The ATS charge sheet in the Malegaon blast case
BY TEESTA SETALVAD
The crime
On September 29, 2008 there was a bomb explosion in a crowded locality of
Malegaon. The explosion occurred opposite the Shakil Goods Transport Company,
located between Anjuman Chowk and Bhiku Chowk, a busy and populous part of town.
The blast was caused by an improvised explosive device (IED) fitted on an LML
Freedom motorcycle bearing the registration number MH-15-4572. Six persons were
killed as a result of the explosion and 101 persons sustained various degrees of
injuries. Property worth Rs 4,23,500 was also destroyed. The IED was assembled
using RDX, ammonium nitrate and ammonium nitrite.
This act was the handiwork of a group of conspirators whose
ultimate aim, according to the ATS charge sheet in the Malegaon case, was to
"propagate a separate Hindu Rashtra with its own constitution and aims and with
Bharat Swarajya, Surajya, Suraksha, in its preamble". The charge sheet goes on
to say that members of "this organised crime syndicate wanted to adopt a
national flag i.e. solo-themed saffron flag with a golden border. The length of
the flag would be twice its breadth, with an ancient golden torch (bhagwa
dhwaj)".
The charge sheet filed by the ATS runs into 4,528 pages. It
contains two confessional statements of accused Rakesh Dhawade and Sudhakar Dhar
Dwivedi alias Swami Dayanand Pandey, a list of 431 witnesses the prosecution
wishes to examine and forensic evidence. The ATS has also included telephone,
audio and video transcripts running into hundreds of pages. A total of 14
persons have been named as accused in the crime and arrests began in October
2008. Three of the 14 accused are absconding.
The conspirators
1. Sadhvi Pragnyasingh Chandra-
palsingh Thakur alias Swami Purnachetanand Giri (38), originally from Madhya
Pradesh but living in Surat, Gujarat. A member of the VHP’s Durga Vahini and a
former member of the ABVP, Pragnya Thakur is closely associated with BJP leaders
and has participated in their election campaign meetings as well.
2. Shivnarayan Gopalsingh Kalsangra (36), a native of Madhya
Pradesh and living in Indore.
3. Shyam Bhavarlal Sahu (42) from Madhya Pradesh.
4. Ramesh Shivji Upadhyaya (57) from Uttar Pradesh. He organised
camps and training modules to ideologically and physically draw young men into
violence. (The fact that Upadhyaya is a retired officer of the Indian army is
not mentioned in the charge sheet.)
5. Sameer Sharad Kulkarni (39), a resident of Pune but
originally from Jalgaon in Maharashtra. A former ABVP member, Kulkarni revived
the Abhinav Bharat in Pune. He worked at a Bhopal printing press for some time
and was in charge of Abhinav Bharat’s activities in Madhya Pradesh.
6. Ajay alias Raja Eknath Rahirkar (39), living in both Pune and
Jalgaon. He was Abhinav Bharat’s Pune-based treasurer who provided logistical
and financial support to Kulkarni and Purohit.
7. Rakesh Dattatraya Dhawade alias Rao (42) from Pune district.
He is an arms expert linked to Abhinav Bharat.
8. Jagdish Chintaman Mhatre (40) from Dombivli, Thane.
9. Lt Col Prasad Srikant Purohit alias Balawant Rao alias
Shreyak Ranadive (36), living in Pune and Panchmarhi, Madhya Pradesh. This is
the first time that a serving army officer has been accused in a terror attack.
Purohit is charged with providing training, coordinating the blasts, sourcing
funds and arranging for the explosives. Being an army officer, he operated under
at least two aliases.
10. Sudhakar Udaybhan Dhar Dwivedi alias Swami Dayanand Pandey
alias Swami Amrutanand Devtirth alias Shankaracharya of Sharada Sarvagy Peeth
(40), a native of Jammu living in Uttar Pradesh. A self-styled ‘Dharma Guru’,
Dwivedi was also guru to the Sadhvi, Pragnya Thakur. There are possible
indications that could link Dwivedi to the Kanpur blast in October and the Jammu
agitation over the Amarnath shrine last year.
11. Sudhakar Onkarnath Chaturvedi (37), a resident of Nashik but
originally from Uttar Pradesh.
