[Reader-list] The Jamia Nagar Encounter: 'Curioser and Curioser'

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

(apologies for cross posting on Kafila.org)

The well known journalist Praveen Swami, who is celebrated by some as  
an 'encounter expert' and 'authority on terrorism' has finally  
offered his comment on the Jamia Nagar encounter in the Hindu. See -  
http://www.hindu.com/2008/10/10/stories/2008101053621100.htm

I am grateful to Aditya Raj Kaul for having dutifully forwarded  
Swamijis latest offering on to the Reader List. It smells fresh.

Now, I really like Lewis Carrol, and am happy that Swami has invoked  
Carrol, Alice and Wonderland while criticising those (like me) who  
have chosen to take a sceptical stance towards the official handout  
of what exactly happened on the 19th of October in L-18, Batla House,  
Jamia Nagar. With due respect to Praveen Swami, lets read him in the  
spirit of Carrol and come to conclusions about who is Alice, who is  
the Red Queen and who is the white Rabbit, in due course.

It takes far more intelligence to read Swami than it must take for  
Swami to write like Swami. Which is disconcerting, given, that in  
Swamis case, he has a whole bureau full of intelligence to back him  
up, and all we have is the stuff between our individual ears, and  
occasionally our own eyes, our own ears and our own two feet. No  
wonder, we have to strain our credibility to believe the six and more  
impossible things that the police's special cell, the intelligence  
bureau and its anointed experts  would would have us swallow whole  
for breakfast, with each morning's headlines in the newspapers.

Swami is not alone. His statements must be seen in tandem with the  
curt responses that the National Security Adviser, Mr. M.K. Narayanan  
made to a suitably deferential Barkha Dutt ("those doubting the  
police version of the encounter are indulging in a travesty"), the  
intrepid journalist Mihir Srivastava, who has apparently heard three  
young canaries sing of desiring to blow up their mothers, while he  
sits with them under police escort (see his cover story 'inside the  
mind of the bombers' India Today,  ) That this story totally  
contradicts what the same three said earlier in interviews to  
journalists and television channels (Mail Today, and Headlines Today  
- both of which are 'sister concerns' of India Today

I recently attended the 'Jan Sunwai' that Nagraj Adve forwarded a  
report of on to this list. And no, I will not talk of what Swami  
Agnivesh, or Harsh Mander, or Arundhati Roy or Tripta Wahi said or  
did not say at that meeting. But I will mention that I heard Badr  
Taslim, Fayyaz Ahmed, Masih Aalam, Hamid Ali, Sohail Khan, Abdur  
Rahman Abid, Reza Hyder and Ateeq Jamil. These were neighbours and  
acquaintiainces of some of those killed and detained in the Jamia  
Nagar encounter. I heard them recount the details of what happened  
that morning, what shots they heard, which directions they were  
coming from, how far they were from Mohan Chand Sharma as he walked  
out of that lane into a waiting Indica car. What was the state of his  
shirt. i head Abdur Rahman Abid talk of what he saw when he bathed  
and prepared the bodies of Atif (in his twenties) and Sajid  
(seventeen, and  so, a minor) and the exact location of the bullets  
holes on Atif's skull.

I also heard Saquib Nisar's father speak about how he had been  
allowed to meet his son only once, and that too for ten minutes, and  
how no other relatives had been allowed to see him. I contrasted this  
with the two extensive, by all accounts, lengthy meetings that Mihir  
Srivastava had had with three of the detenus, including Saqib Nisar,  
under the watchful eye and strong arm of the Delhi police. I wondered  
about the legal status of confessions made to a reporter under  
conditions that cannot be said to be free of coercion.

Before the meeting began, I also went to the house directly behind L  
18, on to the terrace above its third floor, directly behind the  
fourth floor of the house where Atif and Sajid were shot on that day  
saw that there was no possibility of jumping on to any rooftop from  
the rooftop on L 18 without either breaking ones bones, or entering  
and then exiting another house through the door (which would have  
been impossible to do given that there were some of those eight  
policemen who are said to have gone up on to the fourth floor,  
waiting in the narrow passage that runs between L 18 and the flat  
immediately adjacent to it). I was not alone, several people who  
attended this meeting were with me. We can vouch for and corroborate  
each others statements.

Contrary to all this, which I saw and heard with my own eyes and  
ears, we are being asked to believe the following

(1) that two terrorists escaped by jumping from roofs (that are way  
too high to jump from in the first instance) at the same time as we  
were asked to believe

(2) that they also simply walked out of the front door under the very  
nose of a gun wielding policeman.

(3) that there was an exchange of fire when eyewitnesses and  
neighbours clearly say that they did not hear the acoustic  
differences due to directionality that occur when people use firearms  
against each other.

