Phantom Terror

Nearly two decades after the 2006 Malegaon blasts killed 31 people, the Bombay High Court’s judgement has collapsed the last standing prosecution. By quashing the charges against the four remaining accused, the court has effectively closed a case that traversed three agencies, two mutually exclusive theories and 19 years without a single conviction. If justice delayed is justice denied, then justice rewritten is something worse.

The Malegaon saga is a stark indictment of how terror became politicized and elastic enough to be stretched to suit ideological needs. In the immediate aftermath of the 2006 blasts, the Maharashtra ATS arrested nine Muslim men. The Central Bureau of Investigation, taking over in 2007, endorsed that line. Then, in 2011, the National Investigation Agency executed a dramatic pivot, discarding the original accused and advancing an entirely different theory implicating persons from the Hindu community.

Notable among these were Lt. Col. Prasad Purohit, the Army intelligence officer, who spent nearly nine years incarcerated and Pragya Singh Thakur, who were both illegally detained and brutally tortured by the ATS who coerced him into making statements and implicating organisations under duress. Allegations of custodial torture and fabrication of evidence were repeatedly raised against the initial investigators.

While Purohit and Thakur were finally acquitted last year by the Mumbai NIA court, the entire investigation has eroded the credibility of institutions meant to be impartial while deepening public cynicism about whether justice is pursued or manufactured.

The 2008 Malegaon blast case introduced a new lexicon - “saffron terror” – by figures in the previous Congress-ruled UPA government such as P. Chidambaram and Digvijaya Singh, who publicly advanced the idea that Hindu terrorism could be be mapped onto religious identity in a manner that mirrored global Islamic jihadist threats. The implication was a symmetrical moral equivalence between Islamist militancy and alleged Hindu extremism.

The courts have now punctured these constructions. None of this diminishes the horror of Malegaon. Thirty-one people died in 2006; six more in 2008. Their killers remain unidentified in the eyes of the law.

The eagerness with which sections of the then Congress-led establishment embraced the language of “Hindu terror” reflected a broader impulse to counter one form of extremism by positing another. It was a strategy as clumsy as it was counterproductive. By framing terror through the prism of identity, it invited polarisation while weakening the state’s own prosecutorial case.

The political tone was set even earlier. In a 2009 conversation with the US Ambassador, later revealed through WikiLeaks, Rahul Gandhi suggested that “radicalised Hindu groups” could, in certain respects, pose a greater internal threat than outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba. Singh went further, at points alleging links between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and even the 26/11 attacks.

The Malegaon case chillingly proves that when terror becomes a label in a partisan lexicon, justice is the first casualty, and truth the last to be found.