The acquittal of all the five accused by a National Investigation Agency (NIA) Special Court in the Mecca mosque blast in Hyderabad has exposed the flimsy evidence on which the trial had proceeded. It is evident that the probe agencies under the Congress-UPA regime had gone overboard in seeking to implicate the accused, which included Swami Aseemanand, in the incident.
The fact that attempts had been made to frame the accused were clear from the beginning itself. First, the agencies had seen the hand of Pakistan-based militants in the blast which had killed nine people on May 18, 2007, at the mosque in Hyderabad. The suspects were even named in the earlier official reports. Then suddenly the names of Aseemanand and four others, said to be Hindu activists, were dragged into the crime, and from thereon a concerted attempt was made by the investigating authorities to fix them. Red flags were raised even then by certain officers connected with the probe, but they were rejected. All of his happened in the backdrop of senior UPA Ministers P Chidambaram and Sushil Kumar Shinde taking of ‘Hindu terror’ and Saffron terror’. Rahul Gandhi had also said that the biggest threat to the country came from the so-called Hindu terror.
It was not just the Meccas Masjid case; in the Malegaon and the Samjhauta Express incidents too, the needle of suspicion had first gone to Islamists and then shifted almost overnight to others seen as pro-Hindu. The Congress-led regime was clearly out to defame the majority community by linking terror to religion and seeking to appease the minority community. Now that its game has been exposed, it is trying to wriggle out of the situation.
Former Union Minister for Home Affairs Shivraj Patil refused to comment in the aftermath of the court verdict, claiming that he had never used the term linking terror to the Hindu community, and asked questioners to query those who had done so. The Congress is also seeking to deflect the allegation, saying that important witnesses had turned hostile since the Modi Government came to power. The fact is that many witnesses turning hostile had happened before the Modi regime assumed charge and that pieces of evidence were simply too weak to stand judicial scrutiny.
Insiders have revealed how the probe agencies, presumably under instructions from the then Government in power at the Centre, had gone out of their way to nail the accused on the basis of fabricated evidence. Now that the trial court has acquitted the accused, the question is: Who are the culprits? The case is not closed yet.
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