Each time Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit's bail plea comes up for hearing, his wife, Aparna, hopes against hope that her husband would walk out of jail. But her hopes invariably get dashed each time.
“It has been eight years, a long, long ordeal for me. I hope he gets bail and walks out of jail,” said Aparna. In the last six months, her husband's bail pleas were rejected twice. Purohit, an officer belonging to the military intelligence, is the only serving Army officer to have been jailed for waging war against the state. He was arrested on November 5, 2008 by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad on charges of being a party to the criminal conspiracy behind the September 29, 2008 Malegaon bombings in which eight people were killed and over 79 injured.
On September 26, 2016, after special judge S.D. Tekale refused him bail, Purohit told his counsel Srikant Shivade that he was a born fighter and would fight to the end. Shivade said the charge-sheets filed by the Maharashtra ATS and the National Investigation Agency differed on material evidence. One of the main charges against Purohit is that he had smuggled out RDX from Kashmir where he was serving, and supplied it to Sudhakar Chaturvedi, a co-accused in the case. Shivade said Purohit had cultivated Chaturvedi as an intelligence source and the RDX was “purposively planted” by a section of ATS sleuths to trap Purohit. “The material evidence we have given to the courts have refuted the claim that the RDX was smuggled out of Kashmir,” said Shivade.
According to the supplementary charge-sheet filed by the NIA, which has been handling the case for the last five years (after three years of initial investigations by the ATS), Purohit created an organisation called Abhinav Bharat although he was a serving Army officer and collected funds to further the organisation's objectives. These funds were used to buy weapons and explosives, which were used in the Malegaon blasts.
Documents in possession of THE WEEK, however, show that Purohit wanted to develop Abhinav Bharat on the ideals of Chhatrapati Shivaji and counter the subversive actions of terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. “Purohit is a hardcore nationalist who fought with his blood for the country. He had killed several foreign terrorists and the fact that the Pakistani establishment had demanded his custody is reason enough to drop the charges against him,” said Shivade.
Purohit, in his multiple depositions before the special court, said his aim was to create Abhinav Bharat, keeping intelligence requirements in mind. At the meeting held in Faridabad on January 26-28, 2008, in which the organisation was launched, Purohit said R.K. Singh, a representative of the Intelligence Bureau, was also present. Aparna said her husband had kept his seniors always in the loop about Abhinav Bharat. “Secrecy is the soul of conspiracy and Abhinav Bharat was conceived and operationalised in keeping with this dictum. The purpose and objective behind the move was counter-intelligence problems,” Purohit said during one of his presentations.
Purohit had blamed some of his colleagues for framing him. Shivade said Purohit's immediate superior “Colonel S.K. Srivastava's sole aim was to fix Purohit and frame him in the case.” Major Praveen Khanzode, too, was part of the plot, said Shivade. He also blamed ATS officers Mohan Kulkarni and Arun Khanvilkar, who initially investigated the case, for having a vindictive agenda against his client. “They had in place a plan to frame Purohit from day one. They and their senior IPS bosses were driven by sinister motives to implicate Purohit,” said Shivade. He alleged that political considerations were at play and Purohit was made a scapegoat to appease a particular community.
Shivade said the NIA had lifted certain slides from Purohit's laptop and woven them into the charge-sheet. “Those slides, which were essentially part of Purohit's research findings about transnational jihadi ambitions on India, eventually became incriminating material evidence against him. Nothing can be more ironic,” he said.
The defence team, however, received a major boost after Captain Nitin Joshi, who was among the leading prosecution witnesses, retracted his statement against Purohit. Joshi deposed before the Maharashtra Human Rights Commission that he was forced by ATS sleuths to implicate Purohit, for reasons unknown to him.
Purohit had recently written to Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar that he be sent to the Line of Control so that he can “die a martyr's death, instead of having to languish in a jail on a cooked-up charge.” His wish, however, is unlikely to be fulfilled any time soon.
