How Dawood and the Maoists Turned Malegaon into a Political Minefield

A multi-part investigation into how the 2008 Malegaon blasts was turned into a political weapon, a narrative war and a cover for deeper conspiracies involving India’s most wanted fugitive and the Maoist underground.

Part 1

The Malegaon blast case, that was meant to demonise Hindutva groups, points to a shadowy axis of Maoists, mafiosi and political expediency.

Seventeen years after a bomb ripped through the communally sensitive town of Malegaon in Nashik, the acquittal last week of Lt. Col. Prasad Purohit, Pragya Singh Thakur and five others has upended the very narrative that once branded them as symbols of “saffron terror.” Few episodes in India’s recent history have better illustrated the lethal convergence of law, ideology and electoral opportunism than the case of the 2008 Malegaon blast.

The story now resembles something out of a John le Carré thriller, replete with fugitive dons, Maoist warlords, tribal hideouts and the infiltration of the Indian state by subterranean forces.

The blast took place on the evening of September 29, 2008 outside a mosque, killing six and injured over 100 people. With national elections less than a year away, the political resonance was immediate. Soon, a sensational narrative emerged: the accused were not jihadis but alleged members of the Hindu extremist fringe, including a former army officer and a saffron-clad sadhvi. The term ‘saffron terror’ was deployed with surgical precision by the then Congress-led UPA government. The ostensible purpose was to draw a false equivalence between Islamist terror and its supposed saffron twin. That has now unravelled into something far murkier and geopolitically entangled.

In India, following every terrorist attack or bombing including those in Malegaon (2006 and 2008), the Samjhauta Express blast (2007) and those in Ajmer Sharif (2007), the usual chorus of self-styled secularists and intellectuals would rise to assert that “terrorism had no religion.” Yet, when more sceptical citizens asked why so many perpetrators of such violence happened to be Muslim and why so many of them were traceable to Pakistani training grounds, those defenders of secularism struggled to offer persuasive answers. As a result, both Islam and Pakistan began to face greater scrutiny on the international stage at the time of the 2008 Malegaon blast.

My investigations revealed that the Malegaon blast had a far more sinister origin: a secret meeting in mid-2005 between India’s most wanted fugitive, Dawood Ibrahim; his sister and long-time Mumbai underworld fixer, Haseena Parkar; and a top Maoist commander, Muppalla Lakshmana Rao, alias Ganapati. The meeting was held in Malegaon itself, and its purpose was twofold: to frame Hindu nationalist leaders for a terror attack and to redirect Pakistan-origin arms supplies that was previously routed through Nepal’s Maoist rebels, directly to Indian Maoists via new conduits.

The broader context is crucial. After Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known as Prachanda, became Nepal’s Prime Minister, the supply of arms from Nepali Maoists to their Indian counterparts dried up. Responsibility for arming India’s Maoists, and for redirecting public discourse away from Islamist terror by labelling Hindus and their organisations like the RSS and the VHP as threats instead, reportedly fell to Dawood Ibrahim, at the behest of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI.

Dawood was a petty thief lifting footwear outside mosques in Dongri, South Mumbai, before earning global notoriety. Declared a global terrorist by the United Nations Security Council and its Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee, his name features on the FBI and Forbes lists of most-wanted fugitives.

In June 2005, Dawood is said to have travelled to India, heading straight to Malegaon, a communally sensitive town in Maharashtra. Preparations for his arrival were, according to reports, overseen by his sister, the notorious “Lady Don” Haseena Parkar, who was also present at the meeting. So too, reportedly, was the Maoist leader Muppalla Lakshmana Rao, alias Ganapati - then general secretary of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), with a bounty of Rs. 2.67 crore on his head.

Ganapati, originally from Birpur in Telangana’s Karimnagar district, was a key figure in the Maoist insurgency and operated largely from the dense forests of Abujhmad in Chhattisgarh. He had long been responsible for coordinating arms transfers from Nepal to Indian Maoists. In Malegaon, alongside Dawood and Haseena, he allegedly discussed a new plan: to source weapons directly from Pakistan, and to orchestrate a bombing in Malegaon that would implicate Hindu organisations and prominent figures, including Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and current RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, in an invented narrative of ‘Hindu terror.’ The term ‘saffron terrorism,’ it is said, was coined by Dawood himself during this meeting.

My probe revealed that in June 2005, before arriving in Malegaon, Dawood held another secret huddle in the jungles of Gujarat’s Dang district. There, he reportedly met Seema Irani, a lesser-known but powerful Maoist leader engaged in radicalising tribal communities across western India.

Irani, known for her efforts to radicalise tribal populations from her base in the forests of Kasara in Maharashtra’s Thane district, is said to be protected by a cadre of armed Maoists. Her husband, Dr. Sridharan Irani, also a Maoist leader, is presently incarcerated. Her associate, the activist and communist leader Kobad Ghandy, remains on the radar of intelligence agencies even after his release in 2019.

According to sources, Dawood arrived in Gujarat’s Dharampur by sea from Karachi, then travelled overland via Saputara to Malegaon. Before that, he allegedly met Irani in the Dang forests and informed her of a logistical shift. With Prachanda’s Maoists now absorbed into Nepal’s political mainstream, the flow of arms from Nepal into India had slowed. Pakistan would henceforth send weapons directly to Irani, bypassing Nepal altogether. Dawood also mentioned that Sohrabuddin Sheikh, who would later become the subject of a notorious encounter killing, would assist her if needed.

From Dang, Dawood is said to have travelled to Malegaon, where he again met with Parkar and Ganapati. There, the conspiracy to engineer a blast and to frame Hindutva organisations was reportedly finalised. Dawood is then believed to have departed by road, moving through Nashik, Ghoti, Kasara, Bhiwandi and Thane, eventually reaching Palghar beach. From there, he made his way back to Karachi by sea, guided by a known wildlife smuggler.

It was in August 2008, shortly before the blast, that Sharad Pawar, then a prominent Nationalist Congress Party leader, publicly used the phrase “saffron terrorism” for the first time during a speech in Alibaug. He had argued that terrorism in India was not confined to Islamist groups.

More disturbingly, the Malegaon verdict suggests a pattern of state complicity or at least complacency. How did intelligence agencies of the time miss the alleged presence of Dawood in Malegaon? How were Maoist leaders, who were carrying massive bounties and operating from forest redoubts, able to coordinate with a globally designated terrorist? Why were whistleblower reports dismissed or ignored?

When the explosion finally occurred in September that year, the identities of the accused and the subsequent arrests were soon to ignite one of the most controversial chapters in India’s battle against terror. This chapter has now taken yet another turn with the acquittals handed down last week.

(The writer, who goes by his nom de plume of Akela, is a senior investigative journalist based in Mumbai)