By Andalib Akhter
Who Killed Karkare? The Real Face Of Terrorism In India
Author: SM Mushrif
Price: Rs 300/$ 25
Pages: 319
Publisher: Pharos Media (www.pharosmedia.com), New Delhi
AT a time when the Government of India is making all efforts, nationally as well as worldwide, to punish those involved in the dastardly Mumbai attack on November 26, 2008, it has also been facing irritating questions over the killing of ATS chief Hemant Karkare. Not only do the family members of Karkare and other officers who were also shot dead see foul play in their killing, a large section of the society also believes that some Hindutva forces killed the ATS chief in a side operation.
Several articles and essays have been written about the 26/11 attack and Karkare’s killing, but the latest revelation and suspicion over the incident has come in the form of a book by a former IG of the Maharashtra police.
In his book ‘Who Killed Karkare? The Real Face of Terrorism in India’, the author, S M Mushrif, not only tried to show that Karkare was the victim of a larger conspiracy of Hindutva forces, but also attempted to unravel a nationwide network of terror that the Hindutva forces have spread, such that show traces in Nepal and Israel as well.
Mushrif, who knows the system inside out, says two teams were at work on 26/11 — one which did the maximum damage. The smaller team took advantage of the confusion 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 their way.
The author feels that Hindutva forces are out to destroy India and want to re-mould it into how Afghanistan was under the Taliban.
The book has reconstructed a fearsome picture of 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 de-stabilise 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 conducted by Hindutva terror groups across the country. He found that a section of India’s intelligence services, a miniscule group in the armed forces and a section of different state police forces have been infiltrated by these elements, a development that bodes ill for the future of the country.
Several big and small fishes of the VHP, the RSS, the Bajrang Dal and the Sanatan Sanstha (which has been found to be involved in the recent Diwali-eve blasts in Goa) had been trapped in Karkare’s net.
Serving and retired Army officers, academics and serving and retired officials of India’s premier intelligence service were caught in Karkare’s web. The menacing power of these groups, inspired by sustained anti-Muslim hate campaigns over the last six decades, gave the plot a sinister and highly destructive character.
The author writes in black and white, as to who started terrorism in India and who created and sustains the terrorism label against Indian Muslims. He talks about how investigations are manipulated by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and security agencies, which not only play blind to the Hindutva terror, but also encourage it. How innocents are picked up without any proof and how evidence is cooked up to implicate them in crimes they never committed; only to keep the myth of ‘Islamic terrorism’ alive.
Mushrif 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. In order to fudge issues and further oblige police officers, a few Muslim youth were exterminated to be branded posthumously as ‘terrorists’.
There are quite a few such cases where such extra-judicial killings of Muslim youth turned out to be false police encounters. All this is done to cover the 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 the IB, and other vital sectors of life, is behind the terror that seeks to destroy the secular, democratic state. He, however, clarifies 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.
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 in the book, 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. Charges have already been dropped by a special court under MCOCA against 11 accused, including Purohit, on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
The book with a lot of references and evidence can make good reading stuff for those who want to keep a close watch on India’s socio-religious politics and security systems.