‘THERE IS A BIAS. YOU NEED A TARGET. THE RITUAL OF JUSTICE HAS TO BE COMPLETED. STEREOTYPES HELP. A MUSLIM YOUTH, KASHMIRI, IS EASILY ACCEPTED AS THE PERPETRATOR OF THE CRIME’
In September 2006, Parvez Ahmed Radoo, son of a college professor, left home in Kashmir to pursue a PhD in Pune. He had already completed his post-graduation in Zoology from the University of Pune. Radoo took a flight to Delhi, and was scheduled to travel on to Pune. But officers of the Special Cell of Delhi police detained and subsequently arrested Radoo on charges of being a Jaish-e-Mohammad operative, and accused him of being in the national capital with the intention of carrying out terror attacks. He would spend the next seven years in prison before being acquitted by a trial court. In a letter written during his captivity in Tihar, Radoo laments, “The Special Cell actually wanted to show me before the media and tell them that they had arrested a person (terrorist) who had arrived in Delhi to explode bombs on the occasion of Deepawali. How they were befooling their public.”
Unfortunately, Radoo’s is not a one-off case of the police picking up the wrong man and then trying to pass him off as a terror accused. Earlier this month, a Delhi court acquitted two of the three accused – Mohammad Rafiq Shah and Mohammad Hussain Fazili – in the 2005 Delhi serial blasts case for want of evidence. The court observed that the Delhi Police had “miserably failed” to prove the charges. Last year, nine accused in the 2006 blasts in Maharashtra’s Malegaon were acquitted by a special court.
In 2015 the Jamia Teacher’s Solidarity Association released the second edition of Framed, Dammed, Acquitted: Dossiers of a Very ‘Special’ Cell. The report gave details of 24 terror cases in which the accused had been arrested by officers of the Special Cell, but had been acquitted by the court for want of evidence. In the preface to a the first edition released in 2012, the Association says that the cases being reported by it were only “the tip of the proverbial iceberg”. “There are two crimes being committed here. One is the act of arresting someone on a suspicion of fact to satiate the sense of law and order and the second is the incomplete act of investigation,” says sociologist Shiv Visvanathan. The were serial blasts in Delhi in 2005. Butwho were the perpetrators?
Those in the police force are unwilling to admit that an acquittal means that the wrong guy was charged of the offence. “An acquittal only means that the evidence didn’t pass judicial scrutiny,” says an officer of Delhi Police. That can hardly have been true of Mohammad Rafiq Shah, who had been pleading with the police ever since being detained in 2005 that he was at university in Kashmir at the time of the 2005 blasts and had been writing an examination paper, as his attendance record and the statements of his professors have since proved.
“There is a bias. You need a target. The ritual of justice has to be completed. Stereotypes help. If you have an unemployed Muslim youth, bearded, Kashmiri, as your accused, he is easily accepted as the perpetrator of the crime. It is the accompanying acts to terror that are often more frightening than terror,” says Visvanathan.
The bias, feels advocate Vrinda Grover, is so deep-seated that we are unwilling to even admit that it is there. “My work shows me that there is not an individual bias, but an institutional bias,” says Grover. Terror cases, feel many defence lawyers, see an easy manifestation of inherent biases. “These cases they are more in the public eye. There is a pressure on the police to deliver. People from the minority community are targetted. The arrests make headlines, the cops get medals, but when it is proved in court that the accused is innocent, I don’t see the medals being taken back,” says lawyer Kamini Jaiswal.
Grover agrees that the police need to be made accountable. “I have found that the rigour of investigation is inversely proportional to the gravity of the case. The police have to be held accountable,” she insists. Grover gives the example of the Akhshardham temple attack case where the Supreme Court had rapped the investigating agencies by saying, “Before parting with the judgment we intend to express our anguish over the incompetence with which the investigating agencies con- ducted the investigation of the case of such a grievous nature... Instead of booking the real culprits...the police caught innocent people...” .
On a personal level, Irshad Ali, who was falsely accused of being an Al-Badr terrorist in 2006, has taken a stand. In January 2017, he filed a case in the Delhi High Court urging it to order the CBI to re-open their closure report in which they had recommended that police officers who had framed him be booked for criminal conspiracy. The hearing is due in March.
