The
Believer
By LEENA
GITA REGHUNATH | 1 February 2014
[I]
"SWAMIJI KO BULAO,” the jailer ordered. Call the Swami. Two police constables
scurried out of the jailer’s office and onto the grounds of the prison. A
deafening noise reverberated through the room, as if a hundred men outside the
walls were howling at the same time. It was visiting hours in late December
2011 at Ambala’s Central Jail.
After a few minutes, Swami
Aseemanand, the Hindu firebrand accused of plotting several terrorist attacks
on civilian targets across the country between 2006 and 2008, stepped into the
doorway of the jailer’s office. He wore a saffron dhoti and a saffron kurta
that hung down to his knees. The clothes were freshly ironed. A woollen monkey
cap was pulled down over his forehead, and a saffron shawl was wrapped around
his neck. He looked bemused to see me. We exchanged namastes, then he ushered
me through a door into an adjoining room, where clerks in white dhoti-kurtas
were poring over titanic ledgers. He sat on a large wooden trunk behind the
door, and instructed me to pull a chair from a nearby desk. He was informal,
like a good host, and asked me about my visit. “Somebody has to tell your
story,” I said.
This was the beginning of the first
of four interviews I had with Aseemanand over more than two years. He is
currently under trial on charges including murder, attempt to murder, criminal
conspiracy and sedition, in connection with three bombings in which at least 82
people were killed. He could also be tried for two other blast cases; he has
been named in the chargesheets, but not yet formally accused. Together, the
five attacks killed 119 people, and worked as a corrosive on the bonds of
Indian society. If convicted, Aseemanand may face the death penalty.
In the course of our conversations,
Aseemanand became increasingly warm and open. The story he told of his life was
remarkable and haunting. He is fiercely proud of the acts of violence he has
committed and the principles by which he has lived. For more than four decades,
he has loyally promoted Hindu nationalism; during much of that time, he worked
under the banner of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s tribal affairs wing, the
Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA), spreading the Sangh’s version of Hinduism, and its
vision for a Hindu Rashtra. Through all this, Aseemanand, who is now in his
early sixties, has never diluted the intensity of his beliefs.
After the assassination of Mohandas
Gandhi, Nathuram Godse and his accomplice Narayan Apte were executed by hanging
and cremated at the Ambala jail, in 1949. Their co-conspirator, Godse’s brother
Gopal, was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment. “I’m kept in the same cell as
Gopal Godse,” Aseemanand proudly told me. Today, Aseemanand is perhaps the most
prominent face of Hindu extremist terrorism. Journalists who met him in the
years before the bombings described him to me as an extraordinarily arrogant
and intolerant man. What I saw in the dark records room of the jail was a man
subdued by his imprisonment, but void of remorse. “Whatever happens to me, it’s
a good thing for Hindus,” Aseemanand told me. “Logon me Hindutva ka bhaav
aayega”—it will stir Hindutva among the people.
ON THE NIGHT OF 18 FEBRUARY 2007, the Samjhauta Express started on its usual course from
platform 18 of the Delhi Junction railway station. The Samjhauta, also known as
the “Friendship Express”, is one of only two rail links between India and
Pakistan. That night, almost three-quarters of its roughly 750 passengers were
Pakistanis returning home. A few minutes before midnight—an hour after the
train started its journey—improvised explosive devices (IEDs) detonated in two
unreserved compartments of the 16-coach train. Barrelling through the night,
the train was now on fire.
The explosions fused shut the
compartments’ exits, sealing passengers inside. “It was awful,” a railways
inspector told the Hindustan Times. “Burnt and half burnt bodies of the
passengers were all over in the coaches.” Two unexploded IEDs packed into
suitcases were later discovered at the scene; the devices contained a mixture
of chemicals including PETN, TNT, RDX, petrol, diesel and kerosene. Sixty-eight
people died in the attack.
This was the second, and deadliest,
of the five attacks in which Aseemanand is implicated. He is now accused number
one in the Samjhauta train blasts; accused number three in a bombing at
Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid that killed 11 people, in May 2007; and accused number
six in a blast at the dargah in Ajmer, Rajasthan, that killed three people, in
October 2007. He is also named, but not yet charged, in two attacks in
Malegaon, Maharashtra, in September 2006 and September 2008, that together took
the lives of 37 people.
Many of these cases have been
investigated by multiple agencies at different points in time—including the
Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), the Rajasthan ATS, the Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI), and the National Investigation Agency (NIA). At least a
dozen chargesheets have been filed in the five cases. Thirty-one people have
been formally accused, and two of Aseemanand’s close associates are among
them—Pragya Singh Thakur, who was a national executive member of the BJP’s
student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP); and Sunil Joshi,
who was a former RSS district leader in Indore. All of the investigative
agencies determined that Aseemanand played a central role in plotting the
attacks. Aseemanand, by his own account, hosted planning sessions, selected
targets, provided funds for the construction of IEDs, and sheltered and
otherwise aided those who planted the bombs.
In December 2010 and January 2011,
Aseemanand made two judicial confessions, to courts in Delhi and Haryana, in
which he admitted to planning the attacks. At the time of his confessions,
Aseemanand refused legal representation. He spent 48 hours in judicial custody,
insulated from investigating agencies, before making each statement, thereby
giving him an opportunity to change his mind. Both times, Aseemanand resolved
to confess, and had his statements recorded in court. His confessions, and the
confessions of at least two of his fellow conspirators, allege that the attacks
were planned with the knowledge of at least one senior member of the RSS.
On 28 March 2011, Aseemanand
accepted legal representation. The next day, he retracted his confessions,
claiming that they were coerced by torture. An application he submitted before
the trial court read, “the leak of Aseemanand’s alleged confession to the
media, which is shocking and deliberate, is a part of the design to politicise
and hype the case, conduct and conclude a media trial, and to create, at the
global level, the notion of Hindu terror for the political purposes of the
ruling party.” Aseemanand and several of the defence lawyers working on the
Samjhauta case told me that the lawyers are all members of the Sangh; one of
them said that they manage the case in meetings of the Akhil Bharatiya
Adhivakta Parishad, the RSS’s legal wing.
When I interviewed him, Aseemanand
denied being tortured, or that his confessions were coerced. He said that when
he was arrested for the bombings, by the CBI, he decided it was “a good time to
tell all about this. I knew I could be hanged for it, but I’m old anyway.”
Over the course of our
conversations, Aseemanand’s description of the plot in which he was involved
became increasingly detailed. In our third and fourth interviews, he told me
that his terrorist acts were sanctioned by the highest levels of the RSS—all
the way up to Mohan Bhagwat, the current RSS chief, who was the organisation’s
general secretary at the time. Aseemanand told me that Bhagwat said of the
violence, “It’s very important that it be done. But you should not link it to
the Sangh.”
Aseemanand told me about a meeting
that allegedly took place, in July 2005. After an RSS conclave in Surat, senior
Sangh leaders including Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar, who is now on the
organisation’s powerful seven-member national executive council, travelled to a
temple in the Dangs, Gujarat, where Aseemanand was living—a two-hour drive. In
a tent pitched by a river several kilometres away from the temple, Bhagwat and
Kumar met with Aseemanand and his accomplice Sunil Joshi. Joshi informed
Bhagwat of a plan to bomb several Muslim targets around India. According to
Aseemanand, both RSS leaders approved, and Bhagwat told him, “You can work on
this with Sunil. We will not be involved, but if you are doing this, you can consider
us to be with you.”
