“A NEW CLASS OF INDIAN now emerged on the scene. He was the khaddar-clad, Gandhi-capped, black-marketeering patriot,” wrote D.F. Karaka in 1950 in his damning serial exposes of the first Congress Government of Independent India. He further showed that “black-marketeering” was the least of the Congress’ sins compared, for example, to this:
…some of the office-bearers of the Congress party had formed a company to trade in arms and ammunition and had given the address of Congress House [Bombay] as being that of their company. Congress House had virtually become an ammunition dump.
The seasoned journalist and editor D.F. Karaka also predicted how this newly-minted species of the “khaddar-clad, Gandhi-capped, black-marketeering patriot” would inbreed over the decades and infect the whole nation like an epidemic that would corrode us from the inside and correctly diagnosed India’s independence as a betrayal.
The Emergency gave the toxic, first-hand taste of the corrosion on a national scale — from Opposition leaders to the street beggar. But the Congress, far from learning any lesson from it — let alone showing any remorse — became wiser in the only way it knows. On the surface, it appeared that Indira Gandhi had mellowed down in her Second Coming in 1980 but that coming came at the cost of creating Khalistani separatism which in turn cost her life.
The Congress genocide of Sikhs that followed in the aftermath once again showed that the corrosion had merely changed its paint; its core was intact. But the more visceral outcome of the Sikh genocide was the nonchalant manner in which its chief perpetrators — all of them, Congress leaders — not only remained unpunished till the end but maintained their clout unimpaired.
The contrast could not be crueller.
IT TOOK 17 YEARS of excruciating ordeal for a former, ranking Army officer and a former MP to be acquitted in a false case of terrorism foisted by powerful forces in the UPA government.
The spectacle of Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Prasad Purohit who was accorded a hero’s welcome in a grand public procession in Pune elicits dark memories of a recent era. While justice seems to have been served in his case, the price he had to pay has been enormous.
His implication along with Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and five others is a pronounced and defining trait of the decade-long UPA regime. The bloodcurdling tales of bestial torture that both underwent at the hands of the ATS was part of a larger, sinister script that began playing out in the latter part of the first UPA term and continued unabated till the end of its second.
The UPA regime was far more lethal in its character and far-reaching in its consequences than the Emergency. State-sponsored brutal oppression like the Emergency naturally invited an equal and opposite reprisal. But silent, creeping and parasitic terror is of a different magnitude because it is largely invisible and does not have a single point of failure.
The Congress-led UPA government had elevated its legacy politics to an art form. The old ways of socialist plunder of public money was now paralleled by an all-out assault against the very roots of the Hindu civilisation whose main weapon was the planned dismantling of its society. In the earlier periods, the Congress had restricted itself to blatant Muslim appeasement and Hindu-baiting.
The new era was inaugurated by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s public declaration that Muslims have the first right over India’s resources whose documented proof is the Sachar Committee Report.
Not coincidentally, in the new era, the combined forces of the Islamist, Missionary, NGO, and Far Left lobbies working in tandem, silently acquired wider and deeper clout at all levels of the governmental, bureaucratic and judicial apparatus. This frightening power was the zeitgeist of the decade-long UPA government.
The slew of hasty and questionable judgements delivered by our courts during that period in realms sacred only to the Hindu society shows another practical manifestation of this clout. This is apart from legislations targetting and threatening the very survival of Sanatana Dharma in the land of its birth.
As a result, at no point in India’s history was the Hindu society so vulnerable and defenceless as it was between 2004-2014. It is estimated that on an average, there was a Jihadi terror attack once every six weeks on Indian soil during that period. It’s a sickening laundry list including but not limited to the following:
2005: Ram Janmabhoomi grenade attack by LeT terrorists; Jaunpur train bombing; Delhi serial bomb blasts during Diwali.
2006: Ahmedabad railway station bombing; Varanasi serial blasts; Mumbai train blasts; Malegaon blasts.
2007: Samjhauta Express bombing; terror attack in Lumbini gardens, Hyderabad; simultaneous blasts in Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad courthouses by the sleeper cells of the LeT and JeM.
2008: Bangalore serial blasts; 17 serial blasts in Ahmedabad; seven blasts in various market areas of Delhi; Malegaon blasts; terror attacks on Taj Hotel, Leopold Cafe and other locations in Mumbai.
2008 was a particularly interesting year. Apart from the Malegaon blasts and 26/11, it witnessed the gruesome gunning down of Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati, an eighty-year-old monk who was working to prevent Christian conversions as well as reconverting tribal Hindus in Kandhmal, Odisha, by evangelical organisations which used Maoists as hired guns. He remains unmourned and forgotten.
Add to this the heightening of Maoist terror in intensity, expanse and frequency plus the spread of urban naxalism and we get a fairly accurate picture of the UPA’s flagrant disregard for national security.
26/11 was the tipping point in this saga of unabated Jihadi terrorism. It was widely reported back then that even while the assault was happening in Mumbai, Home Minister Shivraj Patil was busy wearing a fresh attire, the second in the same day. His resignation owed more to public outrage than any moral self-realisation.
