The Terror After The Event – By Ashish Khetan (Jun 10, 2013, Outlook)

I was quite settled in my career when a court in Pune sentenced Mirza Himayat Baig, a terror suspect, to death in April this year. I was working with a TV station, drawing a decent salary and covering, among other beats, internal security. A source in the Maharashtra ATS – the same organisation that prosecuted Baig for the Pune German Bakery blast – had told me soon after the arrest that Baig was innocent but was being fixed by some senior ATS officers. The latter apparently felt that their prospects for future lucrative postings would be dented if the case remained unsolved. The blast happened in February 2010, Baig was arrested in September. The usual suspects (always members of SIMI or some other radical Muslim outfit) being falsely implicated in terror cases by our investigating agencies is not a new phenomenon. We have only to check the trajectory of the series of terror cases that have ended in acquittals over the past 10 years. Mostly, after such acquittals there is the usual criticism from civil society and journalists, but that’s par for the course for our investigation agencies. After a few critical op-eds and commentaries, all is forgotten.

For over a year, I researched several terror investigations, including the 7/11 train blasts (2006) and collected material evidence – internal documents of the agencies themselves – that showed how they were peddling different versions of the same, integral terror plot before different courts of law. It was apparent that, for our agencies, the truth had multiple versions for multiple purposes. There was one version for internal consumption of the agencies, another for the courts. Within the courts, there was one version for a court in UP, another for a court in Gujarat and yet another for a court in Mumbai. Interrogation reports of terror suspects were tailored in different and often contradictory ways by different agencies to suit their respective cases. I was intending to use this material to write a book. The idea of using it to intervene in a judicial process never crossed my mind then. After Baig’s sentence was pronounced, I got in touch with my ATS source again and asked how Baig, if he wasn’t involved in the blasts, had got the death sentence? He laughed and replied: “That’s the beauty of our criminal justice system. All you need to show is the recovery of some explosives and arms and a few tutored witnesses.”

Baig was a poor Muslim who with great difficulty had completed his graduation and done a teacher’s course. In 2006, misfortune struck. Some of his acquaintances were arrested in a controversial Aurangabad Arms Haul case in May that year and he got dragged in too. (This is one of the most mysterious of terror cases. It took five years for the ATS to frame charges against the arrested accused. The last one heard, only two police witnesses had been examined). Baig spent the next five years (till he was arrested) trying to earn an honest living. He did a diploma qualifying him to become a teacher in this period, besides various odd jobs including teaching at a private coaching class. On April 17, when the judge in Pune pronounced the death verdict, Baig broke down. “In the German Bakery blast, 17 innocent people were killed. I am the 18th victim of the blast,” Baig told the court. Barring the Indian Express, no other mainstream English newspaper reported at that time on Baig’s protestations in the court. Six months before Baig was handed the death sentence, a terror suspect named Qateel Siddiqui, 28, was killed in mysterious circumstances in the high-security ‘anda cell’ of the Pune Yerawada jail. My source told me that Qateel’s death and Himayat’s innocence were linked. He gave me two interrogation reports of Qateel prepared by an ATS inspector. Qateel was arrested about a year after Himayat’s arrest. But there was a catch. He wasn’t arrested by the Maharashtra ATS but by the Delhi Special Cell. My source asked me to access Qateel’s interrogations reports by the Delhi Police and other agencies and compare it with the ones prepared by the Maharashtra ATS.

I spent the next few weeks procuring the material on Qateel available with other agencies. Finally, I had detailed interrogation reports prepared by not just the Delhi Special Cell but also the Bangalore police. As per these reports, Qateel was not only involved in the Bangalore Chinnaswamy Stadium blasts of 2010 but also the Pune German Bakery blast. More importantly, these reports completely contradicted the ATS theory of Baig being involved in the blast. As per both these IRs, it was Qateel and Ahmed Siddibapa alias Yasin Bhatkal who had come together to plant a bomb at two different places in Pune. While Qateel was supposed to plant the bomb at the Dagduseth Halwai Ganesh temple, Yasin took it upon himself to plant the bomb at the German Bakery. Also, as per these IRs, Yasin and Qateel were together until 2:30 PM on February 13 in a room they had rented in Katraj locality of Pune. Qateel was given the bomb by Yasin on the afternoon of February 13. Both bombs were supposed to go off around the same time, that is, between 6:45 pm and 7 pm. But the Maharashtra ATS theory (that had already been presented in the form of a chargesheet against Baig by the time Qateel was arrested) was that Yasin was with Himayat Baig the entire day on the 13th and that the two had gone to plant the bomb at the Pune German Bakery. On the other hand, the Delhi and Bangalore Police reports had no reference to Himayat Baig whatsoever. …

