WASHINGTON – Confessions by an Indian Swami to Hindu radicals’ being behind a spate of bombings – earlier blamed on Muslims – have revealed the extent of prejudice against the minority community and also exposed the hollowness of New Delhi’s frequent and convenient assumptions of a Pakistani link to all terrorist incidents in India.
A report in The Washington Post noted that when a series of bomb attacks ripped through Muslim neighbourhoods, mosques and shrines in India in recent years, suspicion fell firmly on “Islamist” terror. “After each incident, scores of Indian Muslims were rounded up, and many were tortured. Confessions were extracted, the names of various militant “masterminds” leaked to the media and links with Pakistan widely alleged. “Never mind that most of the victims were Muslims; it seemed natural to many people, from Delhi to Washington, to assume it was the work of extremist Pakistani militants and their Indian Muslim sympathizers, intent on fanning religious tensions in India and disrupting the peace process between the nuclear-armed rivals,” the Post reporters wrote.
“But those investigations, and the assumptions behind them, were turned on their head early this year by the confession of a Hindu holy man.”
“Swami Aseemanand told a magistrate that the bombmakers were neither Pakistani nor Muslim but Hindu radicals bent on revenge for many earlier acts of terrorism across India that had been perpetrated by Muslims,” the report added. His statement, subsequently leaked to the media, not only alleged that a network of Hindu radicals stretched right up to senior levels of the country’s Hindu nationalist right wing. “It also exposed deep-seated prejudices within the police against the country’s minority Muslim population,” the Post reported.
The report refers to attacks in which bombs were placed on bicycles in a Muslim cemetery in the western town of Malegaon, hidden under a granite slab in a mosque in another attack, 68 people, most of them Pakistanis, were killed when suitcases packed with explosives were placed next to gasoline bottles on a train from western India to Pakistan. Unable to escape the inferno because of bars on the train windows, many of the victims’ bodies were burned beyond recognition.
Evidence that radical Hindus, including an army colonel who is suspected of supplying the technical expertise and the explosives, were behind several of these bombings began to surface more than two years ago, and several people were arrested, including Aseemanand. The Swamis said he wanted to come clean after he met in jail in Hyderabad a young Muslim named Kalim who was falsely accused of the bombing there and gradually warmed to him.
“I was moved by Kaleem’s good conduct,” Aseemanand said. “My conscience asked me to do penance by making a confessional statement, so that the real culprits can be punished and no innocent has to suffer.”
