September 22, 2013
Branded for life
Vidya Subrahmaniam
The Sunday Story It is a familiar pattern, from Malegaon and Mecca Masjid, to Dilsukhnagar. Whenever there is an act of terror, Muslim suspects are quickly arrested. Torture is common. And even if they are acquitted, the police shadow never disappears.
The Hyderabad police came for Mohammad Rayeesuddin on February 24, 2013 — three days after the Dilsukhnagar twin blasts shattered the city’s fragile calm, killing 17 and injuring over a hundred. The 30-year-old man returned home fatigued from daylong grilling only to be again picked up a week later and subjected to more interrogation. This time, he was with the police for over 15 hours, and his panicked family began to imagine the worst.
Rayeesuddin’s mother and wife had reasons to worry. The family’s breadwinner was one among the 30-odd males picked up in August-September 2007 for suspected involvement in the Mecca Masjid and Gokul Chat Bhandar blasts. After weeklong torture in various police hideouts, Rayeesuddin was shown as formally arrested and sent to trial. On February 14, 2008, he obtained conditional bail, and on December 31, 2009, the Court of the VII Additional Metropolitan Sessions Judge cleared him and the other accused of all charges.
The Hindu got in touch with Rayeesuddin in February 2011, and what emerged was the familiar and heart-breaking story of ‘once a terror suspect always a terror suspect.’ Hum utthe baitthe dar me rahte hain [I live in constant fear],” he said, talking of the constant presence in his life of the khaki uniform. The policemen turned up on expected occasions, such as the anniversaries of the Babri Masjid demolition and Gujarat anti-Muslim violence and whenever a terror alert was sounded. Often they did not even need the fig leaf; they would turn up just to let him know that he will never stop being under watch.
So when the inevitable happened, and the police knock came in the aftermath of the Dilsukhnagar blasts, Rayeesuddin’s family was understandably crazed with worry. Rayeesuddin himself told The Hindu: “My life is ruined.” He also had a logical question to ask: “I know what it is to go to jail and face torture. Freedom came to me after so much pain, would I forgo it all to get involved in a fresh terror attack?”
Very recently, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) declared the absconding Riyaz Bhatkal the primary suspect in the Dilsukhnagar blasts. It also produced Bhatkal’s associate Asadullah Akhtar in a local court, naming him a second key suspect. But this in itself is no guarantee that the Mecca Masjid boys will finally be free of the ‘forever surveillance’ that has been their fate since 2007. After all, they were freed of the Mecca Masjid charges because a Hindutva link had surfaced when the case was reinvestigated. If that did not stop the police visits, there is hardly any reason why the alleged Bhatkal link to the Dilsukhnagar blasts will.
Identity and oppression
For those acquitted, the tragedy is compounded by the fact of their being Muslim. After much humming and hawing, the Andhra Pradesh Government ordered compensation to those released in the Mecca Masid blasts and other similar cases. The decision itself was taken under pressure from the National Commission for Minorities, which visited the victim boys, and noted the abominable condition in which they lived. Yet the compensation had not even been fully disbursed when the Andhra Pradesh High Court cancelled the award and ordered the State government to recover the sum it had already disbursed. The order, which termed the award illegal and beyond the jurisdiction of the government, was a stunning blow — both to those who had received the compensation and those waiting in eager anticipation for their turn. For the terror acquitted, the compensation was more than a means of starting a new life. It was official recognition that they had been wrongly accused.
Only a terror accused knows what it is to be officially freed of the terror tag. In a society where ordinary Muslim citizens find it difficult to get jobs and accommodation, the Muslim terror tag is equivalent of being condemned to non-existence. Of course, accusations of torture and worse have been made equally by Hindutva-linked terror accused such as Pragya Thakur and Aseemanand. However, the vast majority of those picked up are Muslims, and as an agonised activist told The Hindu: “Muslim boys get picked up in the first place because they are Muslim. They are the first suspects regardless of whether or not there is an actual Islamist connection to the terror act. And then, when they are acquitted, they cannot ask for compensation because the Constitution prohibits religion-based discrimination.”
Ironic indeed! Surely it could not have been the intention of our founding fathers that the injunction against religion-based discrimination ought to be used to further discrimination. In the Mecca Masjid case, as in many others, there is clear evidence of police and administrative mala fides. This was systematic State-sponsored discrimination. If the State finally, and at its leisure, moves to compensate those it victimised by design, how can that be bad in law?
The logic is compelling, and that is perhaps why on September 19, the Andhra Pradesh High Court recalled the stay order on the compensation awarded to those acquitted in the Mecca Masjid and other cases.
Not every terror accused comes even close to getting compensation. Mohammad Aamir, who spent 14 years in jail as the main accused in 20-odd low intensity bomb blasts executed between 1996 and 1997 in Delhi and neighbourhood, finally walked free in January 2011, fully acquitted in 17 cases and acquitted on appeal in one more case. The remaining two cases, in which too acquittals are eventually expected, hold only academic significance today because Aamir has already served more than the maximum prison term of 10 years for offences in these cases.