These are not mere issues of legalities. When law enforcement agencies show absolute contempt for law, justice and truth, when innocent members of a community are falsely implicated in case after case and when the system turns a blind eye and fails to take correctives, it’s not just the idea of justice but the very idea of India that is at risk. My petition before the Bombay High Court has asked that an independent commission of inquiry be ordered into the conduct of the ATS and direct punitive action be taken against the police officers found responsible. Part of the decision lies with the court, the rest with the people of India.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?285770

SEE ALSO:

• Police Brutality in India: Why? What can be Done? – By Kaleem Kawaja (May 30, 2013, Twocircles.net)
  http://twocircles.net/2013may30/police_brutality_india_why_what_can_be_done.html
• Sarabjit vs. Qateel Siddiqui – By Zafarul-Islam Khan (Jun 1, 2013, Milli Gazette)
  http://www.milligazette.com/news/7183-sarabjit-vs-qateel-siddiqui-india-muslims-minorities

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The dark side of a very red moon – By Harinder Baweja (Jun 2, 2013, Hindustan Times)

The description of Darbha Ghati – where Chhattisgarh’s Congress unit got butchered – as ambush point, took me back to a journey I’d made last year in another part of the state. I’d hit ground zero in Bijapur – also part of Bastar and I was being driven by CRPF men along a slim metalled road. The 21 kms had only just been constructed under the supervision of gun-wielding security personnel and this stretch had its own milestones. “Ma’am, this is what we call ambush point. This is where we lost seven men,” said a voice in the dark as we drove down that slim road where turning on headlights was completely inadvisable. A little further is where 12 men had been killed in an explosion and just ahead, another milestone: the place where a jawan had died of a heat stroke.

The majority of security personnel I spoke to did not want to be part of the ‘war’ – the same war New Delhi and its ministers have vowed to fight with renewed vigour after losing Mahendra Karma and state Congress president, Nand Kumar Patel. They desperately want to be out of this war theatre because as one of them said, “We don’t know who is a Naxal and who is an adivasi.” Here, in the jungles of Bijapur, or Sukma or Narayanpur, the state is near absent and the Centre has one response – pump in more troops. And so it did, after the May 25 attack on the Congress cavalcade. But are more boots on the ground response the answer? Will the additional troops be able to distinguish a Naxal from a tribal? Will it help these men – part of a plan, unimaginatively codenamed Operation Greenhunt – understand who the enemy is, who they need to train their guns against? Wait, they don’t even know who they are hunting.

The men in khaki are well trained. They carry the best automatic weapons; even sleep with loaded guns resting on their chest, but these men, drawn from distant Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu neither know the terrain nor the language. A few days spent in ground zero had made it plainly clear – the Centre’s paramilitary is trying to do what the local police should be doing, but they are demotivated, too scared or sympathetic of the tribals. Many local police officers have families in the villages of Sukma and Bijapur and know that if the locals veer towards the Naxals, it is because they want food, clothing, education, healthcare facilities and legitimate rights over the land that is theirs. This is what the state and the Centre need to understand. You cannot deprive the adivasis their due; their minerals, their land rights through MoU after MoU with mining companies. Also, you can’t hope to divide the tribals through vigilante groups as the Salwa Judum tried to.

