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Mainstream, VOL LI, No 31, July 20, 2013

Bodhgaya Bomb Blasts: Moving beyond the ‘Usual Suspects’

Sunday 21 July 2013, by Subhash Gatade

#socialtags

I

Encore!

Mr Praveen Swamy has ‘discovered’ the ‘usual suspects’ once again.

Narrating “[t]he same old, depressing story of incompetence and apathy” behind the Bodh-gaya bombings, he has shared with the readers how “[I]ndia’s police and intelligence services knew there were plots to attack the temple”
and how “... jihadists quite publicly announced they intended to attack Buddhist targets. ... From January, government sources have told Firstpost, the Intelligence Bureau had issued several warnings pointing to heightened risks to Buddhist religious targets in India, as a consequence of anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar.” (http://www. firstpost.com/india/bodh-gaya-bombings-why-were-so-many-warnings-ignored-935233.html)

Of course, after giving enough hints about who the perpetrators could be, he has been careful enough to add—supposedly to maintain objectivity of his profession that

“It’s too early to come to conclusions on who the perpetrators might have been—unlike Internet conspiracy theorists, who’ll be blaming everyone from Islamists to the intelligence services themselves in coming hours. Criminal investigators need evidence, not guesses about motives. There are some pieces of evidence already available, though.”

Readers of his erstwhile employer, namely, The Hindu group of publications, can vouch that it is not for the first time that he has done it. They have been witness to his similar write-ups, providing enough juicy details of the cross-border connections of these terrorists, after every such terror attack. It is a different matter that later it turned out that many of these write-ups were pure work of fiction as it was discovered that the actual perpetrators were the Hindutva terrorists. For example, any independent reader can see for herself/himself what Praveen Swamy had written about, say, Mecca Masjid blasts, Ajmer Sharief blasts and Samjhauta Express bomb blasts (all in the year 2007) and what were the conclusions of the investigators later.

Any cursory glance at the media scene in this country can make it clear that Praveen Swamy is not an exception.

It is important to remember this fact because with the bomb blast at Bodhgaya, the place where Gautama Buddha is said to have attained Enlightenment and which is the most important of the main four pilgrimage sites related to the life of Gautama Buddha—the others being Lumbini, Sarnath and Kushinagar—the whole debate around terrorism has entered a much difficult terrain.

II

One expects added caution on the part of any of the experts/commentators for another important reason as well. It has been widely reported how in two of our neighbouring countries—namely, Burma and Sri Lanka—Buddhist extremists have unleashed a wave of terror against the hapless Muslims. And any such news without proper confirmation, that Bodhgaya has come under attack of jihadi terrorists, can make matters more difficult for the minority Muslims there.

According to conservative estimates, more than ten thousand people—mostly Muslims—have died in Burma where a campaign of ethnic cleansing is underway since 2012 (http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/22/burma-end-ethnic-cleansing-rohingya-muslims) The 153-page report brought out by Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do is Pray: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State”, describes the role of the Burmese Government and local authorities in the forcible displacement of more than 125,000 Rohingya and other Muslims and the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Burmese officials, community leaders, and Buddhist monks organised and encouraged the ethnic Arakanese backed by the state security forces to conduct coordinated attacks on Muslim neighbourhoods and villages in October 2012 to terrorise and forcibly relocate the population. The tens of thousands of displaced have been denied access to humanitarian aid and been unable to return home.

A newspaper like The Guardian had done a story on a “Buddhist monk uses racism and rumours to spread hatred in Burma” (April 18, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/18/buddhist-monk-spreads-hatred-burma)

“His name is Wirathu, he calls himself the ‘Burmese Bin Laden’ and he is a Buddhist monk who is stoking religious hatred across Burma.
“The saffron-robed 45-year-old regularly shares his hate-filled rants through DVD and social media, in which he warns against Muslims who ‘target innocent young Burmese girls and rape them’, and ‘indulge in cronyism’...”

“Rising to prominence in 2001, when he created a nationalist campaign to boycott Muslim businesses, Wirathu was jailed for 25 years in 2003 for inciting anti-Muslim hatred but freed in 2010 under a general amnesty.
Since his release, Wirathu has gone back to preaching hate. Many believe his words inspired the fighting last June between Buddhists and ethnic Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state, where 200 people were killed and more than 100,000 displaced.”

Or look at Sri Lanka. Emboldened by the suppression of the Tamil nationality struggle more than three years back, the Sinhala Buddhist extremists, who happen to be the main pillar of President Mahinda Rajapakse, have begun to persecute the country’s Muslim minority. An outfit named Bodu Bala Sena (BBS—‘the Army of Buddhist Power’), formed last July in Colombo, is engaged in systematically demonising Muslims, accusing them of eroding Sri Lanka’s Buddhist heritage. And as one witnesses, violence has been promised unto the Muslims. The stray examples described below are an indicator in which direction the winds are blowing. Way back in January, Right-wing Sinhala groups stormed a Law College in Colombo, claiming that its examination results were doctored to favour Muslims.

They have called for mosques and dargahs to be razed, ostensibly for being situated too close to Buddhist temples; in the ancient capital of Anuradhapura during one of these demolition drives, a photographer captured a monk burning a green Islamic pennant that he had pulled out of a dargah’s rubble. The Bodu Bala Sena has closed down Muslim-owned butcheries, attacked a popular Muslim-owned clothing store in Colombo, and forced the government to ban the certification of halal meat; other groups have painted pigs on the walls of mosques. In the town of Dambulla last year, when the chief priest of a local Buddhist temple led a protest to “relocate” a mosque, he warned in the process: “Today we came with a Buddhist flag in hand. But the next time, it will be different.” (See more at: http://caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/spoils-victory)

III

A point worth consideration is to look at this particular blast in a more detached way and see for oneself who ‘gains’ from a ‘blast’ at this juncture.

