In a move fraught with danger to India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, the Congress-dominated Central and Maharashtra governments have unleashed a sinister plot to undermine the institutions of the police and the defence forces. These two grids literally hold the nation together, particularly in these troubled times when internal and external threats savage the citizenry so remorselessly. 
 

By using the Maharashtra Anti Terror Squad (ATS) to target, arrest and malign certain retired and serving army officers, whose only crime is alleged or real links with reputed nationalist families like the Savarkars, the UPA is deliberately demoralising and communalizing the security agencies. If honourable and nationalist Hindus serving in the armed forces can be subjected to witch-hunts, then all serving police and defence officers will automatically become conscious of their personal religious affiliations in a manner that could override the solidarity for which the all-India services are justly renowned. This will corrode morale and efficiency, to say the least.

At the risk of sounding offensive, I view this as the UPA’s revenge against the services on at least two counts. One was the firm refusal of both the police and the defence services to furnish the UPA government with religion-based data on serving personnel. The second was the protest by Police and the three Defence Chiefs against the recommendations of the Sixth Pay Commission. While the Police had to pipe down, the Defence Chiefs have proved difficult to tame.

A third reason is that senior army officers have become vocal on strategic issues, and like some foreign office experts, have reservations about the peculiar twist given by the UPA to India’s foreign policy. Besides an unwarranted proximity to America, which resulted in the hated nuclear deal, there is an inexplicable indifference to the plight of Iraq, coldness towards Iran, and a complete inability to assess the dangerous implications of increased US-Pak tensions on the Afghan-Pak border. India’s interests in Nepal have been compromised; and political hype against China upgraded for no obtainable end. It seems likely that senior defence officers have made their reservations known to the government.

Certainly there has been a great vengefulness in the Maharashtra government’s leaks about the so-called confessions of some accused persons. First, they claimed to have made arrests on the basis of confessions made by Sadhvi Pragya (who must have been targetted after she made waves at the Amarnath agitation in Jammu earlier this year). Then they admitted they had nothing tangible on her and submitted her to narco-analysis, polygraph, lie detector, et al, and claimed that her skill in meditation had enabled her to dodge all their trickery in trying to make her incriminate herself! BJP Chief Rajnath Singh has rightly accused the Maharashtra Government and police of harassing the Sadhvi, as no terrorist has been subjected to so many tests.

Currently, Lt Colonel Srikant Purohit is the focus of media leaks regarding his ‘confessions.’ According to these fables, the 37-year-old officer planned the conspiracy and provided the RDX for the 29 September Malegaon attack which killed six persons. More serving officers are likely to be indicted for their association with Lt. Col. Purohit.

The Armed forces, however, in sharp contrast to the manner in which they were caught unawares in the cooked up Samba spy case, have decided to refute these baseless allegations against serving and retired officers. They have, anonymously of course, countered that Purohit could not have been involved in planning the blasts and supplying RDX as no Army unit, let alone an officer, has access to this explosive. RDX for manufacturing shells is directly handled by ordnance factories, and an officer working for Army Intelligence cannot access it.

More pertinently, Purohit was studying Arabic at the Army Education Corps, Pachmarhi, MP, for the last 18 months. He thus completely lacked the mobility required to plot or procure RDX or any weapon, as alleged. Furthermore, as Purohit was deputed by Army Intelligence to learn Arabic, it was doubtless so he could do cyber-intelligence on Arabic websites reputedly used to transmit messages to jihadi cells in India and other places. An officer working fulltime to legitimately combat terror had no logical reason to plot to kill innocent Muslim civilians. Not unless the ATS can prove that he is a psychopath.

It seems fairly certain that he has been selected for indictment because of his association with the Abhinav Bharat organisation linked with the Veer Savarkar family. This is an asinine, yet vicious, attempt to taint all nationalist Hindus as communalists, and to tell Muslims in states going to the polls that the ruling Congress party will delink Islam from the hideous jihad tormenting India by guzzling hundreds of innocent lives every year.

That is why, while exulting in the treatment meted out to Sadhvi Pragya and our Defence officers, the Congress rushed to condemn ABVP activists for spitting upon SAR Geelani, an accused in the attack upon Parliament House, at a recent function. Sadly for Congress, this was terribly ill-timed.

Last Friday, Kerala Police informed the Kerala High Court that it had recovered DVDs featuring SAR Geelani from the homes of youth who participated in the 15 August 2006 SIMI camp at Panayikkulam near Aluva (Pioneer, 8 November 2008). This establishes a link between the notorious SIMI and Geelani, much-feted by lib-left jholawallahs and invited to speak at the prestigious Delhi University on “Communalism, Fascism and Democracy: Rhetoric and Reality.”

The SIMI meet reportedly prepared the schedule for the training camp held at Vagamon, Idukki, which Gujarat Police claims made preparations for the Ahmedabad blasts. Kerala Police took five of the 15 participants into custody, but had to release them after high-level political intervention. They are now belatedly searching for possible links between the Panayikkulam camp case accused and those behind the Parliament attack.

The prevalence of terror modules in Kerala was accidentally exposed when two jihadis from the state were killed in an encounter in Jammu & Kashmir in October. Some accused in the Panayikkulam camps case have links with persons arrested for ties with the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. Lt. Col. Purohit was developing the skills to detect and unearth these terror modules; he did not need to indulge in pointless violence to save or avenge the nation.

The author is Editor, www.vijayvaani.com