INNOCENT SADHVI PRAGYA IN GUANTANAMO BAY OF MAHARASHTRA 
 ILLEGAL ARREST AND INCARCERATION WITHOUT ANY END IN SIGHT

– A CASE FIT FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

Part I

V. SUNDARAM I.A.S

Sadhvi Pragya

Victim of Sonia Congress Police Torture

The Sonia-Congress led UPA government in Maharashtra is mischievously and viciously using the ATS as a political instrument to foist cases on Hindu political and Hindu religious leaders.  The CBI, which I have several times described as Congress Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Congress Bureau of Instigation (CBI), Congress Bureau of Insinuation (CBI) and Congress Bureau of Intimidation (CBI) is being used on a daily basis by the Sonia-Congress to foist criminal cases on their political opponents.

In the same manner, the Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) in Maharashtra is also functioning as a political instrument of the Sonia-Congress Government in Maharashtra State. The Supreme Court of India had also observed that the CBI was being used as a political instrument by the Government in power (Sonia Congress Party) to put down their political opponents. The Supreme Court made this observation in the case relating to disproportionate assets launched by CBI against Mulayam Singh Yadav.

In one of my earlier articles which I wrote in 2008, I had observed as follows: “It is a matter of time before the ATS declares the Sangh Pariwar as the biggest progenitor of terror in India.  They are capable of politically manufacturing new ‘revelations’ to suggest (to them at any rate and at any cost!) that, if SIMI is banned, so must be Bajrang Dal, VHP, ABVP, RSS and eventually BJP.  Finally, the lethal fact that the government will have neither the gumption nor credible and clinching evidence to do so is quite another matter.  But there is no doubt whatsoever that the ATS in Maharashtra, taking political instructions from Sonia Congress in power there, is working round the clock to prove the total parity  between Islamic terror and ‘Hindu’ terror.  But the ‘politically’ determined efforts of ATS to arrive at this ‘equation’ will have disastrous consequences leading to the complete derangement of communal harmony in India. The irresponsible officers and men in the ATS in Maharashtra who equate imaginary Hindu terror with more than one thousand years of Jihadi terror in India, would do well to understand that this odious comparison can only provoke the already emotionally shattered and battered Hindus of India even more, thus communalising the polity beyond redemption and unleash retribution on a scale which would dwarf what happened in Gujarat after the Godhra riots in 2002. If only Hinduism had been an intolerant faith like the monotheistic Islam then India would not been a vibrant democracy and we would have witnessed many virulently violent responses to Jihadic terror.”

In 2007, the Malegaon blasts took place in which 37 people were killed outside the mosque.  At that time the pseudo-secular media --- both print and electronic --- loudly wondered why Jihadi terrorists would specifically target their own co-religionists and suggestively hinted at the possibility of Hindu groups coming under the investigators’ scanner.  With electronic speed, the case was cracked and it was authoritatively billed as a SIMI handiwork.  But the pseudo-secular fundamentalists in the media did not give up.  They waited for two crude bombs to explode in Gujarat’s Modasa and once again in Malegaon on September 29, 2008.  At that time, the weak Sonia Congress government was under fire for handling Raj Thackerray’s plundering goons in Mumbai with kid gloves, the ATS in Maharashtra decided this was the most opportune time to ‘selectively leak’ some sensitive information regarding the September 29, 2008 incidents.  The alleged suspects’ links to the extended Saffron Pariwar were far-fetched and tenuous.  Yet the leaked news came in very handy for the English and electronic media to resume their onslaught on ‘Hindu terror’.

The ATS in Maharastra responded immediately.  That is how the case was launched against Sadhvi Pragya Chandrapal Singh Thakur and others.  She had graphically described how the ATS officers and men tortured her when she was under their illegal and unauthorised custody in November 2008 in the Affidavit, which she filed in a Nasik Court (C.R.No.1-130/08, Re-numbered as C.R.No.1-18/08 at ATS).  I am giving below certain extracts from her Affidavit which are really heart rending and which clearly bring out the fact that the inhuman officers and men in the ATS behaved in the savage way in which the great German writer Mehring described the barbarous men of the Nazi Special Police in Hitler’s Germany: ‘I was tortured by highly cultivated barbarians, by technically trained primitives, by uniformed cannibals’.  The criminal barbarians in the ATS in Maharashtra are not very different from the NAZI Special Police in Hitler’s Germany. The Sonia Congress Government directed criminals in the ATS in Maharashtra will also have their days of Nuremberg trials.

Here are the relevant excerpts from Sadhvi Pragya’s Affidavit.

‘I say that on 7.10.2008, when I was at Jabalpur Ashram, I received a call from a police officer from the ATS, Maharashtra, called Sawant, who wanted to know about my LML Freedom vehicle. However, I told him I had sold it long back and not concerned with it. However, he insisted me to come down to Surat as he wanted to question me at length about it. I was reluctant to go to Surat by leaving the Ashram and insisted for him to come down to Jabalpur, but he refused and told me to come down to Surat as early as possible’.

‘I further say that accordingly I travelled to Surat by train via Ujjain and arrived at Surat on 10.10.2008 early in the morning and my disciple Bhimbhai Pasricha had to receive me at Railway Station and I went to his place at Atop Nagar.....I further say that at 5.15 PM myself, Pasricha and the ATS officer left Surat and reached Bombay on the very night of 10.10.2008. In Bombay I was taken straight away to the ATS office at Kalachowkie’.

