Qaisar Mansoor
Mecca Masjid Hyderabad bombing occurred on 18 May 2007 during Friday prayers in which more than 50 people injured and 14 had lost their lives. Ten persons allegedly belonging to extremist Hindutva groups were named as accused in the case.
The kin of the victims of Mecca Masjid blast cried foul over the verdict of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) Special Court, Nampally, which acquitted all the accused citing lack of substantial evidence. Five accused, including Swami Aseemanand, were acquitted in the bomb blast case, in which nine people died. “It is expected of the Bharatiya Janata Party regime. Our men have died, but none is going to be punished; what sort of the judicial system is it?” questioned Mohd Omar, whose brother-in-law Mohd Jafar was killed in the bomb blast on May 18, 2007, while offering Friday prayers.
Omar’s younger sister Tahseen Sultana was married to Jafar a few months before the bomb blast. Saleema Begum, mother of the 16-year-old Syed Ghouse who was hurt in the blast when he was 5-years-old, said: “It was a close shave for my son.
He was badly injured in the blast. Even now, he cannot move or fold one of his fingers of his left hand,” she said and pointed out that “our men” were initially wrongly implicated in the case and confined for several days and brutally tortured.
And irony is that the actual perpetrators were let off. Shaik Athiq, whose father was injured and became bedridden after the blast, said: “This is very inhuman. We didn’t get justice. What was the National Investigation Agency doing all these days? After my father was hospitalised, I had to toil in order to get bread and butter for my family.” Athiq was also present in the masjid at the time of blast. “I was not aware that my father got injured in the blast but came to know about it a little later,” he recalled.
Exposing the nexus between the ruling BJP and RSS, the ex-Indian home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde revealed in 2013 that they were behind the Samjhauta Express, Malegaon and Mecca Masjid blasts. Central Bureau of Investigation produced Swami Aseemanand before the Court on 19 November 2010 in connection with the blast. Indian ‘Tehelka’ magazine had obtained a copy of 42 pages’ confession report.
According to his confession, many of those involved in the bombing were members of RSS. Similarly, an RSS militant Kamal Chauhan was arrested for carrying out the Samjhauta Express attack in 2007 who had instead blamed the Muslim groups. Chauhan and other activists were also found to be involved in the Ajmer Dargah blast, Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid, as well as the Malegaon Mosque Blast. NIA Officer-in-charge of the case Pratibha Ambedkar was immediately removed and the judge who wrote the verdict was forced to resign. Indian government continued to systemize its ideological vision of a Hindu state at national and state level through the use of both existing and new laws and structural changes hostile to the country’s religious minorities.
US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has urged the State Department for the third straight year to place India on the US list of “countries of particular concern”. The independent bipartisan panel accused India of “engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom”.