Absconding accused:
12. Ramchandra Gopalsingh Kalsangra (38) from Indore in Madhya
Pradesh. The person responsible for planting the explosives at Malegaon,
Ramchandra Kalsangra was in constant touch with Sadhvi Pragnya Thakur and
coordinated the blasts.
13. Sandeep Vishwas Dange, from Indore in Madhya Pradesh.
14. Pravin Mutalik, a resident of Karnataka.
Sections Applied: Sections 302, 307, 326, 324, 427, 153A,
153A(1)(b) and 120B of the IPC read with Sections 3, 4, 5 and 25 of the Arms Act
1959 read with Sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the Explosive Substances Act 1908 read
with Sections 15, 16, 17, 18, 20 and 23 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention)
Amendment Act 2004 read with Sections 3(1)(i), 3(1)(ii), 3(2), 3(4) and 3(5) of
the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) 1999.
The police are also on the lookout for Swami Ashim Anand from
the Dangs district in Gujarat who has been absconding since the day news leaked
out that the ATS was on the hunt for him. If caught, fresh details about the
plot might be revealed along with possible links to the Ajmer and Mecca Masjid,
Hyderabad, blasts as well as the blasts on the Samjhauta Express.
Unlawful assembly
The terror ring held meetings at various places i.e. Faridabad,
Kolkata, Bhopal, Jabalpur, Indore, Nashik, etc to plan their conspiracy under
the banner of Abhinav Bharat, which was concurrently propagating its idea of a
Hindu nation to be established through a takeover by the army.
To further this larger conspiracy, a meeting was held at
Faridabad on January 25-26, 2008 at which the accused Prasad Srikant Purohit,
Ramesh Upadhyaya and Sudhakar Chaturvedi were present. At the meeting Srikant
Purohit took on the responsibility for providing the explosives while Sudhakar
Chaturvedi took on the responsibility for providing two men who would set off a
blast at an unspecified location. Chaturvedi also offered the use of his house
at Vanat Chawl, Bhagur Road, Deolali camp, Nashik, as a location where the IED
could be assembled and stored. The keys to Chaturvedi’s house were kept at the
Military Intelligence (MI) office at the Deolali camp, Nashik. Purohit had asked
Pravin Mutalik (an absconding accused) to collect the keys from the MI office at
Deolali so as to enter Chaturvedi’s house for the purpose of assembling the IED
which was finally used to explode bombs at Malegaon.
At a similar meeting held in Bhopal on April 11-12, 2008 the
conspirators, Pragnya Thakur, Ramesh Upadhyaya, Sameer Kulkarni, Srikant Purohit,
Sudhakar Dhar Dwivedi alias Dayanand Pandey and Sudhakar Chaturvedi among
others, together plotted to take revenge against Muslims in Malegaon by
exploding a bomb in a densely populated area. Srikant Purohit took on the
responsibility for providing the explosives while Pragnya Thakur took on the
responsibility for providing men to carry out the explosion. It was at this
meeting that all the participants decided to carry out the explosion at Malegaon.
Around June 11, 2008 another meeting was held, this time at the
Circuit House in Indore. At this meeting Pragnya Thakur introduced Ramchandra
Kalsangra (an absconding accused) and Sandeep Dange to Sudhakar Dhar Dwivedi,
saying that both these persons were her confidants and had always supported her.
Sometime in the first week of July 2008, at another meeting in Indore, Pragnya
Thakur asked Dwivedi to direct Srikant Purohit to give the explosives to
Ramchandra Kalsangra and Sandeep Dange in Pune.
Unravelling a conspiracy
The ATS has held that all the accused persons were part of a
criminal conspiracy operating through meetings held in different parts of
Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh between January 2008 and October 23, 2008, the
object of which was to commit unlawful acts in furtherance of the criminal
conspiracy.
The charge sheet states that the organised crime syndicate has
been active since the year 2003; a key member of this syndicate, arrested
accused Rakesh Dattatraya Dhawade, has been active since then. Rakesh Dhawade
was among those present at an oath-taking ceremony of members of Abhinav Bharat
that was held at Raigad Fort in 2006, which Srikant Purohit and Ajay Rahirkar
also attended. Dhawade and the organised crime syndicate had been carrying out
bomb blasts since 2003. All the accused also joined this syndicate and continued
its unlawful activities. Dhawade was involved in procuring arms and ammunition
for the group. This organised crime syndicate procured, acquired and transported
the materials that were required for the bomb explosions and also transferred
vast amounts of money, arms and ammunition used to carry out its unlawful
activities. These unlawful acts are often committed in areas where there is a
dense population of Muslims. The supposed justification for these actions is
revenge for acts committed by the Muslim community.
