Can there be two type of Justice delivery system in the same country? This question came to one’s mind with the U turn taken by NIA in the cases related to terror acts in which many Hindu names were involved. Now the NIA in a fresh charge sheet (May 13, 2016) has dropped the charges against Pragya Singh Thakur, has lightened the ones against Col Purohit and others. Along with this new line of NIA is that Hemant Karkare’s investigation in these cases was flawed and that it was ATS which had got the RDX planted in Purohit’s residence to implicate him in this case. The implication is that all this was being done at the behest of previous UPA Government.

A brief recap is in order. Maharashtra in particular and many other places in the country were witness to acts of terror. The first major attention to this phenomenon took place when two Bajrang Dal activists were killed while making the bombs in the house of one RSS worker Rajkondawar (May 2006). There was a saffron flag flying atop the house and a board of Bajrang Dal was put up in front of the house. At the site of bomb explosion fake moustaches, beard and pajama-Kurta were also found. This was followed by many other blasts, Parbhani, Jalna, Thane, and Panvel etc. In most of these case police investigated on the lines in which generally Muslims were blamed for such acts. After every act of blast few Muslims young men were arrested who were later; after long grueling court cases; were released as no evidence was found against them.

The Malegaon blast in which Sadhvi’s role came to surface; took place in 2008. In the blasts those returning from Namaj (prayers) were killed and many injured. Following this the usual suspects, Muslims, were arrested. Then while investigating the cases the Maharashtra ATS Chief Hemant Karkare found that the motorcycle used for the blast belonged to Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, ex- ABVP worker. The trail of investigation led to Swami Dayanad Pande, Retd. Major Upadhyay, Ramji Klasnagra, Swami Aseemanand amongst others. They all belonged to the Hindu right wing politics. There was lots of evidence in the material recovered. One of the helpful evidence came in the form of the legally valid confession of Swami Aseemanand. This confession was made in judicial custody in presence of a Magistrate.

In the confession Swami spilled the beans and said that after the Sankat Mochan blast of 2002, they had decided that bomb will be replied by bomb. He was then looking after the VHP work in Dangs. He gave the detailed narrative of the whole process in which all the people were investigated and became part of the charge sheet of NIA.

When Karakare was investigating the case and many of Hindu names started coming under the shadow Bal Thackeray wrote in Saamna that ‘we spit on the face of Karakare’. Narendra Modi; then CM of Gujarat; called him Deshdrohi (Anti National). Advani also reprimanded Karkare. Feeling the heat of this pressure from Hindutva political outfits Karkare went to meet his professional peer Julio Rebeiro. Rebeiro. Rebeiro has a record of high level of professional integrity. Rebeiro appreciated his painstaking work. Karkare asked that what should be the stand of a person like him when facing such a heat from politicians. The senior officer told him to honestly do the work and ignore these insinuations.

Meanwhile the global terror phenomenon hit Mumbai. On 26/11 ten terrorists, armed to the teeth attacked Mumbai. On this occasion Karakre got killed. There is a strong controversy about this killing also. The then minority affairs Minister A. R. Antulay said that there is terrorism plus something else which is behind the killing of Karakare. Narendra Modi who had earlier called Karkare as Deshdrohi landed up in Mumbai and wanted to give a cheque of Rs. one Crore to widow of Karkare, she refused to accept the amount.

After Karkare’s death the investigations continued on the lines laid down by him. The charge sheet was ready and all the involved were to be tried for acts of terror. Meanwhile Government changed at the center and the NIA adopted the line which has led to the present situation where the efforts to release Sadhvi are marching with intimidating speed. The change in the line got reflected in the statement of Public Prosecutor, Rohini Salian. She stated that she was told to go soft on these cases. As she refused to toe this, she was sacked.

One recalls that in Mumbai 92-93 violence over one thousand people died. This carnage was followed by the bomb blasts in which over two hundred people died. As far as the communal carnage is concerned not many got severe punishments, no death penalty- no life imprisonment. In the cases of bomb blasts many have been given death penalty and many more life imprisonment. One of the people undergoing life imprisonment is Rubina Memon. Her crime, she owned the car which was used to ferry the explosives. She never drove the car with explosives.

Sadhvi owned the motor cycle used for Malegaon blasts; she will be out from the prison soon. Rubina owned the car; she will be in prison all her life. In Mumbai carnage so many died. No severe punishment to anybody. So many severe punishments in bomb blast case!

So where does our democracy stand at the end of all this? It seems two type of justice delivery systems are out there in the open. While shrill debates on TV will defend Sadhvi and blame Karkare for faulty investigation, the people in Malegaon are protesting furiously and planning to go to the court against the change in the stance of NIA. Two political parties seem to be preparing to save the honor of Karakare and press for sincere examination of the evidence collected by him.

One hopes the guilty will be punished and innocents will be protected. But this seems a bit too much to expect in current scenario!

