PRESUMED GUILTY, BUT PROVEN OTHERWISE

After a plodding, 19-year legal saga, an acquittal blasts apart the flawed probe in the 2006 Mumbai train bomb attack

- By Dhaval S. Kulkarni

IT TOOK ONLY SIX MINUTES for the horror to streak through that normal evening, like staccato flashes of lightning from hell. But if evil is delivered instantly, it's proverbial in India that justice always plods along in delay—and often folly. It’s been almost two decades since blasts ripped through Mumbai’s arterial suburban train network in July 2006, but we are nowhere close to knowing whose hand it was. Far from bringing to them the weight of punitive law. Those who had been arraigned in the case so far were presumed guilty till proven otherwise—or rather, till nothing could be proven. On July 21, a two-judge bench of the Bombay High Court (HC) acquitted 12 accused who had, by then, spent nearly 19 years of their lives in jail.