(4) that the absence of bloodstains as a man walks down four floors  
and then some more on the street from a weapon fired at close range  
are not necessarily indicative of the absence of a lethal, life  
threatening gunshot wound.

(5) that the 'two alleged terrorists' one of whom has several bullet  
injuries in his cranium (and we have seen the photographs that were  
taken of his head, just prior to burial, which have been published in  
Mail Today and Rashtriya Sahara) were sustained during combat. How a  
man who is clearly at the feet of his assailant and is shot in the  
head from above can be 'in combat' is another matter.

  (6) that a highly experienced counter-terrorism expert would go  
into a terrorist hideout without adequate protection, after his team  
had been watching this 'hideout' for more than two months.

That makes exactly six things that are impossible to believe, and  
yet, Swami and Friends (Do I hear the wailing ghost of R.K. Narayan  
somewhere) want us to believe them all. This leads me to ask as to  
who exactly is the Queen here, and where, or who is Alice? And is  
every young man who gets caught or shot in Jamia Nagar by the long  
arm of the very special police, just another rabbit being made to run  
down a very dark hole ?

When Swami writes, when the NSA comes to give his one on one  
interview to Barkha, when India Today does a cover splash, denying  
most of what it's own sister publication Mail Today has been saying,  
then it is a sure sign that the big boys have now come out to play.

Swamiji admonishes those of us who persist in our terribly unsporting  
habit of asking questions about the absence of appropriate  
bloodstains on Mohan Chand Sharma's shirt, or other slightly opaque  
details of this so called encounter by saying that we inhabit a  
'wonderland'.

"Much has been made of a newspaper photograph which shows that  
Sharma's shirt was not covered in blood, with some charging that it  
demonstrates he was shot in the back. Forensic experts, however, note  
that bleeding from firearms injuries takes place through exit wounds  
— not, as in bad pop films, at the point of entry. In the photograph,  
signs of a bullet having
ripped through Sharma's shirt are evident on his visible shoulder;  
so, too, is evidence of the profuse bleeding from the back."

It is way too convenient to dismiss this photograph simply by stating  
that it does not show evidence of Mohan Chand Sharma being shot from  
the back. The fundamental issue is not about whether he was shot from  
the front or the back. The fact is, we have been told that the bullet  
has not been found on his body. In which case, there must be an 'exit  
wound', somewhere.The dispute is not only about the trajectory and  
directionality of the bullet (shot from 'back' or 'front' or 'side')  
but about its timing, or, about whether or not it actually exited.  
The specific bloodstains that we are looking for would not appear on  
the shirt, eithe if (a) Sharma was not shot until the time this  
photograph was taken, or (b) if the bullet had not yet exited the  
body. If it is (a) we need to know who shot Sharma after this  
photograph was taken, when exactly was he shot (because we know that  
he was 'bleeding profusely' by the time he reached Holy Family  
hospital) and why he was shot. If (b) the bullet was still in  
Sharma's body (if it stays inside, it can, on occasion arrest  
hamorrhage by blocking an outlet) then, we need to know what happened  
to the bullet, why did it disappear, and what kind of bullet it was  
in the first place (which gun was it fired from). The only way to  
know what happened is to do a careful analysis of the authentic  
untampered autopsy report. This is one of the many reasons why the  
incident needs to be investigated independently.

As has been stated elsewhere, the body was not given to the doctors  
performing the autopsy in a state where clear indications of entrance  
and exit wounds could be ascertained.

see - "Police Theories Encountered" by Shobita Naithani, Tehelka  
Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 39, Dated Oct 04, 2008, <http:// 
www.tehelka.com/story_main40.asp?filename=Ne041008police_theories.asp>

The Tehelka report says "...a senior doctor who conducted the  
postmortem on Inspector MC Sharma at the All India Institute of  
Medical Sciences spoke to TEHELKA of the damage to his vital organs.  
“It was difficult to establish the entry and exit points of the  
bullet because conclusive evidence had been wiped out by the  
interventions of the doctors at Holy Family [where Sharma was rushed  
to].”

Swami, in his text, says "Judging by Sharma's injuries, as recorded  
by doctors at the Holy Family Hospital in New Friend's Colony and  
later re-examined at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences'  
Trauma Centre, he was fired at from two
directions." Now, how can we ascertain that there were 'two  
directions' of fire, when it is not even possible to tell an entry  
from an exit wound because of the interventions done on the body at  
Holy Family Hospital. Either Swami is fantasizing about the contents  
of the autopsy, or he knows what the autopsy report contains, and is  
deliberately misleading us.