Aamir emerged from jail to a hero’s welcome. The press celebrated his freedom, and he himself laboured under the illusion that there would be an official compensation for the ordeal he endured. While he was in jail, his father passed away and his mother suffered a paralytic attack. But every government official he met stood up to receive him, commiserated with his plight and made promises that were, of course, never fulfilled.
Order recalled
The recall by the Andhra Pradesh High Court of the stay order on compensation should induce fresh thinking on the whole gamut of issues related to terror investigation — from policing methods and the irrationality of picking up suspects only to show quick results, to compensating those wrongly accused, and finally punishment to policemen found guilty of misusing their uniform against innocent civilians.
They were faking it all the way
Mohammad Ali
Over time, it was clear that investigating agency had concocted evidence against those held
On the evening of July 16, 2005, there was a knock on the door of a Karol Bagh hotel room where Moinuddin Dar and Bashir Ahmed Shah were staying. Ravinder Tyagi of the Delhi Police Special Branch was at the door.
The nightmare for the two Kashmiri residents had just begun. Over the next couple of days, they were detained in the hotel room, subjected to torture and forced to sign blank sheets of paper.
Dar and Shah, along with Saqib Rehman and Nazeer Ahmed Sofi, were presented on July 2 before a frenzied media by the police. Tyagi claimed that his team arrested the ‘terrorists’ after an encounter on the same day at National Highway 8, near the Indira Gandhi International Airport.
According to Tyagi, an informer had tipped him off about the terrorists who were headed to Delhi from Jaipur in a blue Tata Indica, carrying a huge consignment of arms and ammunition. Tyagi led a police party and sat waiting on the highway. A major attack was averted as the police apprehended the “terrorists” after a chase that involved cross-fire and hurling of hand grenades, the police claimed.
But the case fell apart in court. The deposition of the star witness, Tyagi, crumbled under the scrutiny of the Additional Sessions Judge of a Delhi court Virender Bhat. Tyagi could not disclose the identity of his informer nor could he explain why he felt no urgency to communicate this information about the impending strike to the Intelligence Bureau or his seniors.
Pronouncing the final verdict on February 2, 2011, the judge held that no one could be convicted on the basis of the “concocted” secret information which could not be “tested on the touchstone of the cross-examination by the accused.”
The trial brought out more fudging. The tailor, who had identified Dar as the person to whom he had sold the army uniform, turned out to be a stock witness of the police.
During the trial, the records showed that the Tata Indica, shown as the vehicle of choice of the alleged terrorists and which the police said was stolen, was registered with the transport authority much after it was reported to have been missing. This led the court to conclude that the “Tata Indica car was planted and merely used as a tool to falsely implicate the accused in this case.”
The judge “honourably acquitted” all the accused, including Dar, Shah, Rehman and Sofi, who had already spent over five-and-a-half years in jail.
“An absolutely fake encounter has been projected. The story of the encounter was carefully scripted in the office of Special Staff, Delhi Police, Dhaula Kuan, by its main author Tyagi with the assistance of SI Nirakar, SI Charan Singh and SI Mahender Singh,” said the Judge.
He also directed the police to register a common FIR against all the four police personnel for “stage managing of the fake encounter” and “abuse of their powers as police officer”. This is one of the 16 cases of frame-ups of Muslim citizens, documented by the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association, in a report ‘Framed, Damned, Acquitted: Dossiers of a Very Special Cell,’ which compiled all judgments in these cases to show the ‘terrorists’ were arrested by the Special Cell on charges of being operatives of various terrorist organisations — mainly Al Badr, Harkat-ul-Jhihad-al-Islami and Lashkar-e-Taiba — only to be acquitted later of all charges.
As Manisha Sethi, president of the activists’ body, argues: “There is an uncanny, almost scripted pattern in the cases.” She considers it the “proverbial tip of the iceberg,” and indicative of the extent of the malaise affecting the policing and criminal justice systems.
The highlight of the series of cases was the manner in which judges commented on how prosecution evidence was tampered with and fabricated, and how story after story, presented by the prosecution, was found by the court as unreliable and concocted. Curiously, all these cases have some common features. The information was always secret and therefore unverifiable. The police always failed to join public and independent witnesses in the actual operation even when the place of arrest was a bustling public area.
The vehicles used in the operation are requisitioned from agencies in order to avoid recording of the movements in official log books. There is a time lag of one week to a month between the time the ‘accused’ are picked up and shown to be arrested. This interim is used for torture and extraction of illegal confessions.
In one of the cases, the CBI, while investigating the arrest of alleged operatives of Al Badr by the Special Cell, had sought “legal action against sub-inspectors Vinay Tyagi, Subhash Vats and Tyagi” for fabrication of evidence.