IT IS NOW widely known that the arrests of Colonel Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya and others was part of a broader ploy to manufacture a nonexistent narrative of “Hindu” or “Saffron” terror to serve a twofold purpose. One, to deflect the nationwide fury against recurring waves of Jihadi terror. Two, to finish off organisations working for Hindu causes — specifically, the RSS, the VHP, Bajrang Dal, et al — by villainising them with an unprecedented vehemence. Indira and Sanjay Gandhi had merely imprisoned members of all these Hindu organisations during the Emergency. The UPA-era Congress had planned something far more diabolical for the long term. On the political plane, this singleminded targetting of Hindu organisations would also hurl an already weak BJP almost into oblivion in the upcoming 2009 Lok Sabha elections and beyond.
The Hindu terror bogeyman was manufactured in earnest and would have picked up steam but for 26/11.
The timeline is chilling.
Sadhvi Pragya Thakur was arrested on October 27, 2008, Colonel Purohit on November 5, 2008, and the rest on November 12.
A fortnight later, Mumbai was attacked by an LeT terror squad comprising a paltry ten-member force which wreaked mayhem for four continuous days. The real shame of 26/11 was not lax security that allowed them free pass inside India but the UPA Government’s weak-kneed response in its wake. One recalls the then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi’s acid condemnation of PM Manmohan Singh who, “instead of teaching Pakistan a lesson in its own language, wrote love letters to America.”
Meanwhile, the strawman of “Saffron terror” was being disseminated from all platforms. The political, led by former Home Minister P. Chidambaram, former Madhya Pradesh CM Digvijaya Singh, and former Maharashtra CM Prithviraj Chauhan. A pliant and corrupt section of law enforcement agencies was thickly involved in this cabal. Likewise, Congress-friendly newspapers and channels provided favourable coverage to embellish this narrative; a former celebrity news anchor went so far as to shower effusive praise upon Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind of 26/11.
The phoney “Saffron terror” narrative manifested in other ill-omened ways as well.
A Wikileaks expose in 2010 told the world how in July 2009, Rahul Gandhi, at a lunch with Hillary Clinton mentioned that “the bigger threat [to India] may be the growth of radicalised Hindu groups, which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community."
On Dec 28, 2010, Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh released a book brazenly titled 26/11 RSS Ki Saazish? (26/11, An RSS Conspiracy?) authored by Aziz Burney, Editor-in-Chief of Urdu Sahara newspaper.
The final objective of this narrative arrived in 2011 in the form of the Communal Violence Bill, which sought to hold only the Hindu community as the guilty party in every case of communal violence — guilty until proven innocent. Even worse, if the Hindu community was the victim, the Bill made no provision for legal redressal. The Congress-led Government immediately retreated in face of severe opposition but it was dogged in its witch hunt against the Hindu community. In a last-ditch move, it revived the Bill as late as February 2014 by fielding Kapil Sibal in Parliament to argue in its favour. It was roundly defeated in this second and final attempt. The authors of the Bill were drawn from the unconstitutional National Advisory Council, a legal-sounding moniker for a deadly crew of breaking India forces comprising Far Left NGOs, chaired by Sonia Gandhi.
IN LIGHT OF all this, the implication, the savage torture and sustained harassment of Col Purohit and others was the most audacious facet of the Congress-led UPA government’s project of undoing the Hindu civilisation through a concerted assault on all fronts. His “crime” was delivering inspirational lectures to students of a patriotic Hindu organisation named Abhinav Bharat, founded by a retried Army Major.
His testimonies to the special NIA court leave us agape in horror. Contrary to popular perception, he claims that it was Sharad Pawar who had coined the term “Hindu terror” for the first time in August 2008 — one and half months prior to the Malegaon blast. The blast promptly followed the coinage.
Colonel Purohit was illegally detained by the ATS for a full week before formally showing his arrest; especially damning are his revelations of the extent of rot in the senior IPS circles. Hemant Karkare (now deceased) and Param Bir Singh (now a fugitive) emerge in extremely shameful colours for their inhuman torture of Purohit, forcing him to implicate Yogi Adityanath and senior leaders of the RSS and the VHP. One is once again reminded of another prediction of the aforementioned D.F. Karaka:
[The] deterioration in the integrity of the police force which took place after the Congress took over from the British was directly traceable to the Congress-controlled organizations which were harbouring…black-marketeers and allowing them to move about freely in governmental and social circles…if the [police] took a broad view he stood to gain financially and materially, and if the accused were a man of power and influence [he] stood to gain quick promotion.
The Congress has indeed descended a long way down the abyss from those rather humbler methods of corruption to indulging in borderline treason.
Colonel Purohit who stoically battled to clear his name stands exonerated and deservedly feted. And in what can only be called poetic justice, Sadhvi Pragya Thakur won handsomely against Digvijaya Singh in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
It appears that the Malegaon blasts case has finally unraveled…well, almost because its real masterminds remain unpunished and untouchable. Like the perpetrators of the 1984 Sikh genocide.
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