Aseemanand continued, “Then they
told me, ‘Swamiji, if you do this we will be at ease with it. Nothing wrong
will happen then. Criminalisation nahin hoga (It will not be
criminalised). If you do it, then people won’t say that we did a crime for the
sake of committing a crime. It will be connected to the ideology. This is very
important for Hindus. Please do this. You have our blessings.’”
Chargesheets filed by the
investigative agencies allege that Kumar provided moral and material support to
the conspirators, but they don’t implicate anyone as senior as Bhagwat.
Although Kumar was interrogated once by the CBI, the case was later taken over
by the NIA, which has not pursued the conspiracy past the level of Aseemanand
and Pragya Singh. (Joshi, who was allegedly the connecting thread between
several different parts of the conspiracy—including those who assembled and
those who planted the bombs—was killed under mysterious circumstances in
December 2007.)
Since allegations first emerged in
late 2010 that Kumar had a role in the attacks, the RSS has closed ranks around
him. Bhagwat, in an unprecedented act for an RSS sarsangh-chalak,
participated in a dharna to protest the accusations against Kumar. The BJP has
also defended him, and the BJP national spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi was his
lawyer at the time he was named in the chargesheets. A lawyer for one of the
accused told me that Kumar is “highly ambitious”, and “in waiting to be the
sarsanghchalak”.
An officer at one of the
investigating agencies, on the condition of anonymity, allowed me to inspect a
secret report submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The report
requested that the MHA send a show-cause notice to RSS authorities, asking why
the organisation should not be banned in light of the evidence against them.
The MHA has not yet acted on the recommendation.
The fear of being banned—as the
organisation briefly was after the assassination of Gandhi, in 1948; during the
Emergency, in 1975; and after the demolition of Babri Masjid, in 1992—looms
over the RSS leadership. Whenever terrorist violence has been attributed to its
members, the Sangh has taken a tack similar to the one they used with Nathuram
Godse: there is no question of owning or disowning the perpetrators, the RSS
says, because they have all previously left the Sangh, or were acting
independently of the organisation, or alienated themselves from it by embracing
violence.
Aseemanand poses a serious problem
to the RSS in this regard. Since it was founded in 1952, the Vanvasi Kalyan
Ashram has been in the nucleus of the Sangh family, and Aseemanand has
dedicated almost his entire adult life to serving the organisation. At the time
he planned the attacks, he had been the national head of the VKA’s religious
wing—a position created especially for him—for a decade. Even before the
inception of the terrorist plot, organised violence (including coordinated
communal riots) was a well-known part of his methods.
Bhagwat and Kumar were allegedly
aware of Aseemanand’s involvement in the plot by mid 2005. Aseemanand was not
excommunicated—far from it. In December of that year, according to a report in Organiser,
the RSS’s weekly mouthpiece, he was honoured with a Rs 1 lakh award marking the
birth centenary of MS Golwalkar, the RSS’s second and most venerated chief; the
veteran BJP leader and former party president Murli Manohar Joshi gave the
ceremony’s keynote address. Even if Kumar remains insulated from a full inquiry
into the allegations against him, there can be little question of the RSS
convincingly denying its brotherhood with Aseemanand.
Denouncing terror attacks launched
in the last decade by members of the Sangh, Swami Agnivesh, a prominent Hindu
reformist, told me that the RSS “will harm themselves and others of the Hindu
society” through militant Hindutva. “It is deplorable,” he said. The political
scientist Jyotirmaya Sharma, who has authored three books on Hindutva, said, “the
RSS involves itself in both covert and overt functions. But the organisation’s
central premise is the sort of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare advocated by
Ramdas, the guru of Shivaji. And the problem is that we don’t have enough
liberal institutions within the country—from political parties to even strong
enough media—to counter such acts of terror waged so blatantly in the name of
Hindu religion.”
Despite such condemnations, the
Sangh has come a long way since the ignominy of 1948. Through their efforts at man-making
and nation-building, the RSS and its affiliates, particularly the BJP, now seem
to represent a major current in the mainstream of Indian society. Aseemanand,
too, is in many ways a product of those efforts, and he shares the RSS’s
aims—albeit in magnified form: his vision for the future, he told me, is a
global Hindu Rashtra.
[II]
ASEEMANAND’S PASSIONATE BELIEF in the Hindu Rashtra, and his commitment to violence as a
means of securing it, emerged from two connected but radically different streams
in Indian thought—the ecumenical karma yoga of the Ramakrishna Mission, and the
Hindutva of the RSS. Aseemanand was shaped by both of these currents, and in
some sense he chose to combine the ascetic life of the former with the extreme
politics of the latter. This partly had to do with his early participation in a
local RSS shakha, and it was also, in some measure, a rejection of the
values of his father. In Aseemanand’s own account, it was a sort of
awakening—to Hinduism as a political force.
Aseemanand was born Naba Kumar
Sarkar in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, sometime in late 1951. He is the
second of seven sons of the freedom fighter Bibhutibhushan Sarkar, a Gandhian
who told his children that Gandhi was his god. The village where they lived, Kamarpukur,
was also the birthplace of the 19th-century sage Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, who
preached “yato mat, tato path” (many faiths, many paths to god).
Ramakrishna’s most famous disciple, Swami Vivekananda, established the
Ramakrishna Mission, in 1897, to carry on the work of karma yoga—service
through selfless action. Aseemanand grew up around the corner from the
mission’s local branch—a place of pilgrimage for Ramakrishna devotees—and spent
many of his evenings listening to the monks there singing devotional songs.
Bibhutibhushan and his wife,
Pramila, wanted their son to join the mission’s holy orders—a source of pride
for many devout Bengali families. But Aseemanand and his brothers were also
drawn to the RSS, whose own version of social service was burgeoning under the
leadership of MS Golwalkar. “I have gone after ideologies in my youth and lived
by them,” Aseemanand recalled his father telling them. “So I understand when
you are influenced by an ideology and want to follow it. But the RSS is the organisation
that killed Gandhi, so it is my duty to warn you against it.” The boys
nevertheless grew close to local RSS workers, who often ate with the brothers
at the Sarkar house, and they began participating in local shakhas.
Aseemanand’s elder brother joined the RSS full time. Aseemanand and his younger
brother Sushant Sarkar, whom I met in Kamarpukur, told me that their father
didn’t try to prevent this, but he issued a stern warning: they were never to
introduce him to a member of the Sangh.
The balance of Aseemanand’s beliefs
tilted dramatically during his twenties, under the mentorship of two Sangh
members. The first was Bijoy Adya, an RSS worker who guided Aseemanand towards
radical Hindu politics. In his office in Kolkata, where he now edits the Bengali
RSS newsweekly Swastika, Adya told me that he first met Aseemanand in
1971. Aseemanand was studying for his bachelor’s degree in physics at a local
university—he eventually got his master’s degree as well—but “his parents
always understood that he was different from their other sons,” Adya said.
“They knew that there was no way he would lead a normal life like the other
brothers.” Aseemanand was also still a regular at the Ramakrishna Mission. “It
was in fact from his house that I read all the major literature” on
Vivekananda, Adya said.
One of the books in the Sarkar
library was A Rousing Call to the Hindu Nation, a collection of
Vivekananda’s writing and speeches edited by Eknath Ranade, a stalwart of the
Hindutva movement whose colleagues gave him the nickname “underground
sarsanghchalak” for his leadership of the RSS during its prohibition following
Gandhi’s assassination. The book emphasised Vivekananda’s call to Hindus to
“Arise! Awake! And stop not until the goal is reached.” The Ramakrishna Mission
had wrongfully made Vivekananda a secular figure in order to get government
funding, and it took Ranade’s text to correct this, Adya said. (At the behest
of the RSS chief Golwalkar, Ranade also oversaw the construction of the Rs
1.35-crore Vivekananda Rock Memorial off Kanyakumari, which was completed in
1970.) Adya encouraged Aseemanand to read the book.
