Creating A Chimera Of Muslim Terrorists In India

Ajit Sahi has travelled the length and breadth of India investigating the people locked up or killed for being terrorists – and witnessed the official line unravel.

The rest of the piece can be read here.

The loud chest-thumping by the Indian Government, its police and security agencies with regards to terrorism is based on shockingly little evidence. Of the string of terror attacks in India (outside the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir) over the last few years, nearly all have been timer-based bombings. Only two major events have been physical attacks by gunmen: the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament and the November 2008 assault on five-star hotels in Mumbai. Outside the state of Kashmir, there hasn’t been one suicide bombing, a major surprise because Islamist extremists have been prone to strap bombs on themselves, everywhere from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan. The bombings themselves have almost always been in middle-class markets, or Government hospitals, rather than on high-profile places such as the offices of security agencies, or on police headquarters, as is often seen elsewhere.

Many commentators have now begun to wonder if the police aren’t creating a chimera of Indian Muslims turning to terrorism by the droves. In 2008, police in the western Indian state of Maharashtra arrested members of a little-known fascist Hindu outfit who had allegedly sworn to target Indian Muslims as a counter-attack on the ‘terrorists’. (India’s religious majority of Hindus constitute 80 per cent of its 1.1 billion people.) Several independent citizens’ inquiries have concluded that another infamous ‘encounter’ of two Muslims, one of them a teenager, carried out by police in a Muslim neighbourhood of New Delhi on 19 September 2008 was fake, and that the duo killed were not terrorists.

The story continues endlessly. On 16 August this year, a day after India, the world’s largest democracy, celebrated the 62nd anniversary of its Independence, I sat opposite Ghulam Akbar Khotal in his lawyer’s small room in a multi-storeyed neighbourhood of downtown Mumbai. Khotal, 39, owns a catering business with his brothers in a township named Kalyan near Mumbai. The only one of his siblings never to have gone to school, Khotal sports the devout Muslim’s flowing beard, but dresses nattily in a striped full-sleeved shirt and dark blue trousers. His mien relaxed, he chats freely, although in a low tone, smiles much, sometimes grins, and doesn’t reflect any of the anger that by rights should burn him up, given what the Indian State has subjected him to since September 2001.

Khotal had been released on bail only a month before I met him, after more than three years in prison. Before this incarceration, he had spent another two years behind bars, the two jail terms separated by only a few months of freedom. Khotal’s alleged crime is conspiring to and carrying out bombings in Mumbai. The evidence against him is non-existent. And yet the courts repeatedly denied him bail and refused to entertain his pleas that the police were brutally torturing him to force him to ‘confess’ to a crime he said he hadn’t committed. In this way, in yet another case of counterterrorism, the Indian judiciary meekly fell in line with the Indian State and failed to secure justice for a bona fide Indian citizen. So what was Khotal’s true crime? He had once been a member of SIMI. Over the last eight years, the police have failed to establish a single charge against him.

Having met hundreds of innocent fellow Indians who have suffered Khotal’s fate because they are Muslim, I shudder and wonder: is it likely that the Indian Government’s fantasy about Muslim terrorists could one day become self-fulfilling?

Ajit Sahi is Editor-at-large with Tehelka magazine (www.tehelka.com).