Terrorism and Religious Profiling: Begunaah Qaidi Abdul Wahid Shaikh Unravels it all

Abdul Wahid Shaikh is the only accused to have been acquitted in the Mumbai 2006 train blasts case. His book Begunaah Qaidi talks about his experience of torture while in police custody. He is now a lawyer.  Author SCHARADA DUBEY narrates her interactions with him, whom she calls the 'Freed Fighter', in her book 'M for Minority'. Excerpts:

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WHEN a series of bomb blasts in local trains occurred during the evening rush hour on the Western Railway line on July 11, 2006, Abdul Wahid Shaikh was at home in Mumbra in Thane district, a suburb of Mumbai. The blasts were being reported on TV and he watched and discussed them along with a neighbour, both shocked and alarmed at this fresh assault on their city.

The blasts would go on to have a death toll of over 200 people, and they were serious enough to strike terror in the heart of anyone who was a regular user of Mumbai's public transport, as both Wahid and his neighbour were.

Little did he know how his life was to become painfully linked to these blasts, even though he was nowhere near a local train that evening.

"I came on the police radar about five years before the bomb blasts happened. The whole thing actually started in 2001, when SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India) was banned by the Government of India. At that time, many Muslim youths were picked up all over the country and questioned as supposed SIMI activists. A majority of them in fact didn't have much to do with SIMI, but they were picked up all the same. In my area, the local police picked me up because there had been a dispute in the mosque in which I had been involved, and one man who had a problem with me then was a police informer. He told the police that I could be picked up during the SIMI raids and there would be no problem. I was picked up and regularly questioned by the police, beaten up, sent home, a case was filed against me and then closed, but I had come on the police radar because of it. After that they picked me up whenever there were any bomb blasts, like in Ghatkopar in 2003, in Mulund, at Gateway of India, or whenever there were any communal riot-like situations, they would pick me up, beat me up, have me sitting and waiting for hours, then let me off after some days. I used to think this was all part of regular 'police enquiries'," recalled Wahid to me.

"Somehow, as a young man of 20-21, I had the impression that the police may frame us in SIMI cases or small matters, but they would never do this in serious matters like the bomb blast cases. This is because I had been conditioned to 'cooperate' with the police, and because I also believed that for the bigger terrorism cases, the police would never frame anybody because they ran the risk of leaving the real perpetrators to do further damage. I thought, how will they produce evidence of framing innocents in blast cases? That is why, even though I had been listed as a SIMI sympathiser without having links with SIMI, I didn't really fear or mistrust the process of the police, or their questioning methods," said Wahid.

Wahid was picked up once more, in 2006, this time as a suspect in the Mumbai train blasts.

"They picked me up as part of their enquiry, then the beating happened, the sitting and waiting for hours, being sent home, only to be picked up again, sometimes from home, sometimes from school. I was made to mark attendance at the police station, and I did. The beatings were getting more frequent and my wife thought I should lodge a complaint about it, but I told her there was no need. It was only later that we understood how we must stand up at each stage of this," said Wahid.

There came a point in Wahid's speech, that he delivered to the audience at his book launch functions, when he had to explain how it was that he alone, out of all the accused, was acquitted when those who had been much further than him from Mumbai – two of the accused were in Kolkata and Nepal respectively, were still kept in prison. For this, he credited a lawyer who advised his wife to record the fact that the police had taken the keys to his house in Mumbra, while his wife had gone with their two small children to his parents' home in Thane, and he himself was in police custody. This timely advice is what saved him and changed the course of his case.

"My wife went to the GPO at Mumbai in the middle of the night, at 2 am, and sent a telegram to the Police Commissioner and Crime Branch officers that our house was under the control of the police and therefore anything found in it from that point was their responsibility. If this had not been done that night, anything could have been planted and shown as 'recovery' from my residence, and my fate would have been the same as my fellow accused," Wahid said, emphasizing this as an important preventive action because the 'confessional' and the 'recovery' are the two most important ways in which innocent people get framed by the police.

Begunaah Qaidi is a searing indictment of the Indian criminal justice system. Illustrious names from the police, some haloed by martyrdom, like the late Vijay Salaskar who died in the 26/11 terror attack, lose their sheen in the long account of torture and brutality. It becomes difficult to glorify the role played by men like ATS Chief K P Raghuvanshi and Mumbai Police Commissioner A N Roy, when we read not just how the lives of the 13 accused have been altered forever by their being charged in this case. But also, how a sensitive police officer like ACP Vinod Bhatt actually committed suicide after mentioning to Ehtesham Siddiqui, accused No. 4 in the case, that there was tremendous pressure on him by his higher ups to implicate the 13 men arrested even though he was convinced that they had nothing to do with the Mumbai train blasts.

At one point, Wahid has described Inspector Khanolkar standing in front of him with folded hands on the first floor of the Bhoiwada lock-up, apologizing for having kept him in custody for over two months, even knowing that he is innocent. "I promise I will try and do something for you," the policeman tells him. But how can a single individual make up for a system that seems to be based on religious profiling and discrimination?

Wahid has not written a surface account of his fellow accused. Rather, he establishes the innocence of each through a detailed description of their circumstances and how they have been trapped by the police. Abdul Wahid has chosen to tell the story of each of them from the beginning, their background, and the painful reconstruction of their interaction with the police.

What emerges is the picture of a motley crowd of young Muslims, mostly poor and struggling, picked at random and coerced and cajoled, threatened and tortured into 'confession' mode. In fact, as the voluminous charge sheet in the case begins to unravel in the pages of this book, one begins to seriously wonder: if the police had shown the same industriousness in actual investigation as they did in the rounding up of false witnesses and the fabrication of the case, would the outcome of the case have been totally different?

(Scharada Dubey is the author of several book including Bol Bam: Approaches to Shiva and Portraits from Ayodhya: Living India's Contradictions. The views are personal.)