The State received the best intelligence it could have hoped to get through Alex Paul Menon, one of its district collectors, who was taken hostage by the Naxals a year ago. In the 13 days he spent in custody, Menon had long conversations with his Naxal kidnappers. Of the over 100 armed rebels he had a chance to interact with, as many as 70% told him they had taken to arms in reaction to Salwa Judum. That was a year ago but the lesson was clearly not put to any use, for Chhattisgarh, instead of undoing the damage, is still continuing arming civilians. It is just not using the Salwa Judum nomenclature. Now we are hearing of plans to take the war into the Naxal camp. We are also hearing of surgical strikes and enhanced air force missions, but let us come back to the plain truth – the Naxals live amidst the tribals.

What have the state and central governments done to wean the tribal from the Naxal? What indeed, have the governments done to craft a policy around the basic principle of making the tribal the stakeholder? The tribals have only been divided into the hunter and the hunted. It is imperative now for the state to reflect and not demand another offensive, another war. But if that is what they will do – because firefight is all they can do – I suggest they leave their air-conditioned rooms in Raipur and New Delhi and talk to the paramilitary forces. They will tell you that they are living a dog’s life and are being hunted by day and night, because they’ve been forced into an inhospitable war where they don’t know who they are battling and who they have been forced to declare war against. Be fair and just by the tribals – that’s the only starting point for the present and the future.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/1069953.aspx

SEE ALSO:

• The Bloodstained Karmic Cycle – By Nandini Sundar (Jun 10, 2013, Outlook)
  http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?285795
• Why Was Nand Kumar Patel Killed? – By Ajit Sahi (May 31, 2013, Tehelka)
  http://tehelka.com/why-was-nand-kumar-patel-killed/
• Red Hot Rage – By Debarshi Dasgupta, Yeshwant Dhote (Jun 10, 2013, Outlook)
  http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?285791
• Counter This Maoist Violence – Editorial (Jun 2, 2013, Peoples Democracy)
  http://pd.cpim.org/2013/0602_pd/06022013_1.html

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The Hell Of Living Souls – By G Vishnu (Jun 1, 2013, Tehelka)

On 14 May, police rounded up four men in Etah district of Uttar Pradesh, 260 km west of the state capital, Lucknow, in connection with a month-old case of murder. Three days later, one of them, a 33-year-old farmer named Balbir Singh, lay dead in a hospital in Lucknow. “The police gave him electric shocks and injected acid and petrol in his body,” says his brother- in-law, Sunul Kumar. “They forced him to sit on an electric heater that burnt his body horribly.” According to Kumar, Singh told him before dying that the police wanted him to confess his involvement in the murder.

So critical was his condition that Singh was moved to three hospitals in as many cities before he died. He named the policemen who tortured him in a dying declaration before a magistrate. The police were forced to register a case of murder. Five lowly policemen were suspended. No arrests are yet made. A sub-inspector is on the run. Devendra Pandey, who heads the police station of the alleged perpetrators, was merely transferred, though, according to Kumar, it was Pandey who gave Singh the electric shocks. Singh has left behind a one-year-old son and a pregnant wife.

The scourge of torture by police and prison officials is routine, random and vicious across India. On 18 May, Khalid Mujahid, 32, fell dead on his way back to a prison in Lucknow from a court in Faizabad. His death has generated unusual focus and political attention on the issue of police torture and custodial deaths. For the most part though, police torture hardly ever features as a red-button issue for Indians. First, there is a sense that torture only happens to the deserving. Second, there is a common perception that torture is the only – even if illegal – way of extracting crucial information from deadly terror suspects or mafia gangsters. Both these assumptions are false.

Torture almost never yields accurate information. In fact, it is a security hazard as victims often confess in utter desperation to crimes they have not committed, while the real perpetrators roam free. Equally, torture is not restricted to rare cases. Often, it is perpetrated on those caught on trivial charges. According to the NHRC, over 14,000 people have died in police custody and in prisons in the decade ending 2010. This translates to a rate of more than four deaths a day. In the past three years, the NHRC has recorded 417 deaths in police custody and 4,285 deaths in judicial custody.…

http://tehelka.com/the-hell-of-living-souls-2/

SEE ALSO:

• AFSPA A Threat To Life – By Ravi Nitesh & Devika Mittal (May 28, 2013, Countercurrents)
  http://www.countercurrents.org/mittal280513.htm