“According to Ramakrishna Mission
every religion is equal,” Aseemanand told me. “They used to celebrate
Christmas, Eid—so I used to do the same. When Adya said that this was not what
Vivekananda preached I did not believe him.” He then took up Ranade’s text. One
particular line from Vivekananda dominated Aseemanand’s reading: “Every man
going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more.”
“I got a huge shock after reading
this,” Aseemanand said. “In the days that followed, I gave this a lot of
thought. Then I realised that it is not in my limited capacity to realise or
fully analyse Vivekananda’s teachings, but since he has said it, I will follow
it all my life.” He never visited the Ramakrishna Mission again.
IF RANADE’S VERSION OF VIVEKANANDA became the soul of Aseemanand’s political conviction, its
form was provided by an RSS worker and ascetic named Basant Rao Bhatt, who had
moved to Calcutta from Nagpur, in 1956, to work under Ranade. Bhatt was
fiercely dedicated to the mission of the RSS, but had a soft, disarming
charisma; Aseemanand told me that even his father once remarked, “It is hard to
believe that an organisation that has people like Basant working for it could
be bad.” In Bhatt, who eventually became the chief of RSS operations for West
Bengal, Aseemanand found an example of how to unite the ideology of the Sangh
with the sort of pastoral service practised by monks of the Ramakrishna
Mission.
When Indira Gandhi imposed the
Emergency and banned the RSS in 1975, she started cracking down on its members.
Thousands of Sangh workers were thrown in jail, including Aseemanand. Bhatt
followed the example of his mentor, Ranade, and began operating underground,
providing for the families of the imprisoned. When the ban was lifted at the
end of the Emergency, Bhatt started a new wing of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, to
cover Bengal and the Northeast. Soon after, Aseemanand moved in with him and
began working full-time for the organisation. In 1978, they founded the first
VKA ashram in the north-eastern part of the country, in the forests of
Baghmundi, near Purulia, West Bengal.
The push towards the Northeast was
part of a nationwide expansion of the VKA into tribal areas. Since it was
founded in Jashpur (now in Chhattisgarh) by the RSS leader Balasaheb
Deshpande—who began his work with a dozen children of the Oraon tribe—the
organisation has strived to counter the influence of Christian missionaries and
to prevent tribals from converting. Christianity, the Sangh believes, is a
threat to the integrity of the nation, breeding separatist movements like those
that have long operated in the Northeast. The VKA’s methods are largely derived
from the successful model of Christian evangelists: it runs playgroups, primary
and middle schools, hostels and health services that also serve as centres for
proselytisation. Its goal is to promote Hindutva and thereby increase the
cultural and political capital of the RSS.
Aseemanand spent most of the next
ten years working in Purulia to advance these aims. But he also decided to
follow some version of the monastic path his parents intended for him, and at
31 he resolved to take sanyaas. Bhatt told him that if working with
tribals and furthering the Sangh’s cause was his mission, he didn’t need to
join a holy order. But Aseemanand had made up his mind, and left Purulia for
the ashram of the Bengali guru Swami Paramananda. “I chose him to be my guru
because he followed Ramakrishna’s teachings,” Aseemanand said. “He worked
mainly with the Dalits, but he was also involved in the propagation of
Hinduism.” Paramananda administered the vows of sanyaas to Naba Kumar Sarkar,
and renamed him Aseemanand—“boundless joy.”
After taking sanyaas, Aseemanand
returned to Purulia and his work with the tribals. His life at the ashram there
brought him into contact with the top leaders of VKA, including its all-India
organising secretary, K Bhaskara Rao, who was also for much of his life the RSS
chief for Kerala (which today boasts over 4,000 shakhas—more than any other
state). Impressed by Aseemanand, in 1988 Rao and the VKA president, Jagdev Ram
Oraon, asked him to extend the VKA’s dharma jagran—its work of spiritual
awakening—to the Andamans.
Since colonial times, many of the
more than 500 islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago have been settled
by Indians from the mainland. To build townships for the settlers, tribals from
areas in what is now Chhattisgarh were often shipped in. By the 1970s, the
Sangh feared that tribal migrants to the Andamans were becoming increasingly
enthralled by Christian missionaries, making the islands hostile to Hindus and
Hindutva, Aseemanand told me. The islands had been represented in parliament
for more than a decade by a Congressman, Manoranjan Bhakta. Aseemanand was to
go and establish a foothold for the RSS.
“When I landed in the Andamans
for the first time, there was no place to work from, no people to work with,”
Aseemanand said. He set about forming bonds with tribal settlers through a
combination of folksiness and unvarnished religious zeal. Although he didn’t go
into detail, he told me that even in the Andamans he was using the threat of
violence to coerce tribals into embracing Hindusim. He called these
reformations “ghar vapasi”—homecomings. (The Sangh maintains that
adivasis are fundamentally Hindus, not animists, and talks about
“reconversion”.)
Aseemanand also employed more
sophisticated types of propaganda. He lived among the tribal settlers, seeking
out older members of the community who had not fully embraced their new
religion. “They told me that though they had converted to Christianity, they
still wanted to keep their traditions alive—the festivals, their dance,” he
said. “So I told them that it is my job to get this done.”
Armed with the goodwill of these
community elders, Aseemanand recruited half a dozen young girls, then sent them
to a Vivekananda centre in Kanyakumari to teach them bhajans and get them to
“start believing in Hanuman,” he said. Afterwards, he took them to the VKA
headquarters at Jashpur, where they learned about Hindu culture for three
months. Aseemanand and the girls then began a sort of road show, circulating
through Andaman villages to lead bhajans and recruit another set of children.
Because Aseemanand felt it was not right to travel in the company of young
single women, the girls were married off, and the next batch of
children—trained by the girls—were around 8 years old.
Aseemanand then set about
formalising the Hindu community by building permanent spaces for worship and
creating official bodies to look after them. In Port Blair, a man named R
Damodaran became the president of the local temple committee, and a Bengali
named Bishnu Pada Ray became the secretary.
Aseemanand lived full-time in the Andamans until the early 1990s. He said his efforts there laid the groundwork for Ray to become the territory’s first BJP parliamentarian, in 1999. “I told him that it’s good for him to go into politics, and so he went to Delhi and met Vajpayeeji,” Aseemanand told me. “Politics is also part of our work.” Damodaran was unanimously elected the chairman of the Port Blair Municipal Council in 2007.
Even after leaving the Andamans,
Aseemanand frequently returned, sometimes to hand out medicines and food
following natural disasters. But he callously restricted his relief efforts to
those who declared themselves Hindu. He told me one story about the aftermath
of the tsunami in 2004. “A Christian woman came for milk for her child,” he
recalled. “My people said no. She said that the kid had not had any food for
three days, and pleaded that it would die if we didn’t give some milk. So
please give some. Then they said go ask Swamiji. I told her that what they are
doing is right. You won’t get any milk here.” It is a story he likes to repeat.
[III]
THE DANGS IS THE SMALLEST, least populated district of Gujarat, and lies in its southern
tail, bordered by Maharashtra to the east and west. Seventy-five percent of its
population of roughly 2 lakh lives below the poverty line, and 93 percent is
adivasi. Like other tribal areas, it has seen a disproportionate share of
conflicts over resources and ideology. The British first subdued the area’s
tribal kings in the 1830s, and obtained the rights to exploit the Dangs’
teak-rich forest, which still covers more than half the district, in 1842.
