[Reader-list] Article on Ahmedabad blasts - Tehelka

[Rakesh Iyer]

Dear all

Another article from Tehelka expressing views. The only thing I can say is
that we really need to press for proper police reforms to avoid all such
kinds of controversies and ensure justice is done in such cases.

Regards

Rakesh

Article:


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      *From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 31, Dated August 08, 2009*
 *CURRENT
AFFAIRS*

*The Seeds Of Wrath*

*Our hysteria for ready answers has become a dangerous trap. A bomb blast
conspirator's explosive confession poses a challenge to us all*
 [image: image]

*SHOMA CHAUDHURY*
*Executive Editor*

IN THE clever calculations men make about security and State, they
underestimate the power of human despair. But despair can be a deadly
weapon. When you lose faith that a system will protect and play fair by you,
it breeds fatal recklessness. It makes you abdicate from the rules that
cement human relations. Despair can turn you from citizen to perpetrator.
>From the hunted to the hunter.

>From 2006 to 2008, there was an escalating climate of terror in the country.
With terrifying regularity, bomb blasts went off in Hyderabad, Delhi,
Jaipur, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad. And finally, most brazenly, in Mumbai. But
Mumbai 26/11 was different: here the killers outed themselves: like a giant
game show gone horribly wrong, groups of young men in clear view of millions
went about with impunity shooting people down. The enemy was visible.
Tangible. They could be dealt with. With the other blasts, there was no one
to pin the crime on. And as bombs kept exploding and people kept dying,
fuelled by a media hungry for immediate answers and genuine citizens’
distress, a paranoia gripped the country.

Hundreds of young Muslims were arrested. And within a few days — often
within a few hours — police and agencies, who had had insufficient knowledge
to preempt the blasts, began to hold press conferences on how they had
cracked the case. A triumphant line of deadly “masterminds” were trotted
out: Safdar Nagori, Maulana Haleem, Mufti Abu Bashar, Atif Ameen. Under
pressure to perform, the police hid behind short attention spans and a
confusing cocktail of Islamic proper nouns. They knew that neither the media
(rushing off to its latest story) nor ordinary citizens were interested in
the details. No one wanted veracity. Everyone only wanted the illusion of
security and ‘action taken’. The few human rights groups and media outfits
who raised flags about false arrests and gaps in police logic were scorned
as ‘anti-national’. Or doctrinaire liberals.

The larger point was missed. It is no one’s case that those who plant bombs
should go unpunished. Those of us raising flags had only two simple
arguments to make. One, take the long route, catch the genuine culprits,
remain constitutional: that is the only way to be really secure. Two: do not
make false arrests and breed fresh despair, triggering new cycles of hate
and revenge. If you corrupt a system entirely, people will abdicate from it.
And black despair can be a deadly weapon.

This week, TEHELKA’s cover story braids all these themes together and teases
out their giant implications. The story is about a young man, Muslim, no
more than 22, caught in a terrible dilemma. He is a star witness in the
Gujarat police’s case. Based on his statement, dozens of men are locked in
jail. Except, this young man’s statement is a lie. He was coerced by the
police into becoming their witness in exchange for his own freedom. He has
remained silent for a year, sick with himself, but free. Tracked to his
house by TEHELKA reporter Rana Ayyub, he breaks down.Rana is accompanied by
a young woman in a burkha, holding a child. The woman’s husband — an
innocent man — is in jail because of this witness. Confronted by her and the
child, rocked by remorse and a sudden desire for atonement — in an almost
cinematic moment — the man tells his real story.

One could dismiss his account as another false turnaround, except in telling
the story — like some protagonist in a classic Greek play — the young man
implicates himself. He is no ordinary witness. He is self-confessedly a
member of the July 2008 bomb blast conspiracy. Conscience-struck, he stopped
short of planting the bombs when he realized the targets would not be Hindu
zealots like the RSS and VHP but ordinary bystanders. But he knows and names
who his real co-conspirators were. To free the innocent men in jail, he must
now bear the cross himself. It is not enough that he shrank back from the
abyss and backed out of the conspiracy. As he says to Rana, by speaking out,
he is consciously setting himself up for reprisal from the police.

So how is the police and State going to react to this man’s confession?

