Justice Undone

Few events in 21st-century India have matched the savagery of the 2006 Mumbai train bombings. In just eleven minutes, seven coordinated blasts ripped through the city’s vital commuter lifeline, killing 189 people and injuring over 800. The public demanded accountability; the state responded with arrests and a sweeping trial under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). In 2015, after years of proceedings, a special court handed out five death penalties and seven life sentences.

Now, in a judicial volte-face of staggering proportions, the Bombay High Court has acquitted all twelve men convicted of the blasts. The court concluded there was insufficient credible evidence and called the prosecution’s case a shambles that was built on dubious witness statements, inconsistent timelines and speculative recoveries of bombs, guns and maps. In short, the case that once seemed airtight has now been deemed insubstantial. Eight men walked free on Monday after nearly two decades behind bars. One died of COVID-19 in prison. Two others await release due to unrelated pending cases. One cannot help but ask that if they did not do it, who did?

A wrongful conviction and incarceration is a travesty in any democratic republic. Yet the sheer scale of this judicial discrepancy, between the trial court’s severity and the High Court’s acquittal, is deeply unsettling. One court was convinced of guilt beyond reasonable doubt; another found the same set of ‘facts’ to be speculative at best. This is tantamount to an indictment of India’s investigative and judicial machinery.

The embarrassment does not stop with the courts. The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), once praised for its swift arrests and forensic doggedness, now looks like a caricature of incompetence. If what the High Court says is true that the evidence was thin, the witnesses unreliable and the investigative timeline leaky, then why were these men charged at all?

Predictably, human rights organisations will hail the verdict as a triumph of justice delayed but not denied. But in doing so, they risk missing a more disquieting truth. If the twelve accused are innocent, and if the state’s case was built on sand, then the real perpetrators of the worst terror attack on Indian soil since 1993 are still at large.

The job of the Bombay High Court was not to convict but to weigh the evidence dispassionately. Yet the language of the judgment almost reads like a shrug. What about the dead? The maimed? The families who have waited 18 years for closure, only to be told that there never was a convincing story, never a plausible trail and certainly no one to be held accountable?

A court’s credibility rests not only in its independence but in its consistency. The High Court may have rectified a wrong, but it has inadvertently sown more confusion and bitterness.

The moral cost is enormous. With no convictions standing, and no new suspects in sight, a wound that should have healed now gapes open again infected by legal incoherence and public disbelief.