Apart from Christian missionaries, the British banned all social workers and
political activists from the area, fearing the influence they might exert over
adivasis’ sense of entitlement to the land. The first mission school there was
founded in Ahwa, the district headquarters, in 1905, and Christian evangelists
of many denominations have been active in the area ever since. According to
Aseemanand, Christians used to call the Dangs “Paschim ka Nagaland”—the
Nagaland of the west. “The threat was as big as in the Northeast,” he said.
Aseemanand first visited the Dangs
in 1996, while touring the country on behalf of the VKA. The organisation’s
leaders had asked him to take his successful conversion programmes into every
tribal area in India; they had even created a Shraddha Jagran Vibhag
(faith awakening wing) and installed him as its president. But Aseemanand
thought he could have a greater impact working in a single area, and felt a
strong pull to the Dangs. The Dangs “had the kind of work that I am good
at—staying among the tribals and working with them,” he said. “One should
always do the work from which one gains contentment.” Unlike the Northeast, he
told me, there was still a chance to reclaim the Dangs from Christians.
First and foremost, however,
Aseemanand was loyal to the Sangh, and his superiors were worried that he would
be unable to fulfil his national mandate from the forests of Gujarat.
Aseemanand didn’t convince them to let him focus his operations on the Dangs
until 1998. Their anxiety proved unwarranted: less than a year after setting up
in the district, Aseemanand managed to galvanise Sangh cadres across the
country with his combination of evangelical outreach and violent coercion. Rao,
the VKA organising secretary and Kerala RSS chief, called it “an example for
the whole nation,” Aseemanand recalled.
By the time Aseemanand stationed
himself at a VKA ashram in Waghai, in 1998, religious differences were already
straining adivasi communities in the Dangs, many tribals told me. Christian
proselytisation in the area had been relatively limited before the 1970s; but
since 1991 the Christian population in the Dangs had been growing by roughly 9
percent each year, according to census figures. When parents died, brother
would fight brother over what sort of funeral rites they should perform. In the
year before Aseemanand arrived, 20 attacks on Christians had been reported in
the district, and they continued sporadically throughout 1998.
Every year, the VKA ashram housed
around two-dozen tribal boys, providing them with free food and accommodation
so they could attend a local government school. A day at the ashram began with
Aseemanand leading the boys in chanting the Ekata mantra, an ode to Bharat Mata
and prominent Indians—from Gandhi to Golwalkar—sung by RSS swayamsevaks to open
every session at the shakhas. One of the students that Aseemanand met at the
ashram was Phoolchand Bablo. Aseemanand credited Bablo, who became a sort of
guide and aide-de-camp for the swami, with much of the success of his work in
the Dangs.
When I visited the Waghai ashram
last year, Bablo came from his village to meet me. He was plump, with a round
face and a smile whose warmth reflected in his eyes—the sort of person I felt I
could trust to give me directions in a strange land. Even the most disturbing
stories Bablo told me were imbued with this warmth.
Aseemanand’s methods were similar to
those he used in the Andamans. He trusted Bablo to guide him to communities
where he would be easily welcomed and could recruit aides to extend his
influence throughout the forests. He and his volunteers would then hike to
remote tribal villages, where they camped for up to a week at a time, eating
with the adivasis and sleeping in their huts. Aseemanand preached Hinduism;
distributed chocolates, Hanuman lockets, and copies of the Hanuman chaalisa
to children; sang bhajans; and told the villagers that they should not be
converting to Christianity. In every village, Aseemanand and his aides would
make lists of people who could be baptised into Hinduism. The lists were
closely monitored by Aseemanand. When he left for the next settlement, his
aides would make sure that the adivasis’ huts were flying the saffron pennant
of the Sangh.
Aseemanand married these
comparatively soft methods to fear mongering. “He talked of real life situations
like that in the districts on the borders of Bengal,” Bablo said. “Over there,
the entire Hindu community had to flee because of the Muslims who keep coming
in from the other side.” In pamphlets that he printed in the thousands and
distributed throughout the district, Aseemanand also denounced Christians. The
header on one flier, announcing a massive rally in June 1998, warned: “Come
Hindus, Beware of Thieves.” The invective below read: “The most burning problem
of Dang District is the establishments being run by Christian priests … Wearing
a mask of service these Satans are exploiting the adivasis … Lies and deceit
are their religion.” Aseemanand soon turned these execrations into violence.
On Christmas evening 1998, the Deep
Darshan High School, in Ahwa, was attacked by members of the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal, and the Hindu Jagran Manch (HJM), an offshoot
of the VKA. Sister Lily, one of the Carmelite nuns who ran the school, said
more than 100 people armed with stones participated in the rampage, breaking
windows and destroying the roof of the school’s hostel for tribal boys. “Even
after all these years I can still visualise it,” Sister Lily told me when I
visited her at the school. “I was so frightened that day.”
Thirty kilometres away, in Subir,
another school was attacked; a grain shed there was looted and then set on
fire. In Gadhvi village, a mob of reportedly 200 people demolished the local
church and then set it ablaze; afterwards, they went to a neighbouring village
and burnt down the church there. The church in Waki village was torched the
next day; a forest department jeep was reportedly used in the attack. The day
after, six village churches in the Dangs were destroyed. The homes of Christian
tribals were pelted with stones. Christian and Muslim businesses were
destroyed, and Christian tribals were assaulted.
The destruction carried on like this
for a total of ten days. Between mid December 1998 and mid January of the next
year, “40,000 Christians got converted to Hinduism,” Aseemanand proudly
claimed. “We demolished 30 churches and built temples. There was some
commotion.”
The violence had started with three
Hindu Jagran Manch rallies on Christmas morning—one in Ahwa and two in tehsils
of a neighbouring district—organised by Aseemanand. According to Dasharath
Pawar, who was then a general secretary of a BJP unit in the Dangs, 3,500 Sangh
members wielding trishuls and lathis participated in the Ahwa rally. Slogans
echoing Aseemanand’s anti-Christian rhetoric were raised. The town’s main road
was hung with saffron banners. Local priests had petitioned the district
collector, Bharat Joshi, to intervene. Instead of defusing the situation, he
graced the dais at the Ahwa rally with his presence.
The scale of the rioting that
followed the rallies owed a great deal to Aseemanand’s skill as an organiser.
Before he arrived, there were only a handful of Sangh workers in the district;
Aseemanand pumped energy into the Hindutva movement and turned it into a force
with thousands of members, Pawar said. “His words were powerful enough to awake
the sleeping Hindutva in you.”
“To stop conversions is an easy
job,” Aseemanand told me. “Use the route of religion. Make the Hindus kattar
[fanatic]. The rest of the work will be done by them.”
One of the accomplishments
Aseemanand claimed in this respect was the founding of the HJM, which was set
up to look like a purely tribal organisation. Because of the violence involved,
“we couldn’t do all the Sangh’s work through VKA,” he said. “So we had to make
HJM for this with tribals. This Janubhai”—the ostensible HJM President—“didn’t
know a thing. What plan of action to undertake, what to print in the pamphlets,
all those decisions were taken by us. We just kept him as a face since he is a
tribal. Adivasis used to do all the Sangh’s work.”
Whether by inspiration or
intimidation, Aseemanand’s ghar vapasi programmes also became
increasingly popular. For the next three to four years, whenever they had a
roster of 50 to 100 potential converts, he and his aides would gather them up
and haul them in open trucks and jeeps to the Unai temple in Surat. After a dip
in a perennial hot spring next to the temple, and a tilak-pooja, the
tribals were declared Hindu. They were packed back into the vehicles with a
photo of Hanuman and a copy of the Hanuman chaalisa under their arms. On the
way back, bhajans were blared from the vehicles so that the whole programme
became a spectacle. The carnivals would stop at the Waghai ashram, where
Aseemanand hosted a feast and gave each convert a Hanuman locket.