Missing links
Army and intelligence links
The most dangerous trend revealed by the Nanded investigations
and reconfirmed now in the Malegaon probe is the involvement of both serving and
retired officers of Indian intelligence agencies and the Indian army in training
outfits that are ideologically opposed to the Indian Constitution, in the making
of bombs, in generating terror and in spreading bitter communal poison.
A serving officer and four retired officers of the Indian armed
forces have already been shown up for their links to various recent acts of
terror. The Malegaon charge sheet implicates Purohit and Upadhyaya in the crime.
But Col (retd) S. Raikar, a former Indian army officer and until recently the
commandant of the Bhonsala Military School, Nashik, who made the school campus
available for training terror groups, was questioned by the police but has been
spared in the ATS charge sheet. He has since resigned from his position at the
Bhonsala Military School.
The earlier charge sheet(s) of 2006 (prepared by the ATS
Maharashtra) in the Nanded blast case implicate Sanatkumar Bhate in training
members of the Bajrang Dal at the Akanksha Resort at Sinhgad near Pune. Bhate is
a former officer in the Indian navy. A legitimate follow-up to this would be to
probe the true depth of ideological infiltration into the Indian armed forces,
of ideologies that seek to establish a religion-based state through violent
means. The ATS does not mention the positions or former positions that some of
the accused have held in the armed forces. Does this omission by the ATS stem
from a reluctance to track the role of army and navy officers in
unconstitutional acts? The ATS has also not probed the involvement of any army
officials in these crimes. Those army men who were questioned have been given a
clean chit and been named only as witnesses.
Lt Col Purohit procured the RDX (research department explosive)
used in the blast while he was posted in Jammu and Kashmir. He stored it in his
homes in Pune and Nashik. The transcripts included as part of the charge sheet
implicate Purohit in at least two other similar incidents whereas the ATS charge
sheet limits itself to the Malegaon incident alone. In these transcripts Purohit
said, "Main kuch baat kahunga isse pehle kabhi nahi kahi gayi thi. Do
operation humne kiye, successful ho gaye. Operation karne ki meri kshamta hain,
swamiji. Mere paas equipment ki kami nahi hain. Main equipment paida kar sakta
hoon. Equipment la sakta hoon. Agar jab thaan leta hoon. Lekin target chunna yeh
mere ek ke vishay ke hisaab nahi hona chahiye (I will say something that I
have not spoken of before. We have carried out two operations in the past and
they were successful. I am capable of carrying out operations. I have more than
enough equipment. Getting equipment is easy… But choosing the target should not
be my decision alone)."
In this probe, the ATS has also failed to question many of the
conspirators who plotted a Hindutva takeover of the country. For instance,
reference is made to a two-time BJP parliamentarian named Col Dhar and a
Delhi-based doctor, RP Singh, who were actively engaged in giving shape to
Purohit’s idea of a "new nation". The probable links of the accused with others
who currently occupy influential political positions have not been probed
further.
The ATS also stops short of drawing the wider link to the larger
network of terror that resulted in the Nanded blast of 2006 and the Malegaon
blast in 2008. While it has included the Parbhani and Jalna mosque blasts within
the wider conspiracy, Nanded is mysteriously absent.
Bhonsala Military School, Akanksha Resort spared
The Bhonsala Military School, located at two places in
Maharashtra (Nashik and Nagpur), which were the locations used for training
cadres in bomb-making and the use of explosives, has escaped the ATS net. So has
the Akanksha Resort at the Sinhgad Fort, Pune, where such training in explosives
creation possibly takes place even today.
While some of the school’s functionaries have been cited as
witnesses, the ATS has given the institute lenient treatment. This despite the
fact that a top functionary of the school, Col (retd) S. Raikar, the then
commandant of the Bhonsala Military School, Nashik, and a former officer of the
Indian army, is accused of making available the campus where these groups were
trained. Raikar himself has only been made a witness.
