If Hindus Can’t Be Terrorists, Was Godse Not a Hindu?
On July 21, the Bombay high court acquitted all 12 men accused in the Bombay pressure cooker blasts of 2006. All the accused were Muslims. Within two days of that verdict, the Maharashtra government chose to appeal to the Supreme Court against the acquittal of the twelve men – saying that that the judgement could impact other Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) cases. The top court passed a partial stay on the Bombay high court verdict.
Some ten days later, an NIA court acquitted Lt.Colonel Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Thakur in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, in which seven people were killed and over a hundred wounded.
Within hours, a spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party held a press briefing, hailing the Bombay high court verdict and lambasting the Congress for floating the notion of "saffron terror."
Clearly, where the verdict in the matter of the 2006 blasts was looked upon by the BJP as a temporary event, reversible by the Supreme Court, the other verdict pertaining to the Malegaon blasts is sought to be stamped with finality.
The reason for this discordance is not a legal one, since a legal argument cannot uphold the view that one verdict is medial and the other final because such a view may suit an interested party. The reason lies in the ideological position that Hindus cannot be terrorists and that it is Islam alone that is prone to such shenanigans.
Thus, we must understand that Nathu Ram Godse was not a Hindu; that the LTTE in Sri Lanka, who invented the suicide bomber, were not Hindus; that Maoists, whom the right wing never tires of calling terrorists, are not Hindus; that Sikhs, whom Hindutva ideologues consider Hindus, could not be terrorists even if the Khalistan movement saw rampant terrorism.
Not to mention that many freedom fighters during the colonial rule, several of whom were Hindus, engaged in violent activities against the British and were called terrorists by the colonial oppressors.
As for the Malegaon blast case, it might be instructive to listen to what prosecutor Rohini Salian has confided to The Indian Express. Salian revealed how after change of government at the centre in 2014, an NIA officer asked to meet her, explicitly not to be told on the phone, and instructed her that as per advice from above, she was to go soft on the Malegaon case.
She has underlined how all the evidence previously gathered under Article 164 (given before a magistrate as admissible evidence) was set aside by the new NIA investigators, and revamped evidence adduced.
Salian said that the high court verdict acquitting Colonel Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya was one she had "expected." It remains to be seen if the government will think it right to appeal the Malegaon verdict in the Supreme Court with similar swiftness that it had displayed after the Bombay blast verdict.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
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