Let us take a trip down memory lane and see for oneself what one wants to convey. The Samjhauta Express bomb blast occurred in February 2007 and killed more than 67 people, mostly Pakistanis; this was initially blamed on Islamic terrorists and it was later discovered to be the handiwork of Hindutva terrorists. One may recall that the Foreign Secretary of Pakistan was to reach India merely two days after the tragic blasts and there were news in the papers that the peace process between India and Pakistan would get a new boost with this visit. As expected, this bomb blast and the consequent blame game had a very negative impact on the peace overtures. Thus we can infer that those forces, which are opposed to normalisation of relations between the two countries, were to ‘benefit’ from this incident.

Coming to the present juncture, one can see that the saffron camp, despite the appointment of its ‘most successful Chief Minister’ as the campaign committee chief, finds itself on the defensive on various fronts.

Forget the Rambo act of ‘rescuing’ 15,000 Gujaratis from Uttarakhand which led to enough eggs on their face, or their internal infighting evident to everyone with one of their topmost leaders sending in his resignation from different posts as he found himself marginalised in the party; at the political level, the party of Hindutva stands further isolated because of Nitish Kumar’s exit from the NDA and the BJP-led alliance getting reduced to merely a three-party alliance, with no new entrants ready to join this faltering ship. Perhaps the big news is the ongoing investigation in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case under the supervision of the Gujarat High Court, that has led to the unprecedented situation where many IPS-level officers of the Gujarat cadre have been chargesheeted and one amongst them is found to be absconding. And the possibility is that in its supplementary chargsheet a few of the political leaders involved in the case would be targeted. One of the accused, DIG Vanzara, who is lodged in jail since 2007 for his role in the Sohrabuddin encounter case, is reported to have said that he has talked to Safed Dhadi (white beard supposedly referring to Narendra Modi) and black Dhadi (black beard supposedly referring to Modi’s close confidant Amit Shah) about this particular ‘operation’. In fact, one of the witnesses in the case, who happens to be a police officer himself, in his statement before a Magistrate under Article 164 which is admissible as evidence, has said that Vanzara did make such a statement.

To summarise, while 24x7 journos have finally ‘declared’ that the perpetrators are jihadis just on the basis of a few statements made by the Al-Qaeda or Hafeez Saeed or some IB alerts (which have come under cloud because of the inputs these provided for the Ishrat encounter), an alternate reading of the whole act looks more plausible. Look at the various terror acts in the last few years and see how they could dramatically change the discourse. And with planners and masterminds of the Hindutva terror still roaming free, it seems possible that some such Hindutva terrorists or some rogue Pracharak (wholetimer) from the RSS fraternity, who have gathered enough experience in the last decade by their involvement in various terror acts, could have put their expertise to use in this particular case with due help rendered by some similar rogue elements from the IB, which also finds itself on the defensive in the Ishrat Jahan case.

Perhaps a news item which appeared in the mainstream media could be a pointer to the unfolding conspiracy.

A day after serial blasts rocked the Mahabodhi temple complex in Bihar’s Gaya district, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Monday (July 1) interrogated one person detained in connection with the incident. A team of the Central agency arrived in Gaya to investigate the case.

Based on a bag found in the temple premises, the police detained Vinod Mistri, a resident of the Barachatti block in Gaya. “Vinod was picked up based on certain information. His photo identity card was found in the temple premises,” Abhayanand, Director General of Police, told reporters here. Deputy Inspector General of Police Nayyar Hasnain Khan told The Hindu
that Vinod is a carpenter who made small furniture.

The bag found contained a monk’s robe, a piece of paper with some mobile numbers, medical papers and a voter identity card belonging to Vinod. “He is not a monk. So the NIA is investigating why he was carrying the robe,” a police source told The Hindu... (‘NIA questions man for Bodh Gaya blasts’, Patna, July 8, 2013, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/nia-questions-man-for-bodh-gaya-blasts/article4894131.ece)

The press statement released by ‘Rihai Manch’, a Forum for the Release of Innocent Muslims Imprisoned in the name of Terrorism, which is on dharna (sit in) in front of the UP Assembly for the last fifty days to bring Khalid Mujahid’s killers to justice; Khalid was killed in police custody), tries to join the dots and points to a conspiracy hatched by the ‘Hindutva brigade in association with IB’ to wriggle itself out of the mess in which it finds itself.

According to their press release, “the manner in which one finds mention of a name called Vinod Mistry in this case and the way in which we are finding that clothes normally worn by Buddhist monks were discovered from his possession and the manner in which letters in Urdu were discovered from the temple, it rather vindicates that it was an attempt to stage in Bodhgaya a ‘Malegaon’ where a fake beard was found and where due to wrong/biased inputs many innocent Muslims were lodged in jail for quite sometime till real culprits belonging to RSS were discovered.”

Posing a question ‘why were Hindutva terror groups kept out of this investigation?’ it pointed to the duplicity of the IB in no uncertain terms. According to it, while investigating agencies have no qualms in stigmatising the ‘Girls Islamic Organisation’, active in Maharashtra, as a ‘terrorist organisation’ and are later forced to eat their words, they turn a blind eye to the ‘open arms training undertaken by the Durga Vahini, an organisation affiliated to the RSS, many of whose activists have been found to be involved in terror acts and are languishing in jail’.

Would it be asking too much if one urges for a thorough investigation in this case and apprehending not only the pawns involved in it but their patrons?

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