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Taking The I Out Of RTI – By Shonali Ghosal (Jun 1, 2013, Tehelka)

On 30 March 2012, after reading a report on tax evasions in a local newspaper, Babubhai Vaghela, an Ahmedabad-based activist, filed a Right to Information (RTI) application seeking details of defaulters who were fined in the case. After receiving no information within the 30- day time limit outlined in the RTI Act, 2005, he filed an appeal with the higher authority – the First Appellate Authority – as mandated by law and waited for its response. The wait lasted for three months before the Public Information Officer (PIO) at the revenue department disposed of Vaghela’s query citing ‘lack of merit’ in the application. “Since there is no rule to fine the appellate authority if it does not respond within a certain timeframe, authorities take their own sweet time even to drop cases,” says Vaghela. However, this is just one of the examples of officials circumventing the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) most successful pro-people and pro-accountability legislation.

Consider this. Pending cases and appeals are piling up at both the Central and State Information Commissions (CIC/SICs) in multiples of 10,000. And the 30- day timeframe, within which a person is bound to receive information as per the Act, no longer stands. Individual states have interpreted the Act in different ways to bypass the 30-day timeframe and the SICs are slow, and often defiant, in penalising erring officers. Take for instance the Madhya Pradesh SIC, one of many commissions that came to a grinding halt after the Supreme Court’s September 2012 order, which said that only retired judges could be appointed to the transparency panel. Citing lack of clarity in the SC ruling, the MP SIC stopped entertaining appeals later that month. Although, the SC subsequently stayed its ruling on the issue, the state has shown little interest in appointing members to the SIC. Today the MP SIC has no members – the posts of 10 Information Commissioners and the Chief Information Commissioner have been lying vacant for over a year now.

But even before the SC order impeded the work of SICs, states interpreted the Act in different ways, adding clauses to limit the ambit of the Act. While Karnataka fixed a 150-word limit on applications, the Sikkim and Allahabad High Courts now demand 500 as application fee, as opposed to a fee of 10 mandated by the Act. Maharashtra went a step further to limit queries to one subject per application. Maharashtra, however, is one of the better performing commissions, even when pitted against the CIC. While eight commissioners working in the CIC disposed 20,097 cases from June 2012–March 2013, five commissioners in Maharashtra disposed 23,693 cases in the same period. “What has damaged the RTI more than anything else are some Supreme Court judgments and statements like we don’t want 75 percent of the time of 75 percent of the country’s government officials to be spent on RTI. Statements like these encourage PIOs to take their own sweet time in responding to queries,” says Shailesh Gandhi, former Central Information Commissioner. He further believes that the commissions aren’t disposing cases fast enough as no one has set any minimum requisites for how much work is expected of an IC. “That and the fact that erring officials are seldom punished, means that PIOs do not fear the law.”

Odisha Information Commissioner Jagadananda, however, believes that the heart of the problem lies in the fact that neither citizens nor officials received any training in the transparency law. “We have never had any public programme teaching people how to frame questions, because of which they sometimes tend to fish for minor details from an entire ocean of information. Similarly, panchayats were never trained to catalogue information,” he says. Even so, he confesses that while the demand side (applicants) is better organised with civil society intervention, the supply side (public authorities) needs fine-tuning. In some cases, the Act has been so willfully distorted that often citizens are penalised for demanding information. Rakesh Ranjan, convenor of the Madhya Pradesh Suchna Adhikar Abhiyan, an NGO, recounts an instance where one of his colleagues was pulled up for approaching the Appellate Authority after an RTI application received no response following the 30-day time period. “When 30 days passed by, he went to the Appellate Authority to complain of not receiving information. Instead of registering his appeal, he was told that in accordance with amendments made by the state, an application has to be cleared in 180 days.” More shocking is that he was told that he had violated the rules by attempting to file an appeal after just 30 days and subsequently threatened with penal action.

