In 2006, terror attacked the Muslim-dominated town of Malegaon in Maharashtra. A bomb blast near the town’s Hamidia mosque killed 37 people and severely injured 100.
Investigations by the National Investigative Agency strongly pointed to a Hindu terror angle behind the bombing of the mosque. The shadowy Abhinav Bharat group was seen to have carried out the blasts and was also the prime accused in the bombings that followed in the town two years later, in 2008.
Maharashtra’s Anti-Terror Squad, though, went on a different path. It charged nine Malegaon residents, all Muslim, with the 2006 Malegaon bombing. On Monday, every one of them was acquitted by a Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act court. This was after the NIA itself has admitted in 2014 that it did not have any evidence against these nine.
This comes even after the senior prosecutor in the Malegaon blasts, Rohini Salian, told the Indian Express that she had clear orders from the Union government to go soft on the Hindu terror angle.
The politics over terror has a deep and perverse history in India. On May 16, 2014, symbolically the day the results of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections came in, the Supreme Court acquitted six Muslim men charged with conducting the 2002 terror attack on Gujarat’s Akshardham Temple. Like in Malegaon, the case had not only been concocted but Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujrat, had used it in his political messaging.
This is just one of scores of cases cross India where investigative agencies seem to have fabricated cases against poor Muslims. In many cases, the Indian media simply swallows the police version, declaring them to be terrorists. In all of this, innocent lives are ruined, a community is brutalised – and the people who actually carry out the terror attacks get away scot free.
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