Aseemanand’s concern for the tribals
rarely extended farther than the question of whether they were praying to Jesus
Christ or to Ram. In an interview with The Week, in January 1999,
Aseemanand said, “We are not interested in poverty alleviation or developmental
activities. We are only trying to uplift the tribals spiritually.” This
approach, backed by Aseemanand’s participation in local communities, had a
powerful appeal. “I have never seen a person live a more difficult life than
Swamiji,” Bablo said. “With utmost devotion, he goes and stays with the most
backward community. He stays there, eats there, and mingles with them—and makes
those people his own. The people end up getting confident that now we, too,
have someone to stand up for us.”
ASEEMANAND DESCRIBED THE DANGS TO ME as one of the most beautiful places in India. Many
journalists who worked there in the late 1990s agreed. When I visited the area in
June 2013, the forest was grey and bare. (“You should see it during the
monsoon,” Aseemanand told me in Ambala jail.) What stood out to me were the
region’s roads—miles and miles of world-class highways carved into the
mountains. They were built by the government of Aseemanand’s most important
political patron, Narendra Modi.
Around the time Aseemanand moved to
the Dangs, in early 1998, the BJP politician Keshubhai Patel was sworn in as
Gujarat’s chief minister. For most of the period since Independence, the state
had been a Congress stronghold, although Patel had also headed it for seven
months in 1995. In March 1998, when Vajpayee became the prime minister—and the
ideological compromises of his government were still in the future—there was a
surge of expectation in the RSS cadre that their vision for India was coming
into being.
The Christmas riots in the Dangs
seemed in some small measure to herald the change they desired. An early
indication of Aseemanand’s success was the appearance of Sonia Gandhi, who
travelled to Ahwa to condemn what she called the “heart-breaking” violence.
Other politicians and celebrities followed suit. The news coverage
significantly raised Aseemanand’s public profile—and his esteem within the
Sangh. Not long after, the RSS granted him its annual Shri Guruji award,
another honour named after Golwalkar.
To quell the uproar in Delhi over
Aseemanand’s riots, LK Advani, then the home minister, was forced to intervene.
“When my conversion stories made national news, and when Sonia Gandhi flew down
to make speeches against me, there was a lot of discussion in the media,”
Aseemanand said. “Then Advaniji was the home minister and asked Keshubhai Patel
to rein me in. So then he started stopping us from working and even arrested my
people.” But Modi was already waiting in the wings, and sharpening his knives.
Aseemanand said that Modi approached him at a senior RSS gathering in
Ahmedabad, and told him, “I know what Keshubhai is doing to you. Swamiji there
is no comparison to what you are doing. You are doing the real work. Now it has
been decided that I will be the CM. Let me come and then I will do your work.
Rest easy.” (Repeated attempts to contact Modi through his office went
unanswered.)
Modi became the chief minister in
October 2001. When the anti-Muslim riots that killed over 1,200 Gujaratis began
at the end of the following February, Aseemanand orchestrated his own attacks
north of the Dangs, in the Panchmahal district, he claimed: “The wiping out of
Muslims from this area was also overseen by me.”
Later that year, Modi came to the
Dangs to help consolidate Aseemanand’s influence. In October 2002, Aseemanand
started construction on Shabari Dham, a sacred precinct dedicated to the tribal
woman believed to have helped Ram during his legendary 14-year exile. To raise
funds for the precinct’s ashram and temple, whose centrepiece would be a statue
of Ram, he organised an eight-day Ramkatha (Ramayana recital) by
the celebrated rhapsode Morari Bapu. The performance attracted at least 10,000
people. Modi, in the midst of campaigning to regain his chief ministership—his
government had dissolved that July, in the aftermath of the riots—appeared on
stage to help kick off the performance.
Part of Modi’s election manifesto
that year was the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Bill, which proposed that all
religious conversions be approved by a district magistrate. Four months after
Aseemanand’s fundraiser, Modi’s trusted aide Amit Shah brought the bill before
the state assembly; the bill passed, and was signed into law in April 2003.
Soon, Aseemanand, with the help of Morari, Modi, and the leadership of the RSS,
began planning a high-profile ghar vapasi in the Dangs.
At the end of his Ramkatha, Morari
had proposed a new kumbh mela at Shabari Dham. The festival, which took four
years to prepare, would be a demonstration against conversion and a celebration
of Hindutva. Aseemanand took it upon himself to organise the mela, together
with the RSS.
In the second week of February 2006,
tens of thousands of Indians flooded into the forest village of Subir, six
kilometres from Aseemanand’s ashram at Shabari Dham, to attend the inaugural
Shabari Kumbh Mela. Like the four traditional kumbh melas which it was meant to
emulate, the Shabari Kumbh centred on an act of ritual purification; by
ceremonially plunging themselves into a local river, adivasis would signal
their return to the Hindu fold. Thousands of people from tribal districts
across central India were trucked to the event; the response to an RTI
application I filed stated that the Gujarat government spent at least Rs 53
lakh to divert water into the river—making it ample enough to accommodate the
crowds
The Shabari Kumbh was also a show of
unity within the Hindu Right: over the three-day mela, well-known religious
figures (such as Morari Bapu, Asaram Bapu, Jayendra Saraswati and Sadhvi
Rithambhara), top leaders from the RSS and the broader Sangh Parivar (including
Indresh Kumar, and the hard-line Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders Pravin Togadia
and Ashok Singhal), and senior BJP politicians (including the chief minister of
Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan) shared the dais. Hundreds of full-time
RSS members and thousands of the organisation’s volunteers managed the event.
As one pair of researchers put it, the Shabari Kumbh was a “confluence of …
sadhus, Sangh and sarkar”.
On the festival’s opening day, Modi
(who had regained power the previous December) told the audience that every
attempt to take tribals away from Ram would fail. Behind the stage was a giant
mural of the Hindu deity firing an arrow into a ten-headed Ravana. The then RSS
chief, KS Sudarshan, took a more belligerent line. “We are up against a kapat
yuddha [deceitful war] by fundamentalist Muslims and Christians,” he told a
gathering of sadhus, adding that this had to be “combated with everything at
our command”. Sudarshan’s deputy, Mohan Bhagwat (who became sarsanghchalak when
Sudarshan retired, in March 2009), told the group, “Those opposing us will have
their teeth broken.”
ACCORDING TO NEWS REPORTS, anywhere from 150,000 to 500,000 people attended the kumbh,
although few reconversions were witnessed. Today, there are barely any devotees
flocking to the Shabari Dham temple, and the temple cannot afford support
staff. The ashram where Aseemanand lived has been demolished. Pradeep Patel,
who assists the temple’s chief pujari, told me that the temple has
become notorious because of its association with Aseemanand, and this has kept
away all the generous Gujarati contributors the temple used to attract. The few
Maharashtrians who visit the place barely drop a Rs 10 note in the bhandaar,
having spent all their money on travelling to the Dangs. A disappointed
Aseemanand told me, “It is my mistake. I couldn’t build it properly.”
There is nevertheless a flurry of
activity in the area. The Gujarat government seems to think that temples are
what the region needs the most, so that the Dangs can earn its bread and butter
through religious tourism. In 2012, the state inaugurated the Rama Trail
project, a government initiative to commemorate the journey undertaken by the
mythological characters of the Ramayana, and Shabari Dham features prominently
in the plan.