At a specific level, his story blows big holes in the police’s case in
Gujarat, exposing a damning lie and injustice. At a profounder level, it is
a parable for what is happening beneath the skin of our democracy in
countless other places. It raises questions about media, prejudice, policing
and the due process of law. Most of all, it raises the question: in a just
democracy, how should we deal with those who assault us?

Of the many strands in this story, there is first the one about nailing true
culpability. It is obvious from this witness’ account that all the wrong men
are in jail and the police know it. Take Abu Bashar, for example. The media
and police jointly touted him as one of their deadly ‘masterminds’. But the
witness says he is far from that. The Abu Bashar he paints is a gentle and
religious man, so opposed to violence, the mentors of the conspiracy
specifically advised the witness and his friends to keep him in the dark.
The police know this, yet Bashar continues to languish in jail.
 This confession raises a question. In a just democracy, how should we deal
with those who assault us?

There are other troubling details. The witness speaks of torture and the
police’s double-crossing tactics to extract false statements. Set aside
polite questions about human rights. What about the holy grail: national
security? According to the witness, the real conspirators — Subhan Qureishi,
Alamzeb and Qayamuddin — are still on the run. What is one to make of this
willful official charade? Lock innocent men in jail, let the guilty roam
free. What is this society we are creating, where we are in such a hurry to
get answers to difficult questions, we’d rather get false answers than none,
even if it means innocent men must pay?

Another profound issue this story raises is one of causality. The witness
cites all the big faultlines — Gujarat 2002, false arrests, tortures — as
reasons why he and his friends were drawn into the conspiracy. And, indeed,
it would be myopic to treat these bitter young men as merely hard criminals.
Yet, the argument of causality is a tricky rope. Gujarat 2002 cannot justify
bomb blasts of 2006 – 2008. By that logic, extremist Hindus would also be
right in marshalling their own epic justifications: Hindu pilgrims burnt
alive in a train, Kashmiri Pandits chased out of a valley, organised
Christian conversions, a Hindu swami murdered in his ashram. Be they real or
imagined wounds, causality can never be a justification for violence. But in
a society overtaken by greater and greater hysteria, all causalities must be
recognised and addressed. No military might can break the lethal chain of
action and reaction. Redressal for grievances stands a better chance.

Finally, this is an intimation of our easy and extreme prejudices. Until a
few months ago, whipped on by an unthinking media, India was being lured
into demonising 250 million of its citizens. For many years, SIMI — a
politically strident Islamic student organization — was a convenient
scapegoat for the police. By a sleight of hand, the bad aura around SIMI was
projected onto Indian Muslims at large. Last year, TEHELKA published an
exhaustive investigative story that proved many SIMI members or ex-members
jailed by the police were actually innocent men, wielding nothing more
dangerous than strong political views. At no point did TEHELKA vouch for
SIMI as an organisation, but by flagging individual miscarriages of justice
it broke the easy consensus on SIMI. But by then, another pet poltergeist
had been conjured by the police and media: the Indian Mujahideen. (At a
press conference in Gujarat, with almost laughable cynicism, DG Police, PC
Pande told waiting media, “If you remove S and I from SIMI, you have IM:
Indian Mujahideen.” For him, that clinched the truth.)
 The police hid behind short attention spans and a confusing cocktail of
Islamic proper nouns

Now, in an eerie corroboration of TEHELKA’s earlier story, the witness
strongly asserts that no SIMI members were involved in the conspiracy. In
fact, their mentors – “outsiders” he calls them, “shadowy men, clean shaven
who spoke English and smoked a lot” told him and his mates to stay away from
SIMI members because they would scuttle the plan to plant the bombs. Who
were these “outsiders” — calm, anonymous, out of frame — and why is the
police not working overtime to track them down? How many veils of prejudice
and illusion do we as Indians voluntarily live behind?

This man’s story is a challenge to us all. How is he to be dealt with? One
route — the familiar one — would be for the police to kill him
extra-judicially because he has exposed them. But here is a man, bewildered,
wounded, tempted into violence. He was brought to the brink but had the
courage to pull back. Now, he has the courage to undo another wrong and
expose mighty forces at grave danger to himself. Clearly, like hundreds of
others, he has both wronged and been wronged. How should a mature society
react to such a conundrum?

*WRITER’S EMAIL*
shoma at tehelka.com

 *From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 31, Dated August 08, 2009*




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