Bitta urges Delhi CM, Tihar authorities to reject ’93 blast convict Bhullar’s plea

All-India Anti-Terrorist Front chairman and former Indian Youth Congress president Maninderjeet Singh Bitta has written to the Delhi Chief Minister and the Tihar Jail authorities opposing the permanent release of 1993 Delhi bomb blast convict Davinder Pal Singh Bhullar. His release would pose a “grave threat to national security” and risk “rejuvenating extremist networks”, he said.

In a letter addressed to Delhi CM Rekha Gupta and the Tihar administration on October 24, Bitta said, “It is deeply disquieting that a hardcore terrorist responsible for mass casualties is receiving orchestrated political sympathy.”

He also urged the Sentence Review Board (SRB) to “reject any move towards permanent release/remission” of Bhullar and called for a “comprehensive, updated threat assessment from central and state intelligence agencies and a victim-survivor impact review”.

Recalling the 1993 car bomb attack near Parliament that targeted him, Bitta wrote, “Justice demands parity: Do the widows, orphans, and permanently disabled survivors of the blast not deserve justice equal to or greater than the perpetrator’s claimed equities? The human cost, lives lost, families broken, lifelong disabilities, cannot be minimised or traded for political expediency.”

“If Bhullar is permanently released, there is a credible risk that he may reunite with former accomplices and mount retaliatory violence against me for my ongoing public opposition to Khalistani terrorist and gangster networks and other separatist forces seeking to disintegrate the country,” Bitta has said in the letter.

He warned that Bhullar’s release would “rejuvenate the deadly network of Khalistani extremists and gangsters lodged in Canada, Australia and Germany”, adding that “rewarding terrorism under political pretext would only endanger India’s sovereignty and demoralise its justice system”.

Calling the political lobbying for Bhullar’s release “deeply alarming”, Bitta said “the deliberate support extended by prominent politicians and religious leaders to a convicted terrorist exposes a dangerous narrative shift fuelled by political opportunism”.

Bhullar was convicted by a TADA court on August 25, 2001, for orchestrating the 1993 car bomb blast that killed nine persons and injured over 20.