The response to an RTI petition I
filed revealed that under the Rama Trail project, the Shabari temple received
Rs 13 crore from the state government to build a Shiv temple, four fountains, a
service road and compound wall, a huge parking lot, and a seating plaza—and to
cover the costs of sanitation, flooring, electrification and water supply. In
contrast, Modi’s government is yet to submit plans that would allow it to
deploy an Rs 11.6-crore grant handed out by the central government, under the
Backward Regions Grant Fund scheme, to foster development in the Dangs. The
money has been lying unclaimed for the last six years. Local Christian
institutions have also been shut out by the state. “From 1998 we have been
blacklisted in Gandhinagar,” Sister Lily, at Deep Darshan High School, said.
“We have been putting up files for new grants for the school every year, but
they don’t give us anything.”
The Unai temple in Navsari, where
Aseemanand carried out his mass conversions, also received Rs 3.63 crore under
the Rama Trail project. Work on the main building was completed by the time I
visited, in June 2013. The new structure was magnificent, imposing. Behind its
walls, it hid the humble old temple where Aseemanand brought his tribal bands
for reconversion. A priest at the temple told me grimly that the number of
visitors to the temple has spiked in recent years, but the hot springs have
dried up for the first time.
[IV]
FOR THE THREE YEARS PRECEDING the Shabari Kumbh, alongside preparing for the festival,
Aseemanand had been meeting with several other long-time Sangh workers to
discuss a problem far more distressing to them than religious conversions. At
the core of this group were Pragya Singh Thakur, the executive member of the
ABVP; and Sunil Joshi, the former RSS district leader in Indore.
In early 2003, Aseemanand received a
phone call from Jayantibhai Kewat, who was then a BJP general secretary for the
Dangs. “Pragya Singh wants to meet you,” Kewat told him. Kewat arranged for
them to visit his house in Navsari, Surat, the next month.
Aseemanand remembered bumping into
Singh at the house of a VHP worker in Bhopal, in the late 1990s. He was struck
by her appearance—short hair, T-shirt, jeans—and her fiery rhetoric. (In a
characteristic tirade delivered sometime after 2006, Singh declared, “we will
put an end to [terrorists and Congress leaders] and reduce them to ashes.”) In
Navsari, Singh told Aseemanand that in a month’s time she would visit him at
the VKA’s Waghai ashram.
It was Aseemanand’s ardent
championing of Hindutva, his “Hindu ka kaam”, Singh told me, that first
drew her to him. “He was a great sanyaasi, doing great work for the
country,” she said, when we met last December in Bhopal.
After the Navsari meeting, Singh
soon arrived in the Dangs as promised. Three men accompanied her. One was Sunil
Joshi.
People who knew Joshi described him
as “eccentric and hyperactive”, according to news reports. Singh told me he was
like a brother, and that they met through the RSS. Aseemanand recalled that, in
later years, when he sheltered Joshi at the Shabari Dham ashram, Joshi would
spend all day incanting bhajans and performing poojas while Aseemanand roamed
the forest, visiting tribals. Around the time Joshi and Singh first started
spending time with Aseemanand, Joshi was wanted for the murder of a Congress
tribal leader and the Congressman’s son in Madhya Pradesh, a crime for which
the RSS reportedly excommunicated him.
Another member soon joined their
group. While working in Canada, an administrative professional named Bharat
Rateshwar had also heard about Aseemanand’s work in the Dangs; he decided to
give up his life abroad and return to India to help. Rateshwar built a house,
in nearby Valsad district, where Aseemanand’s collaborators would stay on their
way to his ashram.
Aseemanand and Pragya Singh both
told me that they met frequently in the years leading up to the kumbh. Above
all, they discussed the growth of the country’s Muslim population, which
Aseemanand considered the biggest threat to the nation. “With Christians, we
can always stand together and threaten them,” Aseemanand told me. “But Muslims
were multiplying fast.” He continued, “Have you seen the videotapes in which
the Taliban slaughter people? Yes, I did talk in meetings about that. I said
that if Muslims multiply like this they will make India a Pakistan soon, and
Hindus here will have to undergo the same torture.” The group explored “ways to
curb this”, he said. They were also angered by Islamic terrorist attacks,
especially on Hindu places of worship such as Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar,
Gujarat, where 30 people were killed, in 2002. Aseemanand’s solution to this
problem, which he advocated frequently, was to retaliate against innocent
Muslims. His refrain was bomb ka badla bomb—a bomb for a bomb.
The group’s conversations continued
over the next two years, as Aseemanand prepared the kumbh. Soon, Mohan Bhagwat
and Indresh Kumar gave their sanction to the plot, according to the account
Aseemanand gave me. While they took centre stage at the kumbh along with other
leaders of the Hindu Right, Aseemanand retreated to his ashram. Despite his
seniority and popularity within the Sangh, he had agreed with Bhagwat and Kumar
that he should publicly distance himself from the RSS. “It was a strategy that
we took at the time,” Aseemanand told me. Instead of participating in the
kumbh, he was to focus in secret on planning the attacks.
LESS THAN A MONTH AFTER THE SHABARI
KUMBH, two bombs exploded in Varanasi,
killing 28 people and injuring a hundred more. One of the explosives was placed
at the entrance to a Hindu temple. Aseemanand, Singh, Joshi, and Rateshwar
immediately convened at Shabari Dham, where they decided to conjure up a reply.
In his confession, Aseemanand said
that Joshi and Rateshwar agreed to head to Jharkand to purchase pistols, and
SIM cards to be used in detonators. Aseemanand gave them Rs 25,000. He also
suggested that they try to recruit other radical sadhus to the conspiracy. (In
the end, the Ram bhakts he nominated chose to stick to vitriol.) In Jharkand,
Joshi contacted his friend Devender Gupta, the RSS chief of Jamathada district,
who helped them secure fake driving licences with which to purchase SIM cards.
In June 2006, the team rallied at
Rateshwar’s house. Joshi and Singh arrived with four new members of the
conspiracy—Sandeep Dange, Ramchandra Kalsangra, Lokesh Sharma, and a man known
only as Amit. Dange, whose nickname was “Teacher”, was the RSS district head in
Madhya Pradesh’s Shajapur district; Kalsangra was an RSS organiser from Indore.
According to chargesheets, Joshi
formed three task forces to carry out the blasts. One group would motivate and
shelter young men whom they would recruit to plant the bombs; one would procure
materials for the bombs; and the third would assemble the devices and execute
the attacks. Joshi agreed to be the only connecting thread between the various
parts of the conspiracy. He then suggested that they target the Samjhauta
Express in order to kill the maximum number of Pakistanis. Aseemanand proposed
Malegaon, Hyderabad, Ajmer and Aligarh Muslim University.
Several months went by in the Dangs
without news. Then, during Diwali celebrations, Joshi came to meet Aseemanand
at Shabari Dham. According to Aseemanand’s confession statement, Joshi claimed
responsibility for two explosions in Malegaon, on 8 September, that killed 31
people. Dange, along with Kalsangra, had helped Joshi procure bomb-making
materials, assemble the explosives, and execute the attacks, according to
chargesheets.
On 16 February 2007—a Shivratri
day—Joshi and Aseemanand met again, at the Kardmeshwar Mahadev Mandir in
Balpur, Gujarat. “There is going to be some good news” in the next few days,
Joshi told Aseemanand, according to the confession. Two days later, the
Samjhauta Express was bombed. A day or so after that, Joshi, Aseemanand and
some members of the larger conspiracy met at Rateshwar’s house, where Joshi
took credit for the attack. This time he told Aseemanand that Dange and his
aides carried out the blast. Attacks continued over the next eight months; in
May, the group bombed Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid and, in October, they bombed the
Ajmer dargah.