But often, the person is too broken by the years in custody to think of getting back at the system. Radoo, in his letter written from Tihar, mentions being given electric shocks. Torture – physical and mental – is part of the nightmare years spent by every innocent behind bars. In the Akshardham case for example, one of the accused, Mufti Abdul Qayum, who was on death row, said he had been forced to sign the confessional statement prepared by the police under coercion.
Mohammad Aamir Khan, another innocent accused, who spent 14 years in custody before being acquitted, had said after his release, “I would lie awake at night and often cry myself to sleep... I thought my entire life would pass within these walls”. He has since co-authored a book on his experiences. Often it takes all of one’s courage and determination to simply pick up the pieces of one’s life and move on. There is hardly ever any rehabilitation by the state. The years of fighting for release take a financial toll on families, making it difficult to carry on the fight for justice.
It is because of the courts that many have finally managed to prove their innocence. But lawyer Kamini Jaiswal feels much depends on the judge. “I remember in the Parliament attack case, one of the accused, a woman, used to sit and cry in court. The judge commented, ‘Why are you crying now? Why didn’t you think of the consequences before committing the crime?’ And this, before the verdict is out,” says lawyer Kamini Jaiswal. “The law says that an accused is innocent till proven guilty, but in the case of a terror accused, he becomes guilty till proven innocent.”
Not everyone agrees that the reason for so many poorly-investigated cases is an institutional bias in the investigating agencies. Like a retired officer of the National Investigation Agency, who blames it squarely on the incompetence of the state police. “The selection of officers is poor. Investigation is not everyone’s cup of tea. There are also not enough good public prosecutors,” says the officer. He too stresses on the need to hold officers accountable. Meanwhile, bias or bad investigation, the price of the cops’ mistake is paid by innocents like Radoo, Rafiq, Aamir and all the other innocent accused, whose lives and whose families’ lives are torn apart by careless allegations. – so as to least disturb the status quo. “Everyone realised at some point that Ali was innocent and should be discharged but the Special Cell, however, could not be indicted. The Police’s Morale, Consensus, whatever you call it,” says the cop.
Why did Ali agree to become an informer in the first place? From 2001 to 2006, he was in the pay of IB and Special Cell; his monthly salary was ₹7,000. A cab driver, he needed to supplement the family income. “With a brother in jail on a murder charge, you have to be grateful if cops say they want you to work for them,” says Ali. There is danger in intelligence work. But because of the police association, Ali thought there was security. He also brought in a few friends and some members of his family such as Qamran, and engaged them in intelligence work. Qamran did not want to speak to the media.
Ali’s case is ironic in more ways than one. This was not a case of the police picking up the wrong man. He was the IB’s man. And the Special Cell who, along with some IB officers, “fixed Ali knew that”, says one of the cops who probed the frame-up. “He had been refusing his assignments, he didn’t want to cross the border to be trained as a militant so as to infiltrate their ranks. They just weren’t ready to let him go,” he says.
Ali says he was being asked to “indoctrinate people” and then lead the police to them. His wife Shabana also didn’t want him to cross the border as they had become parents.
He believes he was finally made the “scapegoat for the Cell’s inability to catch the people behind the Delhi blasts of 2005” as his usefulness as an intelligence gatherer was over. Cops he worked with had told him often enough: “If a lime dries up, make use of its peels.”
“Due to Santosh Kumar of the CBI, I am a free man today,” says Ali. Kumar was part of an eight-member team investigating the Special Cell’s allegations.
In January, Ali filed a case in the Delhi High Court urging it to order the CBI to re-open their closure report in which they had recommended that police officers who had framed him be booked for criminal conspiracy. The hearing is due in March.
Ali’s revelations give a glimpse into the “the gross impunity with which men from the minority community can be first forced into becoming the agencies’ foot soldiers, and then disposed off when their use is over,” says Manisha Sethi of the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association. Ali is no longer in shock but speaks with a quiet outrage. Did he ever speak out thus in court? “You could only speak through your lawyers,” he says.
So will Ali’s be a cautionary tale for cops not to force people to continue with intelligence gathering if they don’t want to?
“You can’t use force, that’s for sure,” agrees another cop following the case.
“So will there be outrage now that people know?”
“No. People will forget.”