A Predictable Verdict: Hindutva Terrorists in Malegaon Blast Case Acquitted
Ruling Establishment Celebrates its Own Failure!
The double standards of BJP on Hemant Karkare Exposed!
The job of a ruling establishment is to punish those it accuses of a crime. The BJP and Shivsena, both parties of the ruling establishment, celebrating the acquittal of the Malegaon blast accused reveals (once again) that the fascists would not even like to have a pretense of legal and moral responsibility and can celebrate the accused instead.
A special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court on Thursday (July 31) acquitted all seven accused in the 2008 Malegaon terror blast case, which killed six people and injured over a hundred. Among those acquitted were BJP leader and former MP Pragya Singh Thakur, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, retired Major Ramesh Upadhyay, Ajay Rahirkar, Sameer Kulkarni, Sudhakar Chaturvedi, and Sudhakar Dhar Dwivedi. The court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to link Thakur to the motorcycle used in the blast or to prove Purohit’s involvement in procuring the RDX used in the attack.
The Sangh-BJP camp rejoiced, claiming that they had always maintained that it was the Congress which fabricated everything! “From the very beginning, Shiv Sena has unequivocally supported the patriots who were falsely accused and imprisoned”, Deputy CM Eknath Shinde boasted. A day before the verdict, Union Home Minister Amit Shah declared “I am proud to say that no Hindu can be a terrorist.” This raises an important question: The NIA reports to Amit Shah as Home Minister. If Amit Shah really thought that Sadhvi Pragya and others were not criminals, why did not his ministry simply drop the charges? The answer is obvious – an acquittal by the courts gives the fascist mob an opportunity to stir up communal tensions once again!
Perhaps the days of official celebrations of Nathuram Godse are not far now. But who then carried out the bomb blasts? Unsurprisingly, those sitting in power, having the responsibility to enforce ‘law and order’, now have no comments at all to make about this! While in power, these parties never dropped the charges against the accused. The NIA, acting under directions of the Modi government, even demanded the death penalty for the accused, to show its “impartiality”. And now the government celebrates their acquittal! It is also no surprise that the Congress, toeing its soft-Hindutva line, is completely silent on the verdict!
The case has long been mired in controversy and its investigation has been clearly tampered with time and again by the Sangh-BJP Parivar for political motives. In 2015, NIA special public prosecutor Rohini Salian resigned, alleging that the agency had deliberately weakened the prosecution. She claimed that she was instructed to go soft on the accused—who were linked to Abhinav Bharat, a Hindutva group founded by Purohit in 2006. One cannot forget that former RSS pracharak Yashwant Shinde, alleged in 2022 that the RSS affiliated organizations were involved in orchestrating such bomb blasts. We cannot forget that JCP Hemant Karkare, who was killed in the terror attack in Mumbai in 2008, was the one who initially investigated this case, and held the Hindutva Terrorists accountable for these blasts. He was declared a ‘traitor to the nation’ by the very Hindutva brigade who hailed his name for a while after the Mumbai terror attacks. No wonder his name finds little mention in the so-called ‘mainstream’ media stories on this verdict.
The Malegaon blast acquittal is not an anomaly. Since the Fascists came to power in 2014, multiple high-profile cases involving right-wing leaders have been dropped or overturned by courts. Whether it is the murder case being dismissed against Yogi Adityanath, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh been cleared in a sexual harassment case filed by a minor female wrestler, the Supreme Court upholding the clean chit given by the subordinate courts to Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case or the eleven men sentenced to life imprisonment in the Bilkis Bano gangrape case being released from a Godhra jail by the Gujarat government to name a few. This pattern of judicial and executive action outcomes – occurring systematically across different courts and cases – suggests the alarming infiltration of ideologically oriented forces in the judicial and investigating agencies. The consistent exoneration of powerful figures linked to the ruling establishment, reveals how the fascist forces can manipulate supposedly neutral institutions to entrench impunity.
Conversely, these same institutions have been aggressively weaponized to suppress dissent. The pattern is unmistakable: fabricated cases against activists during the anti-CAA-NRC protests; the arbitrary arrest of journalists critical of state policies; the targeting of activists opposing neoliberal policies of the government aiding the corporate loot of the country; and the recent crackdown on students and activists protesting India’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. This institutional violence is being further enabled in Maharashtra under the BJP-led government, which has introduced the Special Public Security Act—a law even more draconian than the UAPA, which has been widely used until now. The message is clear: total impunity for anyone advancing the fascist agenda. If you belong to a vigilante group perpetrating organized violence against Muslims in the name of gau raksha, you will enjoy the full backing of the state. But if you dare to criticize the BJP-RSS, you will be labelled an anti-national and thrown into jail to rot for life. This is the grim reality of our justice system—where Hindutva extremists operate above the law, while dissenters are crushed beneath it.
The Revolutionary Workers’ Party of India (RWPI) strongly condemns the acquittal of Hindutva terrorists and the shoddy work of the state in the Malegaon bomb blast case. We call upon the working masses to recognize the sham of inquiry and trial being perpetuated by state institutions, whose true role today is to protect the exploiter capitalist class and the Hindutva fascist politics representing its interests today.
