by MANISHA SETHI
Manisha Sethi is an activist with Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association PHOTO/Muslim Mirror
It has been seven months since the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association brought out its report, Framed, Damned, Acquitted, chronicling in detail how the Delhi Police’s Special Cell implicated innocents – former militants, police informers, businessmen, and just ordinary, unlucky men – as terrorists. It is one of the few documents that lends evidentiary credence to the widespread sense amongst Muslims that they are being targeted in the war against terror. Apologists for the police and investigative agencies however do not tire of contesting its conclusions, namely that there is a systemic and systematic bias against minorities when it comes to terror investigations. What bias, they ask. As does our chief National Security ‘analyst’ Praveen Swami, who has stressed that “liberals are compromising the war against jihadi terror“.
Could such ‘analysts’ be echoing the sentiments of a judge of the Allahabad High court, who less than two decades after India gained independence, noted, that “in the entire country there is not another criminal force whose misdeeds can come anywhere near the list of crimes of that organised body called the Indian Police force” (All India Reporter, 1964, Vol. 51, 702). Do they mean, that our extraordinarily brutal police force is even-handed in its application of cruelty across the spectrum of our citizenry, and is not especially biased against the Muslims, or Dalits, adivasis and so on?
One doubts if this is what these commentators mean. Confronted by a long list of acquittals in terror trials, they argue that this is a result simply of incompetence or stretched resources. Nothing in the way these investigations are carried out or prosecuted seems to them to suggest prejudice against Muslims. Comparable data of falling conviction rates in murder, but especially rape, is cited as proof that it is poor investigative skills and other mundane matters rather than any ‘bias’ that seems to be at the root of the acquittals of terror suspects.
And further, this unnecessary fuss over communal profiling or targeting is ‘compromising the war against jihadi terror’. If only we were to zip up our lips and turn a blind eye to what seems to us as deliberate framing of members of a specific community—we would greatly strengthen the battle against Jihadi terror.
Just days before we released our report last year, there were a series of arrests in Bangalore and Hubli, where young men, many of whom were university educated and professionals, were arrested by the Bangalore Central Crime Branch (CCB) for conspiring to kill right-wing Hindu leaders. The news channels and papers, vernacular and English alike, delighted in headlines – one more perverse than the other – which confidently spoke about the guilt of those arrested. Six months later, journalist Muthiur Rehman Siddiqui and technician Yusuf Nalband – two of those 15 arrested were discharged, while the third, Aijaz Mirza, a scientist with DRDO, was released on bail – even as his name did not appear in the chargesheet filed by the NIA, to whom the case had been transferred since then.
http://youtu.be/MeiuQVray_8
Upon their release, the three young men spoke movingly of their period of incarceration, the trauma they and their families suffered – but also of the sense of hurt they felt at having been arrested, they suspected, only because they were Muslims.
Plain short sightedness, felt our leading security expert:
“The facts … suggest the need for a more nuanced reading of these instances of Muslims who are released for want of evidence” and not simply as another case of “police-led persecution of Muslims.” [Praveen Swami]
Swami invites us to “test the assumptions against the facts in the Bangalore case.” Yes, let’s do that. (And, er, it is known popularly as the Bangalore Assassination case, not the ‘Bangalore Jihad’ case.) He writes:
“The NIA’s charge-sheet outlines perhaps the most ambitious jihadist project since 26/11, and the first Indian case involving online self-radicalisation.”
So ambitious was this project that the centrepiece of evidence is an obsolete berretta pistol, which would have been used allegedly to kill the Hindutva leaning journalists.
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