The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. Student leader Kanhaiya Kumar was fined Rs 10,000 by JNU and his colleague Umar Khalid rusticated for one semester.
2. Dalit outreach: Buddhist monks will travel across Uttar Pradesh spreading Modi’s views on the religion.
3. Bihar: Crime rates down by 27% in Bihar after liquor ban was introduced, government claims.
4. Mumbai underworld don Dawood Ibrahim may have gangrene.
5. At least 92,000 people have been affected by floods in Assam.
6. Indian Premier League: Mumbai Indians thrash Kings XI Punjab by 25 runs.
The Big Story: Terror as farce
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.
The Big Scroll
Mohammed Aamir Khan was charged with conducting bombing in Delhi, tortured and incarcerated for 14 years. Now acquitted of all charges, he tells his story here. And before the court freed them, the acquittal of the nine Muslim men was actually challenged by the National Investigative Agency.
Politicking & Policying
1. Red faces in Government as Uighur leader Dolkun Isa’s visa is cancelled after Chinese protests.
2. The Indian Institutes of Technology have been asked to teach the classical language of Sanskrit.
3. Bharatiya Janata Party’s Roopa Ganguly alleges heckling by Trinamool Congress activists
Punditry
1. India would benefit from tri-service theatre commanders who report directly to the political leadership, as in the US, argues Ajai Shukla in the Business Standard.
2. In the Indian Express, Yoginder K Alagh explains that a neat separation of poverty estimates and entitlements won’t pass muster in order to measure poverty in India.
3. In the Hindustan Times, Gopi Gopalakrishan explains why India is becoming drug resistant.
Don’t Miss
TM Krishan explains why even devout Hindus should embrace Ambedkar’s philosophy:
Ambedkar’s investigations of Hinduism and his expose of what I would like to call abstractive isolation is an essential debate for all. In religious and spiritual dialogue we seek the ideal, the place of awakening, where the laukika – as it is – ceases to exist. All sadhana (practice) hopes for that movement through self-enquiry, ritualistic practice or emotional surrender. In order to move into that state of being it becomes essential to leave behind the real, that being the uncomfortable and irreconcilable. And in realisation, the real we believe becomes crystal clear. A substantial problem that emanates from this line of thought is that by default the economic, political and social discrepancies caused by structures that enable spiritual growth are swept under the carpet. The other issue with spiritualisation of inquiry is that the pure cannot be argued or disputed and is placed beyond the tactile, earthy.
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