On 19 February 2007, Singh had sat
down to watch breaking news of the Samjhauta blast with her sister and her aide
Neera Singh, according to a witness statement given by Neera. When images of
the destruction brought Neera to tears, Singh asked her not to cry, because all
the dead were Muslims. When Neera pointed out that there were some Hindus among
the dead, Singh replied, “Chanay ke saath gur bhi pista hai” (A little
jaggery must be ground with the gram). Then Singh treated her sister and Neera
to ice cream.
AT THE END OF 2007, things in the conspiracy took a turn for the worse. On 29
December, Sunil Joshi was shot dead on an isolated stretch of road near his
mother’s house, in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. Joshi had four aides—Raj, Mehul,
Ghanshyam and Ustad—who lived with him and were almost always in his company.
(Raj and Mehul are wanted by police for the Best Bakery arson attack, in which
14 people were burned alive during the Gujarat riots in 2002.) All four
mysteriously disappeared after Joshi’s killing.
When he learned of Joshi’s death,
Aseemanand, looking for information about the killing, dialled the telephone
number of a Military Intelligence officer he had met at a meeting of the
militant RSS offshoot Abhinav Bharat, in Nasik—Lt Col Shrikant Purohit.
Purohit is a mysterious figure. For
the last three years, he has been behind bars for planning the second Malegaon
blast, of 2008. Time and again, he has claimed that he was acting as a double
agent under orders from his army superiors. “I have done my job properly, have
kept my bosses in the loop—and everything is on paper in the army records,” he
told Outlook, in 2012. “Those who need to know know the truth.” Pragya
Singh’s lawyer, Ganesh Sovani, told me they are treading carefully with
Purohit: “We don’t know what his real intentions are.” According to
Aseemanand’s confession statements, Purohit told him that since Joshi was
involved in the murder of the tribal Congressman, this must have been an act of
revenge.
Five months later, three bombs
exploded in Maharashtra and Gujarat—two in Malegaon, and one in Modasa—killing
at least seven people and injuring roughly 80. Aseemanand soon received a call
from Sandeep Dange, who asked Aseemanand to shelter him at Shabari Dham for a
few days. Aseemanand was on his way to Nadiad in Gujarat and didn’t think it
wise to leave Dange in the ashram in his absence. Dange asked Aseemanand to
pick him up from a bus depot in Vyara, 70 kilometres from Shabari Dham, and
drop him in Baroda. In Vyara, Aseemanand met a very worried Dange, along with
Ramchandra Kalsangra. They said they were coming from Maharashtra. Aseemanand
later recalled to police that throughout the three-hour journey to Baroda they
remained completely silent.
Singh was the first of the main
conspirators to be captured, in October 2008, in connection with the second
Malegaon bombing, after the Mumbai ATS determined that a scooter used in the
blast belonged to her. Allegations soon emerged that she had been brutally
tortured while in police custody. The news deeply disturbed Aseemanand. In the
first week of November, the Mumbai ATS made another major arrest in the
case—Purohit. He is alleged to have trained the terror suspects in bomb
assembly, and supplied RDX from army stocks. Later that month, the ATS arrested
a conspirator named Dayanand Pandey. Then the arrests suddenly came to a halt;
Hemant Karkare, the celebrated chief of the Mumbai ATS, who was heading the
investigation, was shot dead on 26 November during the terrorist attacks in
Mumbai.
Little changed until April 2010,
when the Rajasthan ATS, while investigating the Ajmer bombing, arrested
Devendra Gupta, the RSS district head from Jharkhand who had provided fake
identification to Joshi and Rateshwar, and two others. The NIA took over the
Samjhauta case that July. Meanwhile, the CBI was investigating the Mecca Masjid
case, and conducting surveillance on several members of the conspiracy,
including Aseemanand.
By now, Aseemanand knew that things
were closing in; Phoolchand Bablo told me that in the months before his arrest
Aseemanand was very disturbed. “He would be silent, resolutely silent about the
news and investigation, and we did not ask him anything,” Bablo said.
Aseemanand, who was almost 60 at the time, soon left Shabari Dham and began
moving around the country in order to evade arrest. The constant travel
weakened him, and his health deteriorated. Eventually, he settled in a village
outside Haridwar, where he lived under an assumed name until the CBI tracked him
down that November. “They had arrested everyone connected to Sunil,” Aseemanand
told me. “I was the last one to be nailed.”
Aseemanand was thrown in a Hyderabad
jail and soon confessed. “The CBI already knew the whole story,” Aseemanand
told me. One statement Aseemanand made included a surprising account of why he
decided to confess. A few days after his detention, he met a Muslim boy named
Kaleem, who was also imprisoned in Hyderabad. Kaleem was accused of the Mecca
Masjid blasts which Aseemanand had plotted. Kaleem used to wait on Aseemanand,
and his kindness aggravated Aseemanand’s conscience. He was confessing,
Aseemanand claimed, out of remorse.
LESS THAN A MONTH AFTER THE SHABARI
KUMBH, two bombs exploded in Varanasi,
killing 28 people and injuring a hundred more. One of the explosives was placed
at the entrance to a Hindu temple. Aseemanand, Singh, Joshi, and Rateshwar
immediately convened at Shabari Dham, where they decided to conjure up a reply.
In his confession, Aseemanand said
that Joshi and Rateshwar agreed to head to Jharkand to purchase pistols, and
SIM cards to be used in detonators. Aseemanand gave them Rs 25,000. He also
suggested that they try to recruit other radical sadhus to the conspiracy. (In
the end, the Ram bhakts he nominated chose to stick to vitriol.) In Jharkand,
Joshi contacted his friend Devender Gupta, the RSS chief of Jamathada district,
who helped them secure fake driving licences with which to purchase SIM cards.
In June 2006, the team rallied at
Rateshwar’s house. Joshi and Singh arrived with four new members of the
conspiracy—Sandeep Dange, Ramchandra Kalsangra, Lokesh Sharma, and a man known
only as Amit. Dange, whose nickname was “Teacher”, was the RSS district head in
Madhya Pradesh’s Shajapur district; Kalsangra was an RSS organiser from Indore.
According to chargesheets, Joshi
formed three task forces to carry out the blasts. One group would motivate and
shelter young men whom they would recruit to plant the bombs; one would procure
materials for the bombs; and the third would assemble the devices and execute
the attacks. Joshi agreed to be the only connecting thread between the various
parts of the conspiracy. He then suggested that they target the Samjhauta
Express in order to kill the maximum number of Pakistanis. Aseemanand proposed
Malegaon, Hyderabad, Ajmer and Aligarh Muslim University.
Several months went by in the Dangs
without news. Then, during Diwali celebrations, Joshi came to meet Aseemanand
at Shabari Dham. According to Aseemanand’s confession statement, Joshi claimed
responsibility for two explosions in Malegaon, on 8 September, that killed 31
people. Dange, along with Kalsangra, had helped Joshi procure bomb-making
materials, assemble the explosives, and execute the attacks, according to
chargesheets.
On 16 February 2007—a Shivratri
day—Joshi and Aseemanand met again, at the Kardmeshwar Mahadev Mandir in
Balpur, Gujarat. “There is going to be some good news” in the next few days,
Joshi told Aseemanand, according to the confession. Two days later, the
Samjhauta Express was bombed. A day or so after that, Joshi, Aseemanand and
some members of the larger conspiracy met at Rateshwar’s house, where Joshi took
credit for the attack. This time he told Aseemanand that Dange and his aides
carried out the blast. Attacks continued over the next eight months; in May,
the group bombed Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid and, in October, they bombed the
Ajmer dargah.
