The acquittal of Swami Aseemanand among five accused of the 2008 Mecca Masjid blast case is symbolic of the crumbling saffron terror cases in the country.
In the year 2011, during the previous UPA regime, the Union home ministry asked the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to inquire into the alleged involvement of right-wing extremists in six terror cases, and one murder case of former RSS pracharak Sunil Joshi.
In May 2016, in an exclusive interview with THE WEEK, the then NIA DG Sharad Kumar had said from 2011 to 2016, the threat of perception of saffron terror had undergone a sea change. “There is no saffron terror threat in the country,” Kumar told THE WEEK.
“Since 2008, there has been no activity that has come to the notice of the agency. Hence, there is no question of any threat,'' he had said.
Two years hence, fresh allegations have begun with the BJP now accusing the Congress of deliberately coining the word ''saffron terror'', which, it claimed, was nothing but a political conspiracy.
The question, however, that still remains unanswered is who carried out these terror blasts that claimed several lives. The NIA probe has not been able to identify the culprits after several years of investigations.
The terror cases were related to blasts in Samjhauta Express in Haryana (2007), Malegaon in Maharashtra (2006 and 2008), Ajmer Dargah in Rajasthan (2007), Modasa in Gujarat (2008) and Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad (2008).
The investigators suspected the involvement of right-wing extremists in all these cases, which is why the home ministry decided to bunch the cases and hand over the investigations to the NIA.
The Mecca Masjid blast case is second among the Hindu terror cases where trial has concluded and the judgment has been pronounced, acquitting the accused. The trial in the Ajmer Dargah blast case resulted in conviction of only three—Joshi, Devendra Gupta and Bhavesh Patel—out of nine accused persons. Those acquitted included Swami Aseemanand.
In the Sunil Joshi murder case, the NIA handed over prosecution of the case to the Madhya Pradesh police saying it has not found any evidence to suggest that his murder was linked to the larger Hindu terror conspiracy. It said Joshi was killed by his own men. The court didn’t even frame charges in the case, and discharged all accused eight persons, including Pragya Singh Thakur last year.
Incidentally, all charges were also dropped by NIA against key accused Pragya Thakur in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, and the court is yet to take a call on the matter. The investigation into the Modasa blast case also resulted in a naught after the case was closed for lack of evidence, while the trial in the 2006 as well as 2008 Malegaon blast cases is yet to begin.
All eyes are now on the Samjhauta blast case in which the NIA has filed charges against Hindu extremists and the trial is going on in the matter.
What is noteworthy is that 42 of 209 witnesses deposed so far in the Samjhauta Express case have turned hostile, casting shadow over the success of NIA in the case. There are total 299 witnesses in the case. Even in the Dargah Ajmer Sharif case, 27 out of 149 witnesses had turned hostile during the course of trial. This time round, 66 out of 226 witnesses have turned hostile in the Mecca Masjid blast case derailing the probe once again.
The NIA's flip-flop in the investigations of the alleged Hindu terror cases had first seen allegations surfacing when former special public prosecutor Rohini Salian had claimed that Suhas Warke, a superintendent of police in the NIA, had asked her to “go soft” on the accused in the Malegaon blasts case after the BJP came to power in 2014. The Congress had then demanded that all cases being handled by the NIA be monitored by the Supreme Court to ensure that there was “no pressure” on the agency. “Whether it is SIMI or Abhinav Bharat, the investigations need to be done without any interference,” Congress spokesman Ajoy Kumar had said.