“This is in contravention of the Act. No state rules can dilute the spirit of the Act. They’re meant to operationalise the Act, not curb it,” says Jagadananda. What is disturbing is the fact that an ombudsman that was supposed to keep the bureaucracy in check is now teeming with former bureaucrats. Most SICs are full of retired bureaucrats ranging from former chief secretaries to police officers. Much has been said about the appointment of four politically connected Information Commissioners at the Andhra Pradesh (AP) SIC, whereas the RTI Act states that “no person with political connections be appointed to the CIC or any SIC”. Appointments were made even though the Governor had rejected the four names. Turns out that despite the hurry to have them instated, the four members have not conducted any hearings because there is no place for them to sit in the SIC’s office. They, however, continue to draw salaries from the exchequer. …

http://tehelka.com/taking-the-i-out-of-rti/

SEE ALSO:

• An arresting Act – Editorial (May 15, 2013, The Hindu)
  http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/an-arresting-act/article4715144.ece

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No Upright Seams – By Prachi Pinglay-Plumber (Jun 3, 2013, Outlook)

Fast, furious, frenetic, frenzied. The ‘F’ words are the calling cards of 20-over cricket. Yet, a week after the IPL ‘spot-fixing scam’ hit the airwaves, and for all the hoo-hah over the arrest of Sreesanth & co, the pace of investigation, as Ravi Shastri might say, has been slow and low. No new players, Indian or foreign, have been named. No new matches or teams have been exposed. No new tactic of conceding “14 runs per over” has been unveiled. The monies being bandied about have been pitiable. The scam’s going nowhere. Fast. That said, a lot of side-shows have been blowing up on various tangents. Bollywood, bookies, team owner…there have been arrests and alleged charges aplenty. Calcutta, Indore, Jaipur, the police have been digging bookies out of the woodwork from all sorts of places. Indeed, the spot-fixing has been snowed under by the hectic ‘revelations’, fuelled by an unabashed and most untimely tug-of-war between the Delhi and Mumbai police. One is after the Rajasthan Royals; the other is catching up with the Chennai Super Kings. One is probing spot-fixing, the other betting. And in this sly war by innuendo and guilt by insinuation, littered with trivia about actresses, escort girls, cellphones and jeans, the only strand common to the parallel narratives are two characters out of Bigg Boss: Shilpa Shetty because she co-owns RR, and Vindoo Dara Singh because he is close to the one who owns CSK and to the one who captains it: Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

In the background of all this shadow boxing lurks the familiar figure of suspended IPL chairman Lalit Modi, whose co-brother Suresh Chellaram is a co-owner of RR. Ranged against him at the CSK end is Gurunath Meiyappan, whose father-in-law just so happens to be BCCI president N. Srinivasan, with whom Modi has been involved in a long and noisy tussle. (Incidentally, Meiyappan, as we go to press late on Thursday, was under risk of being declared a fugitive by the Mumbai police). Little wonder, as the RR fixing scandal morphed into a CSK betting one, the signals from London, where Modi is holed up, were the most eagerly anticipated. “Lalit K Modi” didn’t disappoint, distilling his insight in a torrent of 140 characters. “This spot fixing mess is getting even worse. Srinivasan and family should immediately resign….be banned with immediate effect.” Easier tweeted than done. Despite a grand total of six cricketers-Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila, Ankeet Chavan, and three ex-players Amit Singh, Baburao Yadav and Monish Guddewar-and 11 bookies and their friends being behind bars, despite the video evidence the police say they have, despite the daily media leaks, and despite even an international umpire, Pakistan’s Asad Rauf, falling by the wayside, no one knows where all this anecdotal and circumstantial evidence will lead.

At the moment, in the fog of breaking news, the distinction has been lost between fixing and betting, fact and slur. Says former Mumbai police commissioner D. Sivanandan: “People are lapping up juicy details about where players went, shopped, the girls they were with etc, but we need to examine what is illegal in those actions. Perhaps nothing. There is in fact not even a specific law to define the match-fixing crime. It boils down to section 420 (cheating) read with section 120-b (criminal conspiracy). That they cheated the public is not legally sound. Tomorrow, a member of the public could say Sachin Tendulkar cheated because he got out. The crime needs to be proven beyond a shadow of doubt.” That will not be easy. “Cricket falls under the category of ‘game of skill’, like rummy or bridge. So betting or gambling charges won’t apply as they apply for a game of flush, which is pure luck-based,” says Ravi Mandrekar of the Maharashtra Cricket Association. “So the section applied is cheating, but who exactly is being cheated? Also, it will be very hard to prove if a player’s actions were by default or deliberate,” he adds. Delhi police have charged the players under Section 409 of the Indian Penal Code (criminal breach of trust by agent), which carries a maximum punishment of life imprisonment. While Sreesanth’s towel indicator may seem like a piece of evidence, all the call detail records are of another accused, Jiju Janardhanan. Besides, all these CDRs (after they match with voice samples of the accused) need to be verified and accepted by the court. Cash has only been recovered from Chandila’s aunt’s house. …

