Mumbai: The Supreme Court granting bail to Lt. Col. Shrikant Prasad Purohit has raised questions as to whether the notion that saffron terror had its genesis in the 2008 Malegaon blast holds true.
The SC held that the grounds on which Purohit and other accused have sought bail are to be decided by the trial court. The court, however, held that as there were contradictions in the chargesheets filed by both the NIA and Maharashtra ATS and, as Purohit had been languishing in jail for more than eight years and the final verdict after the trial would take a long time, it deemed it proper to grant him bail.
The ATS’ case against Purohit was that he along with other co-accused entered a criminal conspiracy between January 2008 and October 2008 with the object of striking terror in the minds of the people and, to create a communal rift, caused a bomb blast at Malegaon.
The ATS had arrested Purohit on November 5, 2008.
ATS had claimed that Purohit had brought RDX with him from Kashmir for the blast. He had floated also the ‘Abhinav Bharat’ organisation in 2007 in spite of serving as a commissioned officer in the armed forces.
The alleged objective of the organisation is to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra called ‘Aryavrat’ and it had planned to train persons for guerrilla warfare and had also decided to kill those opposing their objective.
The ATS alleged that Abhinav Bharat is an organised crime syndicate and its members, including Purohit, were active since 2003.
In one of the meetings at Bhopal on April 11/12 2008, the criminal conspiracy to cause a bomb blast at Malegaon was hatched to take revenge for the ‘jihadi’ activities by the Muslim community and in this meeting Purohit had taken the responsibility of providing explosives for the blast.
In April 2011, the investigation of this case was handed over to the NIA. During the investigation by the NIA two important witnesses claimed that ATS forced them into giving false incriminating statements against Purohit and other accused. The SC while granting bail has left it to the trial court to decide on contradictions in chargesheet filed by ATS and NIA.
