'I Have Lost 11 Years of My Life,' Says Man Acquitted in Akshardham Terror Attack Case // SC slams Gujarat Police probe

By Dilip -
NB: Since PM-designate Narendra Modi takes credit for all good things that took place in Gujarat, surely he and his ex-Minister of State for Home Mr Amit Shah must also be responsible for the bad things? Such as this behaviour of the Gujarat police, which has anguished the Supreme Court? Either they are responsible for a grave miscarriage of justice or they were incompetent. Today we face the prospect of India's criminal justice system - already in a state of endemic crisis - being supervised by leaders such as Modi and Shah, who presided over these events. It is only judges such as the ones on this bench, and upright IAS  and IPS officers, combined with an alert citizenry, who can prevent the further degeneration of Indian justice. Let us hope the judges and officials remember that they are servants not of this or that government, but of the Indian Constitution - DS

 SC acquits Akshardham terror strike convicts, slams Gujarat Police probe
Acquitting all the six convicts, a bench of Justice A.K.Patnaik and Justice V. Gopala Gowda in their judgment said: "We intend to express our anguish about the incompetence with which the investigating agencies conducted the investigation of the case of such a grievous nature, involving the integrity and security of the nation... Instead of booking the real culprits responsible for taking so many precious lives, police caught innocent people and got imposed the grievous charges against them which resulted in their conviction and subsequent sentencing," Justice Gowda said speaking for the bench. Pulling up the Gujarat Police, the court said that "the courts below had ignored these basic legal principles while admitting the treatment of witnesses while weighing the case against the accused persons" as it set aside the conviction and sentencing of six accused by the special court and the same being upheld by the high court.

 Mohammad Saleem, 45, has spent the last 11 years of his life being labelled a 'terrorist' by some officials of the Gujarat police, who allegedly falsely accused him of being involved in the 2002 Akshardham terror attack case. On May 16 this year, the Supreme Court acquitted all the six accused in the case - three of them had earlier been sentenced to death -- and slammed the Gujarat police for its shoddy investigation. 

Saleem, a tailor, had just returned from Saudi Arabia in August 2003, when sleuths from the Ahmedabad Crime Branch picked him up, alleging he had furnished 'fake' details in his passport application. He was then allegedly asked to choose which terror case he would be implicated in. "I was told to choose between Godhra (train burning case), Haren Pandya (murder) case or the Akshardham case. I pleaded to them that I had been out of India for 13 years, why should I own up to something that I was not involved in.'' he recounted.

In 2006, a POTA court sentenced Saleem to life imprisonment. Three other accused -- Mufti Abdul Qayuum, Adam Ajmeri and Chand Khan -- were awarded the death sentence. The other two accused, Abdul Miyan Qadri and Atlaf Hussain, were awarded a ten-year jail term amd five-year jail term respectively 

While his mother fell ill right after his arrest, his 15-year-old son had to drop out from the English medium school he was studying in and join a municipal school. "My children got punished for no fault of theirs,'' rues Saleem. Saleem's brother Irfan was on the verge of completing his graduation. With the family's only breadwinner behind bars, he was forced to give up his studies and drive an auto-rickshaw to earn a living. "I have spent most of my life in courtrooms, police stations and jail,'' lamented Irfan.

The lawyers of the acquitted men are now contemplating moving court against the policemen involved in the case, including D G Vanzara, the then chief of the Crime Branch. Vanzara has been behind bars for over seven years for his alleged involvement in a spate of encounter killings. But all Saleem and his family members want today is to get their lives -- derailed after fighting false charges and injustice for years -- back on track.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/i-have-lost-11-years-of-my-life-says-man-acquitted-in-akshardham-terror-attack-case-530137?pfrom=home-lateststories

 See also:
Subhash Gatade - Thinking About Adam Ajmeris' in Saffron Times
A serving Indian police officer writes about encounter killings
Bharat Bhushan - The Vanzara bomb has a long fuse for Modi
Naroda Patiya verdict: Aides face the music, Modi remains ‘righteous’: by Kingshuk Nag
CBI Summons IB Special Director Rajinder Kumar In Ishrat Jahan Encounter Case // CBI seeks to declare Gujarat cop a proclaimed offender
Team Modi and free speech: Republishing "9 Myth Busters Of Gujarat 2002 Riots"
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell - Manoj Mitta on how the SIT let off Modi / Interview: ‘Crucial Evidence Has Fallen Through The Cracks’

Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more