2002-3 Mumbai blasts: swallowing the police version

BY JYOTI PUNWANI| IN Opinion | 19/04/2016

Mumbai Mirror, March 31. The Mirror and the Indian Express did the best reporting on the judgment and the sentencing. 

HERE’S LOOKING AT US
Jyoti  Punwani

Should journalists report terror cases differently from other cases?

The question comes up every time one meets or reads about anyone acquitted of being a terrorist. Relief at the acquittal is almost always overshadowed by the after-effects of having been branded a terrorist in the media. Loss of reputation, a career cut short forever, relatives and friends avoiding you – these have been the outcomes of such media branding.

Perhaps the trauma of long detentions (because anti-terror laws make bail almost impossible) would be easier to bear if the arrest were to go unnoticed.

But terror is unlike any other crime. And in India, the police, not known for their efficiency in solving crimes of any sort, see every terror arrest as a triumph worth trumpeting. The low conviction rate in terror cases hasn’t made them introspect about whether they should carry on with the publicity. 

But why introspect, when neither their superiors nor their victims make them accountable? And the media continues to believe everything they say?

On March 29, judgment was pronounced in a long-drawn-out trial under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in Mumbai. The accused were charged with carrying out three separate blasts in Mumbai in 2002 and 2003. Ten were held guilty, three acquitted.  

A curious pattern was noticed in the way this outcome was reported.

Saquib Nachan – not quite the ‘mastermind’ of police fantasy 

The Mumbai police had named Saquib Nachan as the prime accused. Mumbai’s readers are familiar with the name. Nachan was the general secretary of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) when it was banned in 2001. He has been accused in two previous cases of terror, was convicted in one and acquitted in the other. He’s also been acquitted in three murder cases.

In the 2002-2003 blasts case, the judge found Nachan guilty only of possessing a firearm, albeit in a notified area under POTA.  In fact, Nachan expressed his gratitude to the judge for not finding him guilty of terror.

All the reporters following this important case must have been present when the judgment was pronounced. Yet, only the Times of India and the Mumbai Mirror reported this statement of Nachan’s.

Both the Times of India and the Hindustan Times, in bylined reports, mentioned Nachan twice as the prime accused, who had been convicted. They did not clarify that he had not been convicted as the prime accused.

The Indian Express too had a by-lined report, but while it described Nachan (only once) as the prime accused, it added that he had been convicted of a lesser charge. Yet, the caption under the accompanying photograph read: ``Saquib Nachan, the prime accused.’’ There was enough space for the desk to have added: ``Convicted of a lesser charge’’, but it didn’t.

Masterminding three blasts which claimed 12 lives is a far graver crime than having a weapon found in your possession. Yet, the Times and Hindustan Times chose to report the judgment in a way that suggested that the alleged mastermind had been found guilty of the crime with which he had been charged.

The Times interviewed former Mumbai police commissioner, Rakesh Maria, who said: "I am happy our months and years of hard work and the endless efforts of my entire team helped get Nachan convicted." The report went on to say that under Maria’s relentless interrogation, Nachan had begun ``singing’’. Well, the judges who tried this case didn’t seem to have been carried away by Nachan’s song.

Maria went on to describe the role of others too, as if they had been found guilty of whatever they had been charged with. These included one who was finally convicted only of possessing a weapon under the Arms Act, not even under POTA.

The Hindu did a similar story: ``How the blasts were cracked’’. A case where, of the 17 arrested, one is discharged, three acquitted, the mastermind is not proven to be one, three are found guilty of lesser charges, and only four are found to have been directly involved in the blasts... is this supposed to be an example of a police job well done? 

Acquitted? Not that you would know, from reading the papers…  

What of those who spent eight years in jail for a crime meriting two years? Were no questions to be asked of the police about them, or why three innocents were implicated?  Both the Times and the Hindu  reporters didn’t even think it worth their while to mention the three acquittals. 

The Hindu too quoted an investigating officer repeating the police version as if it had been proved right. He described one accused as ``a key link’’. But this ``key link’’ was convicted only under the Arms Act.

While Mid-Day carried an interview with public prosecutor Rohini Salian – who’s a celebrity in Mumbai – about how Nachan (who argued his own case) would make a good lawyer, it was the Indian Express that carried the best profile of the 56-year-old, letting him speak about all the allegations against him, speaking to his acquaintances, and also describing his interaction with others in court and out of it.

The profile humanized a man known in Mumbaikars’ consciousness as a shadowy, fanatic SIMI leader who calmly went on perpetrating one terrorist act after the other. 

Is such humanizing wrong for a terror accused? That’s a question for the media to think about.

The Mumbai Mirror and the Indian Express did the best reporting on the judgment and the sentencing. They didn’t rely, like the other national newspapers did, on the police version alone. While the Mumbai Mirror carried separate interviews with two of the three who had been acquitted, the Express profiled and interviewed all those convicted and acquitted.

The Times had just one such report, about a man who had been discharged three months after his arrest.