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?285626

SEE ALSO:

• IPL: As Skewed as the System – By Sidharth Bhatia (May 25, 2013, Economic & Political Weekly)
  http://www.epw.in/web-exclusives/ipl-skewed-system.html
• Pawar Or Not, Srinivasan Will Not Back Down – By Jeemon Jacob (May 26, 2013, Tehelka)
  http://tehelka.com/pawar-or-not-sreenivasan-will-not-back-down/

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Deposit and despair – By Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay (May 31, 2013, Frontline)

Trouble does not seem to end for the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal. The collapse of the chit fund company Saradha Group is one of the biggest financial scandals to hit the State and may well be the ultimate undoing of Mamata Banerjee’s government. The Trinamool Congress, which completes two years in power in May, will find it next to impossible to disown its close ties with the tainted organisation or provide a plausible answer to the righteous indignation of lakhs of gullible investors, including a sizable section of urban and rural poor, who constitute much of the party’s support base. Though the extent of loss to the investors is not known, some estimates state that the group may have collected more than Rs.20,000 crore through its various deposit-collection schemes in West Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Tripura, Jharkhand and Bihar run through its 160 companies.

Although the Saradha Group, under the leadership of its founder and chairman and managing director Sudipta Sen, was carrying on its operations in the State for over a decade, it was in mid-2010 that its activities started gaining momentum and coverage. It forayed into the media business, and between 2010 and 2011 acquired or launched 10 organisations, both in the print and television media. With the help of publicity, it became a household name. Its position strengthened further with the change of government in May 2011 when the Trinamool Congress came to power, ending the 34-year-old rule of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front. The company’s media wing practically became the government’s mouthpiece. Kunal Ghosh, Trinamool Congress leader and Rajya Sabha member, was the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Saradha Group’s media unit, and Shatabdi Roy, Bengali film actor and Trinamool Congress Lok Sabha member, was the brand ambassador for some of its businesses.

“At a time when chit-fund, Ponzi-scheme and illegal deposit-collecting companies were in their heyday, Saradha and Sudipta Sen ruled the roost,” an industry source told Frontline. There was hardly a public ceremony or occasion of the Saradha Group that was not graced by Trinamool’s Ministers or other bigwigs. Their faces would adorn the banners and advertisements of the various companies of the group. Trinamool leaders have been photographed with Sudipta Sen and other top functionaries of the group. Such blatant display of bonhomie apparently helped foster confidence in the minds of ordinary people about the bona fides of the group’s schemes. “We put our trust in the State government and our money in Saradha,” said Alok Das, a small farmer from North 24 Paraganas, who has lost a deposit of around Rs.1 lakh.

The group began to feel the heat with the establishment of the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) and, according to political observers, after Mamata Banerjee pulled out of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre in September 2012. The bubble finally burst when the group started defaulting on the payment of dues to investors early this year. Its media units started to close down by mid-April, rendering more than 1,000 employees jobless, and the crisis exploded right in the face of the government as hundreds of agents of the various Saradha schemes staged demonstrations outside the house of Mamata Banerjee and the offices of the Trinamool Congress. Many of these agents had fled their homes to escape the wrath of the investors. As of May 8, 10 of them had committed suicide. …

http://www.frontline.in/the-nation/deposit-and-despair/article4710952.ece

SEE ALSO:

• ‘A Crime, Not An Auditing Mistake’ – Aniruddha Bahal with Pragya Singh (May 20, 2013, Outlook)
  http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?285350

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