Why Malegaon bomb blast case has returned to haunt Pragya Singh

Pragya Singh Thakur was arrested by Hemant Karkare in September, 2008. And the BJP had then launched a vitriolic attack on the Maharashtra ATS that he headed. While phone call records, accounts by witnesses and Pragya Singh’s scooter used in the Malegaon blast were part of the evidence collected by the ATS against her and other conspirators, BJP leaders accused the ATS and Karkare of fabricating evidence and conspiring against Hindus.

But when Karkare was gunned down in November, 2008 during the 26/11 attack on Mumbai by Pakistan based terrorists, the same BJP leaders had shed a lot of crocodile tears. Narendra Modi, then the Gujarat chief minister, flew to Mumbai to offer a cheque of one Crore Rupees to Karkare’s widow. But she was made of sterner stuff and politely refused to accept the cheque.

In February, 2011 Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi, the then RSS Sarkaryawah, wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh distancing the ‘cultural organisation’ from the Malegaon blast accused. Joshi claimed that the conspirators of the Malegaon blast, in which six people were killed and a hundred more were injured, had also hatched a conspiracy to kill RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and another RSS leader Indresh Kumar, who Lt Colonel Purohit, one of the accused, believed to have been an ISI agent !

“The Maharashtra ATS [MATS] has evidence in its possession to show that the accused in the Malegaon blast case, Col Purohit and Dayanand Pandey, were, simultaneously plotting to eliminate Shri Mohanrao Bhagwat, the then Sarkaryavah – General Secretary – of the RSS (currently the Sarsanghachalak), and a senior RSS leader Shri indresh Kumar,” Joshi claimed in the letter to the then Prime Minister.

He went on to add, “The chargesheet of the Maharashtra ATS dated 20.1.2009 on the Malegaon blast submitted to the Court contains the transcripts of the audio CDs detailing the conversations of the said accused. They revealed that, while the plotters were organising chemical attack on Sri Bhagwat, they had given a pistol to a named, specific person to eliminate Sri Indresh Kumar.”

But barely eight years later, the RSS appears to have had second thoughts about the Malegaon accused. By fielding Pragya Singh Thakur, against whom charges were finally framed in 2018, the RSS-BJP combine have indicated either that the 2011 letter to Manmohan Singh was just a diversionary tactics to deflect attention from the role of the RSS or that the conspiracies in 2007-08 including the Samjhauta train blast had its tacit approval even then.

Karkare’s predecessor K P Raghuvanshi is said to have enjoyed a special relationship and rapport with Colonel Purohit. And he in fact had framed Muslims for the bombing on Muslims in a mosque. Despite protests from the victims of the Malegaon blast, Raghuvanshi returned to head the ATS after Karkare was killed. But despite widespread misgivings, the ATS did not or could not dilute the case against the accused because of strict supervision of the Home ministry under P Chidambaram.

Soon after Pragya was arrested after the ATS recovered her LML scooter which was used to plant bomb outside a mosque in Malegaon, there appeared in the media photographs of Pragya Singh Thakur with several BJP leaders. But Ravi Shankar Prasad held a press conference at party headquarters at 11, Ashoka Road to grandly announce that terror had no religion and the BJP condemned all acts of terror.

It was after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014 and packed agencies with his men, the NIA first asked the Public Prosecutor Rohini Salian to go soft on Pragya Singh Thakur and the other accused. When she refused to do so, Salian was dropped from the panel of prosecutors. Last week, Salian rubbished Pragya Singh’s claims that she was tortured in custody and pointed out that medical reports did not bear it out.

The Malegaon blast accused and the Abhinav Bharat team led by Purohit were plotting to engineer a coup against the UPA Government as well. He is still in jail while Pragya Singh Thakur was allowed out on bail on medical grounds. She claimed she was suffering from breast cancer. She now says that cow’s urine has cured her. Her trial is still pending.