Author: Chandan Mitra
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 16, 2008
URL: http://dailypioneer.com/134642/Politics-of-Hindu-terror.html
Ab Tak Chhappan! The title of this Ram Gopal
Varma film easily comes to mind observing the manner in which the Maharashtra
ATS is going about picking up people all over India and slapping them into
the cooler on a daily basis, ostensibly in a bid to unearth dimensions of
"Hindu terror".
We have lost count of the number of persons
interrogated, sent on police or judicial remand, their brains penetrated with
narcotic substances to induce confession to their "crimes". But
not a day has passed, since Sadhvi Pragya was nabbed some 25 days ago, without
somebody or the other being arrested, allegedly in connection with a fantastic
plot conjured up by the Maharashtra Police.
Those arrested included serving and retired
Army officers, school and college teachers, political activists and now even
a resourceful sadhu. Every evening at the news meeting in our office, the
first question asked is, "What's the score today? Ab tak ...?"
Buoyed by enthusiastic endorsement from the
"secular" media, which is gleefully eating out of the ATS' hands,
the so-called Hindu terror plot keeps assuming an ever-growing magnitude.
Not content with pinning the blame for the minor bomb blasts in Malegaon and
Modasa, then Nanded and later Kanpur, the ATS' ambitions have increased manifold.
Currently, it is busy trying to implicate the same group in the 2006 Samjhauta
Express blasts. Curiously, SIMI commander Safdar Nagori's narco tests have
resulted in a confession that his organisation executed the Samjhauta bombings.
Does this mean that so-called Hindu terrorists have been synchronising their
moves with SIMI? Or, maybe ATS will tomorrow come up with a theory that "Hindu
terrorists" have been funding and masterminding the actions of jihadis
who innocently fell into the Hindu trap in the lure of money. Far fetched?
Not really, if you consider the gigantic yarns being spun around the purported
confessions of the detained suspects.
Interestingly, in the last seven days, contradictory
"leaks" have been planted on the handpicked media about the responses
of detained suspects. A particularly hilarious story front-paged by a leading
national daily claimed that the narco-analysis of Sadhvi Pragya came to a
naught because she meditates daily! Apparently, those who are ardent practitioners
of that spiritual art become immune to narco tests because their mental powers
are strong enough to resist drug-induced coercion aimed at extracting confessions.
Moral of the story: All criminals ought to
mediate, for then narco-tests shall fail and they go scot-free!
By the way, it would be interesting to know
if the servants arrested in the Arushi Talwar murder case were also trained
in the art of meditation. Must be, for the CBI failed to get any information
out of them and finally they had to be released. Similarly, Lt Col. Srikant
Purohit, too, foiled the investigators' desperate attempts to cajole him into
confessing his crime because, we are told, as an Armyman, he was trained to
absorb stress and no amount of drugs got him to talk. Halted on their tracks,
the ATS then leaked purported details of Purohit's confessions, which were
eagerly lapped up by sections of the media to further their campaign to equate
"Hindu" with jihadi terror.
Following the arrest of Swami Amritanand aka
Dayanand Pandey or Sudhakar Dwivedi, we were treated to details of his past,
website photos, his ashrams, connections with top national personalities,
ex-President APJ Abdul Kalam downwards. But what we never got to know was
his role in the Malegaon blasts. Within hours of his arrest, the Haryana Railway
Police swooped down on him apparently to discover his link to the Samjhauta
Express blasts, which self-confessedly, SIMI had carried out. Without a shred
of evidence to that effect, he has already been awarded the epithet of "Terror
Guru".
In the same way, the highly respected Bhonsala
Military School has been dubbed a terror factory - a term used hitherto for
Talibanised madrasas. Merely because some members of a little known outfit
called Abhinav Bharat, an adjunct of the largely defunct Hindu Mahasabha,
visited the premises of the school, its custodians were hounded to the point
of putting in their papers.
Judging by the hype accompanying the "Hindu
terror" revelations, it would appear that nothing else is happening in
this country for the last month or so. With every passing day, the ATS' concoctions
get more incredible, the scale of "leaked" stories magnified and
the media's tone becomes predictably shriller. All this before any of the
arrested persons is formally charged or given an opportunity to defend themselves.
Wasn't it the Congress that kept cautioning us against trial by media? Wasn't
it Manmohan Singh who plaintively lamented that everything in this country
gets politicised? But when a trial by the media is actually sponsored by the
Government and agencies under its control, like the Maharashtra ATS, nobody
sees anything wrong with it.
That, in the process, even the Army is being
hauled over the coals and its exalted status sullied beyond repair is of no
consequence. Clearly, the Government thinks tarnishing the Army serves its
short-term agenda: Putting BJP on the backfoot. Nothing is too sacrosanct
to achieve that aim in an election year. In the face of mounting public anger
against the UPA's all-round failure, especially its vote-bank politics over
terrorism, the Government desperately needed a face-saver. So, they decided
to construct an elaborate theory of all-pervasive Hindu terror hoping to convince
the electorate that the Hindutva forces are the real fountainhead of all terrorist
activities. It is a matter of time before it is volubly argued by "secular"
politicians and their media cheerleaders that jihadi terror is nothing but
an act of self-defence in the face of rampant "Hindu terrorist"
provocation.
With investigating agencies dragging their
feet (could it be under orders from above?), failing to convict any terror
accused so far, this is a clever ploy to divert attention from the real danger
jihadi terror poses to India. Determined to thwart efforts by BJP-ruled States
to introduce tough anti-terror laws, the Government has directed the President
to return Narendra Modi's proposed GUJCOC, drafted on the lines of MCOCA,
which is operational in UPA-ruled Maharashtra. And the Centre is equally determined
not to execute Afzal Guru despite the Supreme Court sentencing him to death
several years back. Incidentally, Muslim-majority Indonesia has fewer qualms:
It executed three Islamic radicals last week, soon after they were convicted
for the Bali bombings.
But our Government is focused on damning Hindu
organisations by a sustained campaign of calumny. I wonder if the Maharashtra
ATS will soon "unearth" global linkages of Hindu terror and accuse
some sadhvi, swami or an Army officer of having plotted 9/11 too!
What the Congress-led Government is failing
to recognise is that public anger against a regime increasingly seen as decidedly
anti-Hindu, is rising. In the process, the Congress may actually be helping
to create a Hindu vote for the first time in India's history. Pyromaniacs
often end up being consumed by the very fire they light.