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Key words

Pragya Thakur, Malegaon blasts, Hemant Karkare, Rubina Memon, Hindutva Terror, Swami Dayanand Pandey, Lt Col. Prasad Purohit, Rohini Salian, NIA

Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of modern India, was a human with human flaws and failures but a leader of shining veracity. And guts beyond the ordinary. (HT Photo )

The Hindustani word or exclamation ‘arey’ is untranslatable. It could mean any or all of ‘but, oh…’, ‘oh, but wait…’, ‘just a moment…’, ‘incidentally…’, or simply, ‘also…’

Harivanshrai Bachchan’s translation of Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by woods on a snowy evening’ is stunning. For the lines ‘But I have promises to keep/and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep ’, the author of ‘Madhushala’ gives ‘Arey, abhi to milon mujhko, milon mujhko chalna hai’. The opening ‘arey’ captures the reader’s attention even more compellingly than Frost’s ‘But’. Jawaharlal Nehru’s transcribing of these lines in his own hand unsteadied by a stroke, with the poet’s first name charmingly mis-written as ‘Richard’, has enhanced the poem’s currency in India. That Nehru kept the extract by his bedside, his death-bedside, has tinged it with pathos. A few days ago the Hindi poem glowed anew in my mind when I came to read, in Rupert Snell’s captivating English translation (In the Afternoon of Time) of Bachchan’s autobiography, a description of the poet’s last visit to Nehru. The stroke, which had affected the left side of his frame, had slowed the PM down. Bachchan was walking a few steps behind Nehru in the Teen Murti House gardens as Indira Gandhi, holding her father’s hand, led him slowly forward, step by step. Dew lay over the grass and Bachchan noted, as a poet would, that Panditji’s right foot left footprints on the grass while the left foot drew a continuous line.

‘Arey, abhi to milon mujhko…’

What were the miles, arey, the many miles, that Nehru saw lying ahead of him? What was the task, partially finished or wholly unfinished, ahead ?

He was, like any of us, many things – parent, grandparent, brother, friend to many who, like Bachchan, were not in politics, and to many who were in that murky line, a reader of books, fond of stimulating conversations, of anything that showed personal courage like adventure, sports, a writer, thinker. But unlike us, also a politician who thought of politics as a form of idealism, an MP, Prime Minister…

In each of those roles, Nehru had miles to go. As a father he most definitely worried for his daughter’s future. Delhi is, after all, Delhi, the graveyard of empires where loyalties are strictly bound to power, where smiling pick-thanks drop affiliations on the road between office and crematorium, even turn hostile. And he agonised, surely, for the fatherless grandsons whom he adored, billeted in boarding school, bereft of disinterested elders to guide them or dependable ‘youngsters’ to give them unselfish company. As a brother of two highly but incompatibly intelligent sisters, he must have wished his family’s chemistry was less complex.

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He must have doubtless worried about what would happen to his books, his papers, personal ones, those that were official and personal-official, a combination that forms itself and is impossible to unravel, his more intimate papers, those he wrote not in shaded secrecy but in honest privacy to chosen ones who having received them, had passed on.

In those weeks after his stroke and he would have also been troubled by memories, of the man to whom he owed everything and who wrote to him in blessing in Hindi ‘May you live many (bahut) a year and abide in those years as Hind’s only Jawahar’, extending the loop in the Devanagari ‘bahut’ to make it ‘bahuut’. How far, how very far removed from 1964, the Mahatma must have seemed to him. And he must have thought too, with some remorse, of his strained ties with Subhas Bose, with Sardar Patel, both gone into the mists. Equally, his out-of-joint-ness with Rajagopalachari’s dissenting spirit, Jayaprakash Narayan’s revolutionary ardour, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s brilliant but neglected creativity. He may well have felt more than a pang of regret at his un-democratic dismissal of the Namboodiripad government in Kerala in 1959. And remorse of a very serious order over Sheikh Abdullah, friend of friends, comrade of comrades, being left by the most bizarre of inexplicable conspiracies, to the sharp needles of Kashmir’s lonely pines.

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Of these regrets, real and painful that all of them were, the most troubling, tormenting, has to have been the miles that lay, in unmapped confusion, to a solution to the Kashmir problem. The stricken Nehru must have asked himself where he went wrong.

And then, the five-letter word – China. How could a country he embraced when the powerful nations of the world were shunning it, treat India, his India, to war ? Where did that leave Panchashila, non-alignment ?

Beyond these Nehru must have been torn by deep anxiety over two other, life-defining things for India and therefore for its Prime Minister : one, the stubbornness of Indian poverty and two, the remorselessness of Indian bigotry. There can be no doubt that these thoughts would have beset his twilight mind.

But, stepping back from these tormenting thoughts, if Jawaharlal Nehru had looked at the India that he had indeed fashioned, he would have felt his fears giving way to pride. Contrary to the grim prognostications of the West, particularly of Great Britain, he would have seen that after three general elections India was a secure democracy, exercising freedom of thought and expression, of faith and of religious practices, with a press that was as courageous as it was unfettered, where politics was free from fear of the bully and the blackmailer, where the judiciary was independent and where life expectancy at birth was rising steadily, as was the age of the Indian girl at marriage. And above all, where science and technology were being harnessed for the nation’s good not for belligerent ambitions.

The architect of modern India was a human with human flaws and failures but a leader of shining veracity. And guts beyond the ordinary. Who but he could have turned to a group of bigots shouting ‘Mahatma Gandhi murdabad’ outside the house where the 79- year-old lay fasting, and demand in his matchless Hindustani “Who said that, who ? Let the man who said that kill me first…”

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I am not sure if he used “Arey…” to preface his chastisement. But something of that two-syllabled admonition was most definitely heard because the murdabadis just slithered away.

Nehru is not to be belittled. He is not to be eclipsed by the sawdust haze of idealism’s current drought.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is distinguished professor of history and politics, Ashoka University. The views expressed by the author are personal.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/nehru-was-a-leader-of-shining-veracity/story-wRUi7gWjcgmZVuurjWKwFN.html

courtesy : "The Hindustan Times", 26 May 2016