On 19 February 2007, Singh had sat
down to watch breaking news of the Samjhauta blast with her sister and her aide
Neera Singh, according to a witness statement given by Neera. When images of
the destruction brought Neera to tears, Singh asked her not to cry, because all
the dead were Muslims. When Neera pointed out that there were some Hindus among
the dead, Singh replied, “Chanay ke saath gur bhi pista hai” (A little
jaggery must be ground with the gram). Then Singh treated her sister and Neera
to ice cream.
AT THE END OF 2007, things in the conspiracy took a turn for the worse. On 29
December, Sunil Joshi was shot dead on an isolated stretch of road near his
mother’s house, in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. Joshi had four aides—Raj, Mehul,
Ghanshyam and Ustad—who lived with him and were almost always in his company.
(Raj and Mehul are wanted by police for the Best Bakery arson attack, in which
14 people were burned alive during the Gujarat riots in 2002.) All four
mysteriously disappeared after Joshi’s killing.
When he learned of Joshi’s death,
Aseemanand, looking for information about the killing, dialled the telephone
number of a Military Intelligence officer he had met at a meeting of the
militant RSS offshoot Abhinav Bharat, in Nasik—Lt Col Shrikant Purohit.
Purohit is a mysterious figure. For
the last three years, he has been behind bars for planning the second Malegaon
blast, of 2008. Time and again, he has claimed that he was acting as a double
agent under orders from his army superiors. “I have done my job properly, have
kept my bosses in the loop—and everything is on paper in the army records,” he
told Outlook, in 2012. “Those who need to know know the truth.” Pragya
Singh’s lawyer, Ganesh Sovani, told me they are treading carefully with
Purohit: “We don’t know what his real intentions are.” According to
Aseemanand’s confession statements, Purohit told him that since Joshi was
involved in the murder of the tribal Congressman, this must have been an act of
revenge.
Five months later, three bombs
exploded in Maharashtra and Gujarat—two in Malegaon, and one in Modasa—killing
at least seven people and injuring roughly 80. Aseemanand soon received a call
from Sandeep Dange, who asked Aseemanand to shelter him at Shabari Dham for a
few days. Aseemanand was on his way to Nadiad in Gujarat and didn’t think it
wise to leave Dange in the ashram in his absence. Dange asked Aseemanand to
pick him up from a bus depot in Vyara, 70 kilometres from Shabari Dham, and
drop him in Baroda. In Vyara, Aseemanand met a very worried Dange, along with
Ramchandra Kalsangra. They said they were coming from Maharashtra. Aseemanand
later recalled to police that throughout the three-hour journey to Baroda they
remained completely silent.
Singh was the first of the main
conspirators to be captured, in October 2008, in connection with the second
Malegaon bombing, after the Mumbai ATS determined that a scooter used in the
blast belonged to her. Allegations soon emerged that she had been brutally
tortured while in police custody. The news deeply disturbed Aseemanand. In the
first week of November, the Mumbai ATS made another major arrest in the
case—Purohit. He is alleged to have trained the terror suspects in bomb
assembly, and supplied RDX from army stocks. Later that month, the ATS arrested
a conspirator named Dayanand Pandey. Then the arrests suddenly came to a halt;
Hemant Karkare, the celebrated chief of the Mumbai ATS, who was heading the
investigation, was shot dead on 26 November during the terrorist attacks in
Mumbai.
Little changed until April 2010,
when the Rajasthan ATS, while investigating the Ajmer bombing, arrested
Devendra Gupta, the RSS district head from Jharkhand who had provided fake
identification to Joshi and Rateshwar, and two others. The NIA took over the
Samjhauta case that July. Meanwhile, the CBI was investigating the Mecca Masjid
case, and conducting surveillance on several members of the conspiracy,
including Aseemanand.
By now, Aseemanand knew that things
were closing in; Phoolchand Bablo told me that in the months before his arrest
Aseemanand was very disturbed. “He would be silent, resolutely silent about the
news and investigation, and we did not ask him anything,” Bablo said.
Aseemanand, who was almost 60 at the time, soon left Shabari Dham and began
moving around the country in order to evade arrest. The constant travel
weakened him, and his health deteriorated. Eventually, he settled in a village
outside Haridwar, where he lived under an assumed name until the CBI tracked
him down that November. “They had arrested everyone connected to Sunil,”
Aseemanand told me. “I was the last one to be nailed.”
Aseemanand was thrown in a Hyderabad
jail and soon confessed. “The CBI already knew the whole story,” Aseemanand
told me. One statement Aseemanand made included a surprising account of why he
decided to confess. A few days after his detention, he met a Muslim boy named
Kaleem, who was also imprisoned in Hyderabad. Kaleem was accused of the Mecca
Masjid blasts which Aseemanand had plotted. Kaleem used to wait on Aseemanand,
and his kindness aggravated Aseemanand’s conscience. He was confessing,
Aseemanand claimed, out of remorse.
ON FRIDAY, 24 JANUARY, a special NIA court in Panchkula, Haryana, framed charges
against Aseemanand in the Samjhauta blast case. After three years in Ambala
jail and 31 months of legal hearings, his trial can finally move forward. In an
NIA court in Jaipur, he has been under trial for the Ajmer case since September
2013. His trial in the Mecca Masjid case is not yet underway; last November, he
made his first visit in two years to the Hyderabad court that is hearing the
case.
Pragya Singh, who is accused number
one in the 2008 Malegaon blast, has approached the Bombay High Court to
challenge the NIA’s constitutionality. She also claims to be suffering from
cancer, and is currently under treatment at an ayurvedic hospital in Bhopal.
She has filed various bail applications that are being contested by the NIA.
At this point, it seems the trials
may drag on for several more years. Lawyers from both sides blame each other
for delaying court proceedings. Over the year and a half that I travelled back
and forth from the Panchkula court, there were few newsworthy developments
until the framing of the charges.
In Ambala, Aseemanand is now being
held in a special B-class cell with Ram Kumar Chaudhary, the Congress
parliamentarian from Himachal Pradesh who is accused of murdering a 24-year-old
woman in Haryana in November 2012. They share a cook, who prepares them meals
on request, and they are only on lockdown during the night.
In our last interview, in January
2014, he asked if I would like some tea. Before I could answer, a lean teenage
boy, incarcerated for petty crimes, thrust a plastic cup filled with sweet chai
into my hands. Aseemanand pulled him close and said, “This is my boy. He will
be released soon.” He looked into the teenager’s face and added, laughing,
“This chaiwala might grow up to become Narendra Modi.”
During our interviews, prison
officers often stopped by to ask Aseemanand how he was doing. “They all tell me
‘jo hua accha hua,’” Aseemanand said—whatever happened is good. “They
don’t know whether I have done it or not, but they believe that whoever did it,
did the right thing.”
When I visited Kamarpukur,
Aseemanand’s village in West Bengal, his family members were largely reluctant
to speak with me. But as I left, his younger brother Sushant said to me, “Wait
for a few months. Once Modiji comes to power I will put a stage in the village
centre and shout from the loudspeakers all that Aseemanand has done.”
In one of our meetings, Aseemanand
paraphrased the last words of Nathuram Godse: may my bones not be discharged
into the sea until the Sindhu river flows through India again. He has assured
Phoolchand Bablo that although his trial might take time, he will definitely be
released. And he told me that the work of people like him, Pragya Singh and
Sunil Joshi will continue: “It will happen. It will happen on time.”
Correction: The print version of this article mistakenly states that the
Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003 was withdrawn in 2008. An amendment to
the law, passed by the state assembly in 2006, was withdrawn. This has been
corrected online. The Caravan regrets the error.
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