Once again the Indian media in particular and their spin doctors and global media at large are guilty of dereliction of duty in obfuscating the tragedy in the immediate aftermath of mayhem that surrounded India’s financial and entertainment capital Mumbai. In a country touted as emerging super power by its new found friends in Western nations - with the hidden agendas of their own - voicing their vociferous support to help India combat terrorism, pertinent reasoning was relegated to the back seat.
The unprecedented magnitude of simultaneous attacks is being projected as engineered by foreign Muslim nationals coming from that perennially convenient entity Pakistan. The nation’s population is made to believe by the politicians and the media that the city was under siege by a handful of criminals who were in their mid 20’s who conveniently found their way, in this case via sea route, amidst the 13 million strong population of Mumbai nonchalantly targeting hospitals, railway station, posh hotels and cinema theatres.
The focus was zealously painted as ‘Mumbai burns’, ‘India’s 9/11’, ‘Mumbai brought to its knees’ and ‘Terror strikes Mumbai’ and the dubious Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi describing it as ‘an attack on India’ and the militant BJP party’s Prime Minister in waiting L K Advani, man responsible for causing nationwide communal unrest through his ‘rath yathra’ prior to the Babri Mosque demolition under his supervision, laying the blame on ‘total intelligence failure’ and K P S Gill, who perpetrated terror among the Sikh community during his half-a-decade long tenure as chief of Punjab Police, exhorting for a need to have another “Operation Blue Star” to combat terrorism in his write up to a newspaper.
All the logical reasoning points to the fact that the real perpetrators of this entire gory episode came from within the confines of India and their sole purpose was to spread terror and fear among the masses to divert the attention and in order to thin the police force had to be engineered on a large multiple scale as the hunt was for no less a person than Mumbai’s top cop Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) Chief Hemant Karkare. The 54 year old upright cop Karkare was probing the Malegaon blasts case, was gunned down mercilessly by three bullets to his chest when he was leading an operation at Hotel Taj against Mumbai marauders who had taken 15 people, including seven foreigners, as hostages.
Much to the dismay of BJP and its Sangh Parivar (RSS) Karkare was making deep inroads in unveiling the hidden moles of the Hindutva brigade in sensitive echelons like the military, police, politics and trade. He had promised to soon expose the Hindutva network. Lt. Col Prasad Purohit was identified as the prime accused and jailed along with another accused Sadhvi Pragya Singh. Advani fumed and charged that the Hindu community was being maligned by the government. Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray while protesting against the alleged custodial torture of accused Sadhvi Pragya Singh called for statewide Maharashtra bandh on December 1 to show the might of Hindus to the government. A Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut said "Hindus will have to show their power to the government which is engaged in a systematic campaign to malign them”.
Shiv Sena was bitter over the manner in which Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) was probing the Malegaon blast case. Since the target was not just Hemant Karkare but his whole team, the orgy of violence was unleashed on Wednesday night. The chain of events points the finger of suspicion at the Sangh Parivar and Shiv Sena.
Public is made to believe that this particular happening was the worst the city has seen but in fact it is not true at all. Shiv Sena has been responsible for causing much greater damage on previous occasions. The difference being the brunt of the attack was concentrated in the slums and ghettos predominantly inhabited by the minorities, who were specifically targeted for the carnage, while this time round it was the affluent South Mumbai area. Hence, the superlatives in describing the nature and the scale of the attacks.
Whichever way one looks at the tragic events in Mumbai, it makes absolutely no sense why any Muslim group would create this havoc as the only thing this incident has achieved is to bailout the Hindu terrorists responsible for Malegaon blasts and take the focus of the Indian people and the Western media away from questioning the claims made in all such previous violent incidents conveniently blamed on some faceless “Muslim sounding” name like L-e-T or in present case “Deccan Mujahideen” (a more media friendly name would have been “Mumbai Mujahideen”!).
The much needed debate which was beginning to happen — to question the role of rabidly violent entities like the Bajrang Dal, Vishva Hindu Parishad, Shiv Sena, and hundreds of other such spawned by aptly described “hydra-headed RSS” — has once again been sought to be killed by again raising the bogey of “Muslim terrorists” who very conveniently have attacked the “foreigners and Western tourists” to give the Western media an excuse to not discuss the tremendous police work being done by ATS under Hemant Karkare in exposing the hideous face of Hindu terrorism.
It is my view that the aim of the whole operation was to kill Hemant Karkare and other inconvenient members of his team who were in the process of undoing at least fifty years of work that RSS and its front organizations had put into infiltrating Indian governmental institutions like armed and police forces, intelligence agencies and civil services. Those who are sincere about finding those who organized the mayhem in Mumbai would be well-served in carrying out the investigations of Karkare to their logical conclusion rather than running after the ghost of “Deccan Mujahideen”.