Further, while discussing what is visible in the photograph, Swami  
says - :so, too, is evidence of the profuse bleeding from the back".  
Now, I have examined the photograph very carefully as it was  
reproduced in the Hindustan Times.

  and I see no evidence of profuse bleeding from the back". There is  
evidence of "profuse bleeding" from his left shoulder, but then a  
shoulder is not an abdomen. Should we then conclude that our  
distinguished counter terrorism expert is the kind of person who  
would be colloquially recognized (pardon my french) as someone who  
can't tell his "arse from his elbow".

Finally, I come to the most colourful aspects of Swami's theory. Once  
again, we are asked to attend to the arcana of telephone  
surveillance. Its curious, for instance, that Swami mentions the fact  
that one of the dead alleged terrorist's Atif Amin's phone (and hence  
his movements) was under surveillance from as early as immediately  
after the 19th of July (a week before the Ahmedabad bombings)  This  
occurred, because, a number traced to Bharuch, Gujarat, which was  
purported to be that of a person who had parked the bomb laden cars  
in Ahmedabad, had also both received calls from Jamia Nagar and had  
itself been traced on occasion to Jamia Nagar. Swami says 'The  
authorities mounted a discreet watch on his phone but decided not to  
question him in the hope that he would again be contacted by the  
perpetrators..." (of the Ahmedabad bombings). That moreover,  
'investigations' had revealed that an 'assault squad' with a 'top  
commander' called Bashir had left Ahmedabad for a 'safe house' in  
Jamia Nagar, Delhi on the 26th of July.

So the Delhi Police's special cell, and its 'top phone surveillance  
and interception' expert, according to the 'top counter-terrorism  
expert commentator' Praveen Swami, had been watching Atif from around  
two months before the bomb blasts in Delhi (which Atif, and the other  
inhabitants and visitors to L-18, Batla House were supposed to have  
had a hand in). Atif, as we know, listed his name and address on  
numerous documents. Which included phone registrations, driving  
licenses, tenant verification forms. His phone number and address are  
said to have been uploaded even on his orkut profile.

What can we make of the import of this suggestion, that the special  
cell had been 'watching' or 'listening' to Atif for two months before  
the alleged encounter. That the special cell, either, followed Atif  
and allowed him to plant his bombs (logical possibility 1), or,  
neglected to keep its watch (logical possibility 2) or, is inventing  
the story of the phone records, in exactly the same way in which it  
invented the story of phone records, IMEI numbers and other details  
in the 13 December case (logical possibility 3). Unfortunately, there  
are no other possibilities.

If possibilities 1 and 2 regarding the alleged phone taps are to be  
believed, then, the incompetence, or lethargy of the special cell,  
including the late Mohan Chand Sharma, is directly to blame for  
allowing a terrorist outrage to happen. (and this would be the only  
conclusions that can be drawn, were Swami to be right in this case).  
If Swami is right in this regard, we have to ask "what prevented the  
special cell from mounting a 24 hour seven days a week watch on the  
inhabitants of a house from which calls were made to the bombers in  
Gujarat, and finally, what prevented them from catching them red  
handed as they went to plant bombs in Delhi"

If, on the other hand, Swami and his 'extra-curricular' colleagues in  
the security apparatus are lying, and there was in fact no  
surveillance of the kind that they say occurred on Atif's phone,  
then, the special cell is guilty of pre-meditated assasination, and  
bureaucrats, journalists, commentators and so called 'experts'  who  
are covering for them are aiding and abetting them in their crime.

They are using our sense of danger, our daily apprehension about yet  
another pathetic, violent, condemnable incident of terrorism as a  
plaything as they go about charting their pathetic course. In all  
likelihood, they and their masters, which include the home minister  
and the prime minister of this government, and all those who ratchet  
up the rhetoric on the so called war against terror are either not  
interested in making sure that terrorism does not end, or have a  
vested interest in seeing the macabre dance of terror and counter  
terror go on, an on.

And yet, for many people, Swamiji can say no wrong. If this is indeed  
so, then we are trulyin wonderland, and this wonderland we all  
inhabit, like any respectable fairground attraction has its chambers  
of horrors, its roller coaster rides between contradictory  
positions,  its talking corpses and its decomposing truths. In Alice  
in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat, after vanishing, left its grin  
behind, here, Swami and friends, having said their pieces, leaves us  
only with their hovering grimaces. Unfortunately, while this effort  
might make do as an example of the second rate variety of first  
information reports, it does not pass muster as a convincing body of  
argument. For that, Swami, Mr. Narayanan, Mihir Srivastav and all the  
rest who have danced their dance of death, will have to try harder.

Like Alice, the most interesting sojourner through Wonderland till  
date, we might be tempted to say, as we continue to read journalists  
with excellent sources in the intelligence apparatus, or,  should we  
say intelligence operatives with impeccable clout and credentials  
within certain respectable newspapers, magazines and television  
channels -  'curioser and curioser'.