Justice Delayed But Not Denied

After 17 years of travail facing a possible sentence of death, the Special NIA Court has acquitted all the seven accused of engineering a bomb blast in Malegaon.

- Santishree Dhullipudi Pandit

Soon after the blasts took place, a few in the Maharashtra police contacted the present writer and privately said that they had instructions from higher-ups to frame the accused. The BJP was gaining traction in Maharashtra, and this was a source of concern to the Congress Party, which had long been the dominant force in the politics of the state. The government of the day was proving helpless in checking the growing number of terror attacks taking place across the country. At a high political level, a decision was taken to invent the bogey of "saffron terror" and to warn that this was a far more dangerous terror network than that created by Wahhabi terrorists supercharged from across the border by the Pakistan army.