Materials used
RDX was used in the IEDs exploded at Malegaon. Another
disturbing trend over the past few years or so is the leakage and consequent
availability of highly controlled and dangerous substances like RDX in the
marketplace for easy use by any outfits that wish to make a career out of
bomb-making. In India, RDX is only legally available to the Indian army. Yet
there have been reported cases of RDX leakage in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan
and Haryana, which have been treated casually by the state police. Gelatine
sticks and ammonium nitrate, volatile substances that are often used in the
making of bombs, are carefully controlled in law and leakages from both
industrial and retail users should be very easy to trace. The ATS charge sheet
in the Malegaon case avoids any investigation into the leakage of these
explosive substances.
The fact that this has not been done in any blast-related cases,
be it the Samjhauta Express, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Thane or Panvel, establishes not
just the laxity in our investigating agencies. It underscores the cynicism of a
political class, across party lines, that places a tragically low premium on
life itself and uses communalism of all hues to further electoral gain.
The missing Mithun Chakraborty
The Malegaon investigation also reveals in its forensic
laboratory reports that a person who went by the name of Mithun Chakraborty,
after a training session with recruits, handed over a bag containing large
quantities of RDX to conspirators at the Pune railway station. Investigators
have concluded that this is an assumed name. Chakraborty is untraceable and the
ATS’s failure to trace him remains a gaping hole in their investigations.
The name of a mysterious trainer, Mithun Chakraborty first
surfaced during the interrogation and narco analysis test of Rahul Pande, a key
suspect in the 2006 Nanded blast investigations who revealed that a tall
well-built man identified as Chakraborty alias Sir was the main conspirator in
the plot. Pande also stated that Chakraborty had trained right-wing Hindu
militants to prepare various kinds of bombs and IEDs and had even procured and
provided them with large quantities of explosives to make more bombs.
Organisations spared
What is Abhinav Bharat? The ATS charge sheet tells us that the
Abhinav Bharat is an organisation floated in 2007. The charge sheet claims this
organisation is not the same as the public charitable trust registered in the
same name even though its founder, Himani Savarkar, was present at one of the
meetings the conspirators held! Savarkar is on record as stating her concurrence
with the actions of the Malegaon accused and justifies her position with the
assertion that "only bombs can reply to bombs". The ATS’s assertion – that the
two organisations bearing the same name and sworn to the same ideology are
unconnected – rings hollow.
Why was Section 125 not applied?
The crime syndicate has among other things also advocated the
overthrow of the Indian republic bound by the Indian Constitution in favour of a
Hindu nation under army rule. These chilling visions of the syndicate’s dream
future are clearly revealed in the Malegaon charge sheet. This vision was
advocated in public and secret meetings to fire youngsters and urge them to
enlist in the cause. The ideology that drives the conspirators is not only
manifest in ‘retaliatory’ acts of bomb terror, such as the attack in Malegaon,
but also goes to the very foundation of the republic itself. The transcripts
describe extensive mobilisation of young cadres by the conspirators and others,
in public, to generate anger against the Indian Constitution and advocate the
overthrow of the Indian republic. If these acts do not amount to sedition, what
does?
Despite detailed transcripts of conversations between Purohit
and others that reveal commitment to the overthrow of the Indian secular
republic and the creation of a militarised Hindu nation, Section 125 of the IPC
– for waging war against any Asiatic power in alliance with the Government of
India – has not been applied.
(Speaking to CC, acting chief of the ATS, KP Raghuvanshi
said that he was concerned with creating a watertight case that could ensure
convictions and not in outlining charges that could not be proved. "We consulted
senior public prosecutors who advised us that the ingredients of sedition were
not present in the crime itself.")
Section 125 of the IPC states: "Whoever by words, either spoken
or written, or by signs, or by visible representation or otherwise, brings or
attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite
disaffection towards the government established by law in India, shall be
punished with imprisonment for life to which fine may be added."
In law the actions of these conspirators amount to sedition and
war against the Indian state. If it is proved that this war is being waged from
the inside, from a section, not exactly small, of our army, and this fact has
escaped the attention of the top echelons of the armed forces so far, it would
be logical to conclude that the infiltration into our armed forces runs deep.
Just as an ideologically fanatic ISI of Pakistan must shoulder a substantial
share of the responsibility for their country’s disintegration into violence and
chaos, the trends revealed in the Nanded and Malegaon investigations have the
potential, if allowed to pass unchecked, of driving India to disintegration, if
not total destruction.