Book: Who Killed Karkare? The Real Face of Terrorism in India
Author: SM Mushrif
Price: Rs 300/ USD 25
Pages: 319
Publisher: Pharos Media (www.pharosmedia.com), New Delhi
By M Zeyaul Haque,
A new book curiously titled Who Killed Karkare? says a nationwide
network of Hindutva terror that has its tentacles spread up to Nepal
and Israel is out to destroy the India most Indians have known for ages
and to remould it into some kind of Afghanistan under the Taliban.
The writer, a former IG Police of Maharashtra, SM Mushrif, has
reconstructed a fearsome picture out of former Maharashtra ATS chief
Hemant Karkare’s chargesheet against alleged Hindutva terrorists like
Lt. Col. Purohit, Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur and others.
The chargesheet pointed towards a mind-boggling nationwide
conspiracy with international support to destabilise the constitutional
order and the secular democratic Indian state that upholds it, to be
replaced by a Hindutva state run according to a new Constitution. For
that the conspirators were prepared for a massive bloodbath, using bomb
attacks on religious places to trigger an anti-Muslim holocaust.
Mushrif, who has over three decades of diligent policing behind him
and whose feats include exposing the Telgi scam, has made an elaborate
case out of nearly a dozen blasts over a large area of the country
conducted by Hindutva terror groups of different stripes. His case: a
section of India’s intelligence services, a miniscule group in the
armed forces and a section of different state police forces have been
compromised and infiltrated by these elements, a development that bodes
ill for the future of the country.
In Hemant Karkare’s net (of investigations, of course) many big and
small fishes of VHP, RSS, Bajrang Dal and Sanatan Sanstha (which has
been found to be involved in Diwali-eve blasts in Goa last week) had
been trapped. Serving and retired army officers, academics, serving and
retired officials of India’s premier intelligence service were ensnared
in Karkare’s fishing net. The menacing power of the latter groups,
inspired by sustained anti-Muslim hate campaigns of the last six
decades, gave the plot a sinister and highly destructive character.
Among the plans unearthed by Karkare was a blueprint for the
assassination of 70 prominent Indians who could by a hindrance to the
project of Hindutva. Interestingly, most of the persons marked for
elimination would, naturally, be Hindus because it is they who
primarily run the dispensation. The conspirators were also unhappy with
organisations whose Hindutva they suspected to be less virulent than
desired.
Mushrif, who very well knows the power of the Intelligence Bureau
(IB) to make or mar lives and careers, says he is prepared to face the
consequences of hostility of this power hub. He musters “evidence” to
show that the IB has regularly been interfering with regular police
investigations to let Hindutva terrorists slip out of the net and
replace them with random Muslim youth. To fudge the issues further
obliging police officers in the states would not mind exterminating a
few Muslim youth to be branded posthumously as “terrorists”.
There are quite a few number of such cases where such extra-judicial
killing of Muslim youth has turned out to be false police encounters.
All this is done to cover tracks of Hindutva terror. Mushrif says a
“Brahminist” network that has its origins in Maharashtra, and is
closely knit across political parties, government services, including
IB, and other vital sectors of life is behind the terror that seeks to
destroy the secular, democratic state. He hastens to clarify that very
few Brahminists are Brahmins. Many are from other high Hindu castes,
some from middle and lower castes.
Most Brahmins are fair-minded and would not like to associate
themselves with hate ideologies. Hemant Karkare, too, was a Brahmin,
Mushrif says. So is Mushrif’s son-in-law.
It is pertinent to note that “Brahminism” and “Brahminical order”
first appeared in Dalit protest vocabulary in the Dalit uprising
movement in Maharashtra towards the turn of the 20th century. Mushrif,
who appropriates part of this vocabulary for the present discourse,
says that Maharashtra still remains the centre of this ideology that,
among other things, has the dubious distinction of killing the Father
of the Nation.
The power establishment that really runs the affairs of this country
(Mushrif says it is not Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh or Rahul Gandhi)
does not want to expose the Hindutva terrorists. One example is the
blasts in Samjhauta Express, which the IB said was carried out by
Pakistan’s ISI. Mushrif quotes a report in The Times of India that
said, “the Centre had blamed the ISI on the basis of the IB’s
findings.” However, during a narco-analysis test under Karkare, Lt.
Col. Purohit had admitted having supplied the RDX used in the blast.
The IB, which draws its power from its proximity to the Prime Minister
(its director briefs the PM every morning for half an hour), did not
want Karkare’s investigation that blew the cover off the IB’s
shenanigans, to continue.
Once Karkare was removed from the scene, the IB moved in to fill his
position with KP Raghuvanshi, a pliant police officer with extremely
low credibility among Muslims for his record of letting off known
Hindutva terrorists and implicating innocent Muslim youth even in bomb
attack cases on mosques.
There are quite a few interesting vignettes here, like Raghuvanshi
and Col. Purohit’s association with Abhinav Bharat in Maharashtra,
whose hand was evident in a series of blasts across the country. It has
old connections with men like Veer Damodar Savarkar (whose relative
Himani Savarkar leads the Abhinav Bharat movement), Dr Munje, who led
the Hindu Mahasabha, and other Hindutva luminaries. It is at the
Bhonsala Military Academy run by these groups that Purohit trained
police officers, including Raghuvanshi. Mushrif asks a pertinent
question: Will Raghuvanshi pursue the investigation against Purohit,
his guru? A plausible answer is, perhaps no. Already charges have been
dropped by a special court under MCOCA against 11 accused, including
Purohit, on the grounds of insufficient evidence produced in the court
by the prosecution.
This was just the beginning of the undoing of Karkare’s painstaking
investigation. Mushrif says slowly the system is working to undo all of
Karkare’s work and let off the terrorists who over the years destroyed
scores of lives and wreaked irreparable economic damage. The ATS team
under Karkare had pointed out VHP leader Praveen Togadia’s role in the
blasts. The ATS under Raghuvanshi dropped the investigation against him
saying (please hold your laughter) they do not know who Togadia is!
A number of investigations have been thus sabotaged by the powers
that be and the tracks of the Hinduta terrorists duly covered. The
319-page book is crammed with such information.
But what about who killed Karkare? Mushrif says two teams were at
work on 26/11 – one which did the maximum damage, and was from outside.
The smaller team took advantage of the confusion of the moment and
acted only on the relatively small CST-CAMA-Rangbhavan stretch that
killed Karkare. It was a desi unit that wanted Karkare and his men out
of the way.
(Courtesy: The Milli Gazette)