A Violent End: The collapse of a murder trial - By LEENA GITA REGHUNATH
On 29 December 2007,
Sunil Joshi, a one-time member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was shot and
killed near his home in the district of Dewas, in Madhya Pradesh. Nearly a
decade later, in February 2017, eight people who were charged with his killing
were acquitted of the crime. Joshi’s murder, it appeared, was destined to
remain unsolved.
The significance of
the acquittals extended far beyond the case of Joshi’s killing. One of the
theories that investigating agencies proposed for the murder was that it was
linked to Joshi’s involvement in some of the most heinous acts of mass murder
in India’s history: the Malegaon blasts of 2006, and the Samjhauta Express
blast, the Ajmer Sharif blast and the Mecca Masjid blast of 2007, which, in
all, killed 111 people. One of Joshi’s alleged co-conspirators in these
attacks, a Hindutva activist named Pragya Singh Thakur, was among those
accused, and then acquitted, of his murder. If Joshi’s killing erased key
information about the blasts, the failure of the murder investigation further
weakens the possibility that the larger network of conspiracies will be
uncovered, and their perpetrators punished.
Among the early
theories that investigating agencies explored in the blast cases was that they
had been planned by Pakistani conspirators or members of the banned Students
Islamic Movement of India. But according to Vikash Narain Rai, a police officer
who headed the special investigation team of the Haryana police that was
assigned to the Samjhauta case, an unexploded suitcase from the train led his
team to a shop in Indore, whose staff revealed that it had been bought by
Hindu, and not Muslim, men. Pursuing the lead further, Rai said, they came upon
the name of Joshi, who headed a group of three people that had planned the
bombing. “But by the time we started looking into this aspect,” Rai told the
news website The Wire in June 2016, “this guy was murdered.” Joshi thus became
a shadow of a shadow: a suspect who had been eliminated before investigators
could find him.
The names of the
alleged Hindu conspirators only emerged into the public domain in 2008, when
the Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad, or ATS, headed by Hemant Karkare, which
was investigating a 2008 blast in Malegaon, traced a motorcycle recovered from
the site to Thakur. Apart from Joshi and Thakur, the investigations also
pointed to the involvement of another Hindutva activist, Swami Aseemanand, as
well as an army officer named Shrikant Purohit.
Joshi, who at one
point held the post of RSS’s zila pracharak of Madhya Pradesh’s Mhow
cantonment, had gained a sinister reputation after he was linked to the 2003
murder of the Congress leader Pyar Singh Ninama and his son Dinesh. The police
had since declared him absconding. This unseemly history, according to a 2010
report on the website Rediff, only increased his popularity, as “Joshi began to
operate quite openly, mobilising support” for his violent activities. An
unnamed Bajrang Dal activist in Mhow told Rediff, “Joshiji was someone who
would say one death from our side should be avenged with five from the other
side.”