The Mumbai Mirror also reported in detail the arguments made against awarding the death penalty to the only accused whose crime attracted it. It transpired that this man, Muzammil Ansari, found guilty of planting bombs aimed at killing innocent people and  motivated by religious hatred, actually got a copy of the Hanuman Chalisa for a Hindu co-prisoner and advised him to recite it in jail.

This Hindu prisoner came to court to support the plea that Ansari should not be sent to the gallows.

Why is such reportage so rare in terror cases? Why do most newspapers do what the Times of India and the Hindustan Times did?

Blamed for insisting on their rights 

The case took 13 long years. The Times carried a separate report on why this happened. The report blamed the accused, specially Nachan (described once again in this report thus: ``Nachan, considered the mastermind’’)  for filing many applications. The reporter described as ``frivolous’’ the application asking for home food. This demand is often made by prisoners and has sometimes been considered sympathetically by the courts. On what basis could this be considered ``frivolous’’? Prisoners too have rights.  

One of these many applications, pointed out a defence lawyer in the same report, had led to the acquittal of many of the accused from the charge of conspiracy. The application was against the police practice of using the confession of one accused under POTA against another accused. On Nachan’s application, the Supreme Court ruled that this could not be done. This judgment became an important rule for all terror cases across the country. Surely this was an application that needed to be filed?

 Another application was made against the police clubbing together the three blasts, which had taken place in different months and different locales – another crucial application. A third was for a CBI inquiry and the fourth, for a discharge. The Times put it like this: ``The accused, mainly Nachan, made numerous applications demanding… even a discharge from the case.’’

``Even a discharge?’’ 

Was it the Times’ view that the accused should not have made every possible effort to free themselves legally? Is every such exercise to be viewed as a delaying tactic?

When the shoe is on the other foot

Mumbai has seen another famous ``discharge’’. Ex-Police Commissioner of Mumbai, R. D. Tyagi, had been indicted by the Justice B. N. Srikrishna Commission of Inquiry for the murder of eight  innocent Muslims during the Mumbai ‘‘92-93 riots. Under Supreme Court pressure, the Maharashtra government charged him. He filed for a discharge and it was granted. One heard no protests then, either by the court or the media.

So why did the Times’ reporter consider the act of these accused men filing for a discharge to be too much? 

It’s the same old answer: in terror cases, the English media believes the police, and expects the accused too to repose the same belief in them! 

The Hindustan Times also reposed supreme faith in the ``confessions’’ of the accused. Nowadays the word is not even graced with quotation marks as it used to be. Where terror is concerned, everything recorded by the police is sacrosanct for the media. The Hindustan Times report quoted the public prosecutor as saying: ``There was hardly any direct evidence against any of the accused. It was a web and we had to connect the dots.”  Despite this frank admission, the Hindustan Times reporter went on to quote from the confessions. 

One of the accused who had ``confessed’’, was finally released, because he had spent a much longer time in jail than his sentence of two years. His ``confession’’ had obviously not stood up in court.

Yet, the report’s headline was: ``Confessions helped prosecution nail blasts case’’. The headline wasn’t the desk’s fault – the report had not a word from the defence lawyer.

One-dimensional reporting masks the complex reality 

Indeed, no newspaper interviewed the defence lawyers to get their version of the verdict, even if only to find out how three accused were acquitted.  Their acquittal came because witnesses turned hostile, it was reported. But many witnesses turned hostile in this trial. So was there absolutely no other circumstantial evidence against these three? Yet leading newspapers were applauding the police! 

Nachan and four other accused came from Padgha, a Konkan village that has gained notoriety the way Bhatkal has in Karnataka. Almost all witnesses from Padgha turned hostile. Wasn’t it worthwhile to go to Padgha after the verdict, to hear the village’s version? No paper thought so.

Before his arrest, one of the accused, Dr Anwar Ali, had  held the prestigious job of teaching Urdu at the National Defence Academy in Khadakvasla. He spent eight years in prison and was finally convicted of a crime that attracted just two years. When I asked him if he would sue the policemen who wrongly charged him, the man, who now makes a living by writing teach-yourself-Urdu books, wearily replied: ``No, let it be.’’

Crime reporting is mostly police dictation.  So why should terror cases be reported differently? Because most of the accused are Muslims. Other people accused of terror - mostly those wrongly accused of Maoist terror - hardly get that much media coverage because they live deep in the jungles. A few like Dr Binayak Sen do get media publicity. Even he got the same media treatment in the Hindi press, which is read by his neighbours in Raipur.

As for those accused of Hindutva terror, there are just a handful who’ve been arrested. One of them had the ex-Home Minister pleading for her at the time she was arrested. The media profiled them too at that time. Since then, little has been written about them. Certainly, the entire Hindu majority has not been stigmatised by their arrests. On the contrary, some Hindus showered them with rose petals when they were produced in court in Pune. 

Imagine a Muslim suspected of terror being greeted publicly in this fashion?  In fact, the continuous false arrests, long detentions and bogus police versions carried by the media have made Muslims as a community feel humiliated and stigmatised.

The media now knows this. Yet it carries on swallowing every police lie. Is the English media aware of how little credibility we enjoy among Muslims? Do we care?

Jyoti Punwani is a Mumbai-based independent journalist