 ‘I further say that on 12.10.2008 the ATS changed the mode of interrogation and became extremely aggressive with me. At first they asked my said disciple Bhimbhai Pasricha to beat me with sticks, belts etc, on my palms, forehands, soles, etc. When Pasricha refused to do so, he was severely beaten by the ATS. Ultimately with the greatest reluctance, he complied with the ATS orders but obviously being my disciple, he exerted the very minimum of force on me. He was then pushed aside by a member of the ATS squad known as Khanwilkar, who then himself commenced beating me severely with a belt on my hands, forearms, palms, feet, soles, causing me bruises, swelling and contusions in these areas’.

‘I say that from the 13th onwards, I was beaten during the day, night and midnight. On two occasions I was even woken up in the early hours of the morning at 4 am and questioned about my knowledge of the blasts. On these occasions, I was beaten by a senior officer having a moustache, whom I can identify. In addition I was subject to vulgar abuse and obscene language by members of the ATS team interrogating me. My Guru was abused and my chastity was questioned. I was physically and verbally traumatised to the extent that I wanted to commit suicide’.

‘I say that as a result of the custodial violence/torture, mental stress, anxiety that were developed in the process, I was subjected to, I developed acute abdominal and kidney pains. I lost my appetite, became nauseous and giddy and prone to having bouts of unconsciousness’.

 

                                Sadhvi Pragya in 2008                      Sadhvi Pragya today

                                Before arrest by ATS                        Now after three years of

                               In October 2008                                Illegal, arbitrary detention

                                                                                                and torture by ATS

SADHVI PRAGYA CHANDRAPAL SINGH THAKUR HAS BEEN CONTINUOUSLY IN PRISON SINCE OCTOBER 2008 AND NO CHARGESHEET HAS BEEN FILED AGAINST HER SO FAR. ISLAMIC TERRORISTS LIKE KASAB WOULD BE TREATED WITH GREAT INDULGENCE AND THEIR EVERY WHIM AND FANCY PAMPERED BY THE ATS IN THE SONIA CONGRESS MAL-ADMINISTERED MAHARASHTRA.

It will be very clear from the above Affidavit of Sadhvi Pragya Chandrapal Singh Thakur  that the officers and men in the ATS are treating the Hindu under-trials in Maharashtra in the same way in which the Islamic prisoners have been treated by the US army prison authorities in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The American Civil Liberties Union has stated: “The United States government continues to turn a blind eye to mounting evidence of widespread abuse of detainees held in its custody at Guantanamo Bay. If we are to truly repair America’s standing in the world, the Bush Administration must hold accountable high-ranking officials who allow the continuing abuse and torture of detainees. These aggressive interrogation techniques, when coupled with the stress of indefinite, arbitrary detention, have caused the prisoners tremendous psychological and physical injury. The extreme interrogation technique were designed and implemented first at Guantanamo and then exported to Iraq. The very fact that innocent men may be arbitrarily imprisoned, mistreated and tortured at Guantanamo is an especially egregious miscarriage of justice”. 

Sadhvi Pragya’s Guantanamo-Style brutal torture brings out the ATS in Maharashtra in very bad light.  The public have the right to draw the reasonable inference that many of the officers and men in the ATS are committed to the working philosophy of converting innocent Hindus into dangerous criminals and terrorists.  That is why perhaps Justice Mulla of the Allahabad High Court, in a famous judgement in 1962, observed with candour: ‘There is no more organised lawless criminal force in the country than the Indian police force’. If only Justice Mulla had been alive today, what he would have said about the ATS and its methods of investigation is just beyond my imagination.

POST SCRIPT:

ATS /CBI / NIA foisting of more and more imaginary cases on Sadhvi Pragya

As I have already stated, Sadhvi Pragya has been in continuous illegal detention undergoing untold police torture and brutality ever since October 2008. Our wretched National Human Rights Commission --- may I say, National Human Non-Rights Commission --- under the Chairmanship of known and blatant InJustice K.G Balakrishnan who is a crypto Christian --- would not take any interest in the denial of ordinary human rights to Sadhvi Pragya by the ATS in Maharashtra.

I can see from the latest newspaper reports of March 29, 2011 that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) have recently grilled Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur in connection with five bomb blasts in different parts of the country and the murder of RSS worker Sunil Joshi at Devas, Madhya Pradesh. Joshi was also an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case. It is alleged by the ATS that Sunil Joshi was killed because he had become a liability to the Hindu-right wing group involved in the Malegaon blast.

The NIA questioned Sadhvi Pragya for her suspected involvement in the 2008 Modasa bomb blast, the Samjhauta Express and Ajmer Sharif bomb blasts in 2007 and Joshi’s murder. The NIA questioned Sadhvi Pragya about the motorcycle that was used to trigger the blast at Modasa, Gujarat, on September 29, 2008. The same day the group triggered a blast in Malegaon killing six people and injuring 101. In both cases, motorcycles were used to plant the explosives. The motorcycle used at Malegaon has been traced to Thakur.

The CBI questioned Sadhvi Pragya in connection with the serial bomb blasts at Malegaon in 2006 and the 2007 Mecca Masjid blast case. Sources said CBI particularly questioned her about Swami Aseemanand’s revelations and claims about the Abhinav Bharat’s involvement in the 2006 blasts at Malegaon.