Grieving for Hemant Karkare after Malegaon verdict

I am grieving for my friend, the late Hemant Karkare, who was a good man and a professional. He was one of the officers who did the Indian Police Service (IPS) proud. Like many respected IPS officers I know, he was a stickler for truth and justice.

Karkare was killed by Pakistani terrorists who attacked Mumbai on November 26, 2008. We mourned his death at that time. Today, we mourn the demise of justice after seven accused, including former BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur and Lt Col Prasad Purohit, were acquitted in the 2008 Malegaon blast case.

A day before he was killed, Karkare had called on me for advice on a ticklish problem he was facing while carrying out his duties honestly and faithfully. The state Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) headed by him had initially suspected jihadis of involvement in the terror attack near a mosque in Malegaon, a Muslim-dominated town in Nashik district, on September 29, 2008. Six local Muslims had died when a bomb planted on a motorcycle had exploded.

Later, it was found that the bike had been registered in Gujarat in the name of Pragya, a feisty, hardcore Hindutva activist. She had become a Sadhvi and either sold or handed over the bike to a close aide, Ramji Kalsangra, who has remained untraceable till date. The markings on the engine and chassis had been erased, but experts had restored one of the two markings. I had no reason to disbelieve my friend. He had no motive to implicate fellow Hindus, including a Hindutva activist and an Army officer, with whom he had no previous acquaintance.

Evidence of meetings held in cities of different states by Pragya with Lt Col Purohit and five others had been collected. The group, which included Kalsangra, called itself Abhinav Bharat. It appeared to Karkare and also to me that the group had a grouse against the government for not acting more forcefully against the jihadis despite their terrorist depredations. The group seemed to have decided to act independently to take revenge, which they had attempted in a very amateurish manner and certainly not in the manner of the jihadis schooled and trained in the obnoxious practice of killing innocents.

The acquittal of all seven accused by a special court of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in the Malegaon case was widely anticipated. Karkare had been advised by a top BJP leader from Delhi to go slow on Pragya (a request that unnerved him and nudged him to seek my counsel). The consequent transfer of the probe from the Maharashtra ATS to the NIA (controlled by the Union Home Ministry); the visit of an NIA officer to the office of Special Public Prosecutor Rohini Salian in Mumbai, asking her to “go slow” on the prosecution; the replacement of a highly respected prosecutor like Salian probably because she publicly berated the NIA for trying to influence her; the fact that the probe agency told the NIA court that there was no evidence to prosecute Pragya and Lt Col Purohit, and that the ATS had planted the RDX in the house of one of the accused — all this pointed to the intention of the rulers to ensure that the accused were set free.

It is tragic that justice is being dished out on the wishes of the powerful and not according to the truth of the matter. In our police training institutions, we are told to ferret out the truth and collect proper evidence to bring the culprits to book. If police investigation agencies go about arraigning in courts of law the persons identified by their political masters and exculpate the real perpetrators of the crime, the entire concept of the rule of law will crumble like a house of cards.

Unfortunately, sides are taken on the grounds of religion, caste or linguistic identities of the culprits. In the 2006 Mumbai train blasts case, the 12 persons convicted of killing 187 commuters and injuring 800 others were members of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a known jihadi terrorist organisation. When the Bombay High Court acquitted them, many co-religionists of the acquitted men rejoiced! In the Malegaon case, too, some co-religionists celebrated when the seven accused were acquitted.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis proclaimed, “Terrorism was never saffron, is not, and will never be!” Did the CM suggest that Karkare, a good Hindu himself, had manoeuvred the investigation to spite fellow Hindus?

I grieve for Karkare and his team members. Similarly, I grieve for former Police Commissioner Anami Roy and his dedicated officers who worked for months to nail the culprits in the Mumbai train blasts case. Many of my friends and well-wishers disagreed with me when I said that the Bombay High Court was wrong in its decision to acquit the jihadis.

I am convinced that the guilty have got off the hook in both cases. Courts go by evidence on record. They acquit the accused even if they sense their guilt. The reliance of the prosecution on oral witnesses and more importantly on confessions should be abandoned. The emphasis should shift to forensic evidence, which is hard to refute.

With the aim of achieving this goal of shifting to forensic evidence, the police top brass needs to address the current culture in all police establishments of relying solely on witnesses who are prone to pressures or inducements. The emphasis on forensics should begin at training institutions.

Interrogation of suspects should be monitored by CCTV cameras, as done in many advanced democracies. We are spending crores of rupees every year on modernisation, but the purchase of equipment alone will not spur police investigators to change their methods. A new culture has to be dinned into them daily. And all of them should be trained in forensics and subtler methods of interrogation. A whole new breed of interrogators should be the ultimate goal.

A massive awareness campaign should be launched to educate the public on the need to discourage custodial violence. I remember a state Home Minister gently upbraiding me for “not even slapping” a boy suspected of theft in the house of one of his acquaintances! “What kind of police are you,” he asked me!