The Phantom Witness

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.

The Malegaon Files - Part 5

If the earlier parts of my investigation into the 2008 Malegaon blast case revealed political manipulation and dubious policing, the arrest of Sudhakar Chaturvedi - a little-known functionary with shadowy ties to both Abhinav Bharat and Military Intelligence - exposed how deep the rot had spread.

By early November 2008, the Anti-Terrorism Squad’s narrative in the Malegaon blast case appeared to be tightening. Investigators claimed that Sudhakar Chaturvedi, described as the national general secretary of Abhinav Bharat, had been caught “roaming suspiciously” on the concourse of Dadar railway station in Mumbai on 4 November. The official version placed his arrest there and then.

Yet accounts from inside the intelligence community and those close to the accused tell a different story. According to these, Chaturvedi had been picked up much earlier (on 24 October) in Nashik. He was allegedly detained for four days without formal registration of arrest. This gap between claimed and recorded arrest dates would later feed into broader allegations of fabricated evidence and manipulated timelines.

In addition to his role in Abhinav Bharat, Chaturvedi is said to have been on the payroll of Military Intelligence (MI) as an informer. His possession of an MI-issued identity card, and residence in a military-subsidised property in Deolali, strengthened the picture of someone operating in the murky overlap between the armed forces and ideological networks.

The MI card bore the signature of Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, by then already cast as the alleged mastermind of the Malegaon blast. Despite the potential evidentiary weight of such a document, the ATS never appears to have formally verified its authenticity with Army authorities. Whether this was oversight or design remains unanswered.

The October 24 Nashik pick-up, according to those alleging a frame-up, was not Chaturvedi’s first brush with the ATS that month. Just three weeks earlier, on October 3, 2008, ATS officers including PSI Shekhar Bagde allegedly attempted to plant RDX in Chaturvedi’s locked house in Deolali. The incident was reportedly foiled by MI officers who arrived at the scene, catching Bagde in the act.

This confrontation, if accurately recounted, hints at a turf war between Maharashtra’s counter-terrorism unit and the Army’s own intelligence arm.

When Chaturvedi was eventually booked into the system, his personal property list contained nothing more incriminating than an identity card. His mobile phone did not appear on the initial seizure record. Oddly, weeks later, ATS documents show the same phone being ‘recovered’ from his Deolali residence during a search. Was the device in police custody all along?

Even more strangely, the recovered phone was reportedly still switched on after three days without charging. For investigators versed in chain-of-custody rules, this detail was an indicator that the phone may have been used or manipulated before being entered as evidence.

Another unexplained episode took place on November 24 when Chaturvedi and fellow accused Ramesh Upadhyay were transported by helicopter from Mumbai to Bhopal and back on the same day. Reports suggest the aircraft belonged to the corporate giant India Bulls. The stated purpose was to facilitate a mobile conversation between the two men - extraordinary given that they were both in police custody.

No public record clarifies whether this operation had judicial sanction, who authorised it, or why a private helicopter was used for what could have been accomplished in a secure police setting.

Taken together, the inconsistencies in arrest dates, the Deolali incident, the shifting provenance of key evidence, and the unexplained helicopter trip chip away at the ATS’s carefully constructed timeline. If Chaturvedi was indeed in custody from October 24, then the official portrayal of his arrest on November 4 as a chance encounter at Dadar unravels entirely.

For the prosecution, linking Chaturvedi to Purohit was essential to buttressing the so-called “Hindu terror” narrative. His dual identity — Abhinav Bharat operative and MI asset — made him a bridge between the military intelligence world and the ideological group the ATS claimed was behind Malegaon.

For sceptics of the ATS case, that same dual identity made him dangerous for a different reason: he may have known too much about both sides, and been vulnerable to pressure or fabrication.

The irregularities in Chaturvedi’s arrest and evidence handling mirror many of the troubling themes in the Malegaon investigation as a whole: opaque chains of custody, selective leaks, and the sidelining of inconvenient facts. They also underscore the fraught relationship between state police counter-terrorism units and military intelligence — two arms of the security apparatus meant to be aligned against a common threat.

Instead, in the chaotic weeks after the 2008 blast, they appeared to be working at cross-purposes, with Chaturvedi caught in the middle.

Years later, with the acquittals in the Malegaon case, the ATS’s claims about Chaturvedi and the manner of his arrest have never been fully tested in court. The Malegaon episode serves as a cautionary tale that when inter-agency rivalries and dubious police methods intersect in a terror investigation, the truth becomes just another casualty.

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