But, Ms. Sethi adds, that as for action against the named police personnel is concerned, not a single officer, including those involved in the fake encounter case scripted by Tyagi, has been subjected to criminal proceedings. “On the contrary, adverse observations, strictures and censures from the courts did not come in the way of promotions, gallantry awards and the President’s medals to such personnel.”
Even after the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) indicted ACP Sanjeev Yadav — a figure who surfaces repeatedly in the JTSA report — for staging an encounter in Sonia Vihar in 2006, he was assigned to head probes as crucial and sensitive as the attack on the Israeli diplomat in Delhi, concludes Ms. Sethi.
Taint of terror
Rashmi Rajput
Spectre of new arrests haunts those who suffered after Malegaon
For the past three months, the 40-year-old Shabbir Ahmed Massiullah has spent every morning at Malegaon’s T.M. High School. He sits patiently for four hours outside his son Maaz’s classroom. Throughout the class, the 11-year-old keeps looking at his father, checking if he is there.
On August 2, 2006, the police had barged into their home in Maharashtra’s Malegaon town, near Nasik, and taken Shabbir away. Maaz was only four then.
Overnight, Maaz’s hero was branded a terrorist. Taunted by his classmates, Maaz stopped going to school. He stayed home for almost seven years.
Shabbir was released on bail in 2011, but it took nearly two years to get his son back in school. “When I hugged my son for the first time after I returned, he didn’t speak much. He kept to himself. When I asked about schools, he flatly refused to go.
“If I go to school the police might re-arrest you,” he said. “So I wait outside his classroom till he is done,” says Shabbir, who once had a battery shop. He now practises acupressure, a skill he learnt in jail.
Shabbir was among the nine Muslim men arrested for the blasts in the powerloom town, once the hub of the banned extremist group Students Islamic Movement of India. Five years later, in 2011, they were granted bail after Swami Aseemanand — under arrest for the Mecca Masjid blast — confessed that the Hindu right was behind the Malegaon blasts.
0Initially the case was probed by Maharashtra’s Anti-Terror Squad and then by the CBI. After the confession, it came to the National Investigating Agency (NIA).
By August-end, the NIA told the court that there was no evidence against them and it would not contest their discharge plea.
So, seven years after they were arrested, these men are a whisker away from being declared innocent.
Less than a km away in Zaffarnagar, we meet 56-year-old Shamsuddha Zoha whose son Noorul Hooda was the first man arrested in the case. He was picked up around midnight, a reason why she still finds it difficult to sleep at night. “I sleep near the door. Through the night I peep through the slat to see if the police are coming. They took my son away saying he would be back in 10 minutes. He returned after five-and-a-half years,” she says.
With her son branded as a terrorist, no one was willing to marry her daughters. “People told our relatives — no one wants to marry a girl whose brother is a terrorist,” she says, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her daughters are finally married now, after Noor’s release.
Noor used to work at Shabbir’s battery shop and earned Rs. 5,000 a month. He now rents a run-down grocery store along National Highway-3. “I had to take a Rs. 1-lakh loan to get into this business, but I make Rs.1, 500 a month,” he says. That is barely enough to support his family, let alone pay for his own treatment. “The beatings in jail left me with a clot on my head. When it bleeds, I feel like someone is drilling a hole in my head,” he says.
Held for Babri posters
In the interiors of Malegaon, we meet Maulana Zahid Abdul Majeed. Once a priest, he now makes a living as a woodcutter, earning Rs.1,000 a month. He lives in a ramshackle house, built with tarpaulin sheets. His wife is 8 months pregnant but is painfully thin.
Maulana Zahid first came under the police scanner in 1998. “I was booked for sticking a Babri Masjid poster. After that, I was seen as a suspicious character regularly rounded up in preventive arrests,” he says. But life changed completely after his arrest in 2006. “My father disowned me. He blames me for my brother’s arrest in the 2006 Aurangabad arms haul case,” says Zahid.
Bizarrely, the case built by the anti-terror squad rested on the confession of one man, a police informant called Abrar Ahmed. It was he who implicated those held. The ATS ended up arresting him as well. He finally retracted his confession in 2009. But the ATS and CBI chose to ignore that.
But once Aseemand admitted to the role of the Hindu right and the case reached the NIA in 2011, alibis were taken more seriously. Maulana Zahid, accused of planting one of the bombs, says he was not in Malegaon on the day of the blasts. “More than 20 people had given evidence that I was in Yavatmal on the day. Luckily the NIA believed them.”
On October 19, a Mumbai sessions court is likely to take a decision on the applications of these nine men, asking to be discharged from the case.
Even this discharge, considered a mere formality, faces a final barrier. Members of Hindu groups subsequently arrested have intervened to oppose the discharge, which could pose a delay. Till then, Shabbir Massiullah and the rest can do little else but wait.
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