Shoddy investigation goes unquestioned

BY muzamil jalil| IN Opinion | 13/10/2012

SECOND TAKE
Kalpana Sharma

You have to wonder when you read the headline: “Three suspected IM terrorists held” followed by:

“Delhi Police on Thursday claimed to have cracked an Indian Mujahideen module with the arrest of three persons who were suspected to be involved in the low-intensity blasts in Pune two months ago. The trio believed to be close to fugitive Indian Mujahideen Chief Yasin Bhatkal, were apprehended by Delhi Police’s elite anti-terror unit Special Cell, a senior police official said. Police have recovered some arms and ammunitions from the arrested persons.”

You question such a story in the light of the increasing number of reports and accumulated evidence that many of these so-called breakthroughs by the police are little more than innocents being rounded up and charged.

In the last month, at least two investigations into the conduct of the police, not just in Delhi but also elsewhere, amply illustrate the cavalier manner in which so-called “evidence” of terrorist activities is collected only to have it thrown out by the court.  In the meantime, the young men arrested and kept behind bars while the farce of an investigation is conducted, have no option but to wait and hope.  We know the stories of men who have spent from five to 15 years waiting to be acquitted on cooked up charged.

The report by the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association (JTSA) into such cases by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police (“Framed, Damned and Acquitted: Dossiers of a ‘Very’ Special Cell”) is a revealing document, one that journalists who cover this beat would do well to study. The question for the media is, of course, why this kind of investigation was not done by any newspaper or magazine, although one must add that Tehelka has been following up with regularity on many of these stories.

At least one newspaper has done a similar investigation recently, and that is Indian Express. From September 25 to October 8, Indian Express ran a series that is worth a second look. Muzamil Jaleel, who used to head the Express bureau in Srinagar but is now based in Delhi, did what any reporter could have done at any stage in the last decade.  Ever since the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) was first banned in September 2001, there have been a series of arrests of suspected “SIMI sympathisers” or “SIMI members”.

When these arrests take place, the police link the individuals to events that have already occurred, such as bomb blasts, or to events that could occur in the future, such as more bomb blasts.

The press generally reports such police information uncritically and for public record, these individuals are assumed to be SIMI members and also assumed to have had some role in events that caused mayhem and death or could cause the same. In each case, the police claim a major breakthrough, much as they have in the item mentioned above.

However, rarely are these stories followed up independently of the information supplied by the police or one of the investigative agencies. Occasionally you read about someone who is released, for “lack of evidence”. What happens to these young men? Who were they anyway?  And why did the police arrest them in the first place if there was not enough evidence to convict them? No one asks and hence the pattern continues.

Jaleel has done what any reporter can do, that is to look at official records and put together a story. And the story is remarkable, for it tells us of the cavalier manner in which those who believe they are putting paid to “terrorists” efforts to disrupt life in India are manufacturing evidence and picking up young men randomly, often without any logic or reason, probably in the confident belief that they can get away with it.

And they do get away with it because few question this methodology. Yet over the years, as the young men wrongly charged are slowly getting released, these stories are beginning to emerge.

Let us examine what Jaleel has done. He has taken a bunch of cases of suspected SIMI members who were released because of lack of evidence.  And then he has looked at the evidence produced by the police in each of these cases.

To our amazement we discover that in cases filed in different States, the same “incriminating evidence” turns up. In one case it is a children’s magazine called Umang, published by the Urdu Academy. In another it is the April 9, 2008 issue of Dainik Jagran. It was incriminating because it carried news about 13-hour-long narco tests of SIMI activists Safdar Nagori, Kamruddin Nagori, and Anees Parvez. Possession of one of the most widely read Hindi dailies was introduced as “incriminating evidence” in this case. Another young man had supposedly “confessed” to attending Quran classes and this was considered “incriminating” enough to put him behind bars. Another piece of “incriminating evidence” was a book by Herbert Fensterheim, “Don’t Say Yes When You Want To Say No.”

The absurdities continue. One man was charged with participating in “Seerat Pak Jalsa”, which is a gathering on the Life of the Prophet but the charge sheet translated this to “goodness of Pakistan”! Another man was booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for shouting slogans.

The April 2004 issue of Tehrik-e-millat, an Urdu fortnightly published from Kota, Rajasthan, which is not proscribed, was repeatedly produced as “incriminating evidence” in a number of cases with the names of two women, Aasiya and Rafia (who had also been picked up earlier and subsequently released) written on the magazines in Hindi. The magazine was introduced in cases in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

As with the current rush of stories in the media on Robert Vadra and his business deals, the information gathered by Jaleel is not from “sources” but from public records. As a result, his reports are bare, without any embellishments. Yet they make compelling reading.

The reports bring out the shoddy and blatantly contrived investigation by the police. They also expose the flaws in our criminal justice system that despite this slip-shod investigation and charge sheets, people can be kept locked up for years on end only to be released because there is actually no case against them.

A useful follow up to Jaleel’s investigation would be to look at reports in newspapers around the time these men were arrested and the kind of stories that the press carried. Was there any indication in the reports that there could be another side to the police version? Was there any follow-up once these individuals were remanded either to police custody or judicial custody?

The answers to these questions are fairly obvious. Routinely, only the police version of these arrests is reported. The people arrested are small fry and therefore do not elicit any long-term interest from the media  unlike say “Abu Jindal”, the alleged Indian hand in the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai, whose name keeps popping up with regularity.

And when these men are released, the story appears in a couple of paragraphs. Barring the exception, there is little that is known about what happens to these individuals who have a permanent scar on their lives for having done no wrong. And the policemen who foisted these false cases are almost never questioned or penalised. As a result, the same old tune is played out again: “police crack terror cell”.

Is it not time the Indian media woke up to these realities and started doing what an independent media in a democratic country is supposed to do?

Links to series by Muzamil Jaleel in Indian Express:

A children’s magazine, newspaper, Urdu poetry – Anything can land you in jail

2 years, 5 cities, 6 cases – and “proof” everywhere is the same magazine

The posters that landed retired SIMI secy in jail 

Over a month, four “terror” arrests in Indore for “shouting slogans” 

When ISI became a “front for SIMI”

  Lawyers attacked — on the streets, in police stations, inside courtrooms