blast, but Joshi’s cell phone, taken away by one of his murderers who were later apprehended, has not been traced as yet. “Off the record, officials said that there had been pressure ‘right from the top’ to go slow in the matter” reported The Indian Express in its Mumbai edition of November 21. “Pressure from the top” to avoid checking on the phone of someone who had purchased the guilty bike from the allegedly guilty sadhvi? Strange, very very strange.
A swami, a sadhvi and a sainik
See, again, the ATS revelation that Lt.Colonel Purohit, whom it suspects of being a “mastermind” behind the Malegaon blast, was also behind the Samjhauta Express blast of February 2007. That bomb blast tragedy had not showed up any trace of RDX --- 60 kgs of which Purohit is alleged to have stolen from Army Stores and part of which he supposedly used in the Malegaon blast as well as for the train tragedy. That the ATS was quick to deny this allegation is one proof of its bumbling ways.
Now consider the ATS allegation that Purohit had stolen 60 kgs of RDX. Now that quantity is just too big to be hidden in the records of Army Stores or Ordnance factories --- unless it was the ATS belief that there’s no such thing as security and record keeping in those two military units. And 60 kgs!! Do you know that that quantity is “enough to blow up Parliament, Rashtrapati Bhawan, South and North Blocks and still have ammunition to spare.” (Ashok Malik, an ex-Assistant Editor of The Indian Express, in The Pioneer, November 20.) The Maharashtra ATS must be a nut to think that an army colonel would be so stupid to steal what he didn’t need.
Purohit procured RDX for Samjhauta blast: ATS
Y.P.Singh, a retired senior police officer of Mumbai, was at a loss on TV to explain away the Maharashtra ATS public allegations without any hard evidence in support. He thought one reason for the ATS attitude was “overzealousness.” He did not specify the cause of that “overzealousness” or what other reason could have prompted the ATS to be as blindfolded as it has been found to be.
There are more such twists and turns to the ATS tales revealed so far. Its hypothesis so far has been utterly child-like: “spit and scoot” as someone so devastatingly put it. Apparently under some pressure to nail certain non-Qoranic elements of our society as “terrorists”, the ATS has found the simplest possible way of leaking its “discoveries” to the media. And the media, 24x7 and all others, have lapped up the muck without any cross questioning. Today’s media men and women, it seems, don’t believe in wearing thinking caps but only in “Breaking News”.
Sadhvi's arrest a poll gimmick: Sushma Swaraj
It’s a great national shame, therefore, that L.K.Advani’s expression of outrage at the facts expressed in the sadhvi’s affidavit on oath has prompted the Congress --- and the English media therefore --- to pass the judgment that Advani and his BJP are “politicising terrorism” and “thwarting the ATS investigations”.
Indeed, the Congress is apparently happy with the unending, unsupported allegations which the Maharashtra ATS has been levying. Why else would the Congress proclaim that the investigations of the ATS in a state ruled by it prove that the party is not soft on terror as alleged by the BJP ever so often? Clearly, the Congress has just not understood the cause of Advani’s outrage at the facts in the sadhvi’s affidavit. Nor, sadly, has our 24x7 media
Read all columns by Lavakare
The Prime Minister was gracious enough to heed Advani’s expression of outrage and to send the National Security Adviser to brief him on the matter. Unfortunately, the PM himself had not apparently read the sadhvi’s affidavit! Wasn’t it the same PM who had last year confessed his inability to sleep over the plight of an alleged terrorist held in custody in far away Australia? Do the arrested person’s book of faith result in different emotions in our PM?
Do tell us the truth of the entire ATS on Malegaon, Mr. Prime Minister? Is it an investigation or an inquisition? Do tell us. Please.
By the same author: Their Surreal Agenda for Kashmir Polls | A diary of Kashmirâ€Â™s murky politics
(The views expressed in the article are the author’s and not of Sify.com.)
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