By Sohail Parwaz
In 2002, on February 27, a train Sabarmati Express was stopped outside Godhra station and a hell bent upon the Muslim passengers and the locals. Exact five years later, on 18 February 2007, on the anniversary of Godhra tragedy, another play was staged. This time it was Samjhota Express; a train shuttled between New Delhi and Lahore. The train havoc took place at a time when the then foreign minister of Pakistan Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri was to hold talks with his Indian counterpart on taking their bilateral peace process forward, resolving the Kashmir dispute and signing a nuclear risk reduction accord. Soon after the incident, as the script said, Delhi immediately accused elements in Pakistan of masterminding the attack. So much so that weeks later Indian officials, even at a first meeting of the joint terror mechanism handed over to the Pakistani side what they claimed was a picture of the alleged ‘perpetrator of the attack’. “LOL”.
The Indian government danced to their media’s tunes initially and started pointing the finger at Pakistan for the terror attacks.Widespread condemnation of Pakistan developed, particularly from the then opposition BJP and Pakistan was accused of harbouring terrorists and intentionally derailing peace attempts with India. However, soon the loose script messed up the production and it turned out as a flop drama, when the bombing appeared to be more linked to a Hindu fundamentalist group Abhinav Bharat within India than with any terrorist organization within Pakistan.
After a four-year probe, the NIA had on June 20, 2011, charged Aseemanand and many for hatching a criminal conspiracy which resulted in blasts in the Samjhota Express near Deewana railway station in Haryana’s Panipat district. Aseemanand confessed before a judicial magistrate and said he and his fellow RSS activists were involved in blasts on Samjhota Express; at mosques in Malegaon in Maharashtra State, Hyderabad; Andhra Pradesh’s state capital,; and a Muslim shrine in Ajmer in Rajasthan. Sadly, in August, 2015 the Indian government refused to challenge or hinders the decision of the Supreme Court who granted the bail to Swami Aseemanand. The gravity of Aseemanand’s crimes was so horrible that a responsible Indian daily determined him as the ugliest face of terrorism.” The shameless Aseemanand had twice admitted in the court that he was involved in Samjhota Express incident. Once he did so in December 2010 and then again in January 2011. The court had given him 48 hours and had asked the investigation teams to keep away from him so that it could be determined that he was not accepting the responsibility under duress. However RSS’s Rambo did not change his confessional statement even after remaining in judicial custody for 48 hours and reiterated that he had carried out that terrorist activity.
There was yet another drama planned and staged on 26 November 2008, however, it is purposely being not mentioned here sincethe script for a change was comparatively better, although it left behind dozens of questions lurking in sane minds. Coming to a recent past’s drama, the ‘terror boat’ is must to be mentioned. This thrilling was a special production at the eve of New Year, to welcome 2015. Again, the lousy script embarrassed the ‘director’ when it took a new twist in the shape of an exposé, which overturned the Indian aspersions about Pakistan. The government of India claimed that it had foiled another 26/11-type attack, alleging that ‘Pakistani terrorists’, after a long chase by the Indian Coast Guard on the high seas, after hearing the warning shots blew themselves up. Nevertheless, the retired Indian naval personnel while analysing the incident, argued that the alleged terror boat, according to Indian television videos, was apparently a fishing boat and was no match for the high-speed coast guard ships. They pointed out that the claim that Indian Coast Guard vessels had chased the “terror boat” for hours was improbable. The analysts’ another observation was that the flames shown on the ill-fated boat resembled to a fuel fire rather than detonation caused by explosives. The Indian Coast Guard’s excuse about not rescuing any ‘terrorist’ due to inclement weather was rebutted by the marine specialists’ weather forecast, which was depicted fair for a whole fortnight.
The majority of the Indians could not solve the mystery that how a television channel’s crew was on board the coast guard vessel to exclusively film the entire gruesome episode and air it, giving the impression that it was a choreographed event. The final nail in the head was hammered by the Deputy Inspector General (DIG) B K Loshali, also chief of staff (northwest region), coast guard, Gandhi Nagar, who at a gathering of officials from the coast guard during the launch of the coast guard interceptor boat ICGS C-421, astoundingly disclosed that his crew members sunk the boat. His exact remarks that caused a rumpus were, “Let me tell you. I hope you remember December 31 night. We blew off that Pakistan…We have blown them off…I was there at Gandhi Nagar and I told at night, blow the boat off. We do not want to serve them biryani.”
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