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Intelligence failure or design? Karkare, Kamte and the campaign for 26/11 truth

Sukumar Muralidharan (sukumar.md@gmail.com)

Journalist, Gurgaon

ABSTRACT: For an event that traumatised the nation and created a

serious crisis of citizen loyalty to the Indian State, the

November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai have not been put

through a rigorous process of public accountability. Information

available in the public domain has frequently been inconsistent

and the official responses, often reflexive and formulaic, have

evaded serious scrutiny because they have conformed to a

predetermined template on terrorism. Though the pressures

enforcing conformity have been acute, a number of independent

analyses have emerged which point to the need for greater public

engagement with the process of unravelling the truth behind the

sixty hour siege of Mumbai. Dispassionate examination of all

available evidence indicates that terrorism in the current

millennium is a more complex phenomenon than ordinarily supposed,

with a vastly variegated cast of actors.

KEYWORDS: Mumbai, 26/11, terrorism, Islamic jihad, Hindutva,

Intelligence Bureau

Shock and grief are the first reactions to violence committed

with cruel premeditation. And then, anger and indignation. Spasms

of rage were unleashed when India’s maximum city – a vast and

teeming multitude where dreams are made and more often unmade --

was held under siege in a 60-hour ordeal of terror beginning 26

November 2008. Covered for most part in real-time by the

country’s numerous news channels, the initial shock at Mumbai’s

horror was followed soon enough, by the moment of mass derision,

of revulsion against the Indian practice of democratic politics.

The “political class”, guilty of complete indifference to the

daily anxieties that people face, was additionally held

responsible in its corrupt and inept ways, for the double

jeopardy of unpredictable and randomly targeted terrorist

violence faced by those who elected them.

Competition among news channels – at the time fighting the very

real possibility of falling victim to the September 2008

financial meltdown -- left no room to step back from the

hysteria. The media stoked the thirst for vengeance, but did

little to meet the greater public need for a dispassionate

investigation that would unravel the full conspiracy. Acts of

terror are designed to kill and maim without discrimination.

There may be a central target with a specific identity, but the

object most often is not merely to kill, but to destroy citizen

loyalty to the State and civic order. Those who suffer personal

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loss are condemned to live with it in a milieu that has little

time for them. Those who escape physical injury and personal

loss, nonetheless encounter their own vulnerability at very close

quarters and wonder if they could be less fortunate the next time

around. It is a moment when rational minds are susceptible to

irrational quick fix solutions and tend to gravitate towards

media platforms that advocate such remedies. In the deeply

overwrought moments of Mumbai 26/11, with emotions raw and the

sense of violation running deep, guilt may have been prejudged,

allowing little room for informed participation in judging how

best to deal with an event that deeply undermined citizen loyalty

to the State.1

On 21 November 2012, just ahead of the four-year anniversary of

Mumbai’s horror, India woke up to the news that Ajmal Amir Kasab,

the only survivor among the marauding gang of terrorists that had

held Mumbai hostage, had been put to death. Newspaper readers

that morning would have woken up to a story that Kasab’s plea for

commutation of the sentence of death, had been rejected by

President Pranab Mukherjee, who has the ultimate right to

determine when the quality of mercy is invoked.2 Readers of

another category of newspapers would have been told, without any

assurance that the information was accurate (since the headline

was hedged around by an interrogation mark), that Kasab may have

been shifted from Mumbai’s Arthur Road prison to Pune’s Yerawada

jail. There was no suggestion that the information, even if true,

was of any significance, other than the sensitivity of the 26/11

anniversary that approached.3

Cold print cannot quite convey the chortling delight with which

most of India’s channels broadcast the news of the hanging, when

they were not quarrelling angrily over who had first rights on

the breaking news. Newspapers the following day carried faint

echoes of the celebratory tone: “A Puppet’s Life Ends on a

String” said The Times of India (ToI), under a strap headline

which described the execution as a “top-secret operation executed

with surgical precision”; “26/11 Butcher Hanged”, said The

Hindustan Times (HT). The timing of the execution and its

announcement seemed programmed for the media, with the government

fielding spokespersons to maximally exploit the 24-hour cycle

1 Through this article “State” in upper case will refer to the apparatus of

governance of a nation, while “state” in lower case will refer to the

provincial jurisdictions in which the Indian union is organised for purposes of

administration. 2 The Indian Express, a multi-edition newspaper, published this story as its

lead in Delhi on November 21. It may have appeared in other editions too,

though there is no particular purpose served by further investigation of this

matter. 3 The Times of India had this story in its Delhi edition on November 21, though

without firm attribution and a fairly straightforward confession that it was

not sure of its sources. The mere stratagem of placing an interrogation mark

after the suggestion that Kasab had been shifted to Pune, served the purpose of

distancing the newspaper from any responsibility for its reporting.

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through which public hysteria ascends and just as rapidly

subsides. These spokespersons in turn struck a posture of

decisive action, of having lived up to some construct of a

masculine State that could take hard measures at just the time

they were being accused of effete softness. The country’s main

political opposition called for more executions as a firm

deterrent against terrorism, unsurprisingly focusing most demands

for fast-track dispatches to the gallows, on persons of the

religious minority. Again echoing this rising clamour for

retribution, ToI had right under its banner headline, a story

asking if Afzal Guru, the Kashmiri sentenced to death in a

judicial verdict that many question, would be next. HT also

addressed the question on its front page, assuring the readership

that the Home Ministry would take a “quick call” on it.

As through his trial, Kasab’s identity, his motivations and his

antecedents, were shrouded in mystery till the very moment of his

death. His burial in the premises of the Yerawada jail after his

putative family and the government of Pakistan refused to take

possession of his body, reinforced the image of a young vagrant

who was drawn into a brief career in extreme terror by material

inducements and the illusory promise of a paradise to come in the

after-life. One newspaper published an account of Kasab’s life

which was as much the documentation of a determined investigative

effort by a news reporter of Pakistani origin to locate the exact

coordinates of his origin, from sketchy details published of his

interrogation4. A popular news website revealed that he was a

sharp and canny learner who had picked up the Marathi language

while in custody, from police personnel assigned to his inner

security ring. As reported on a widely visited news website, he

had, “during the 26/11 trial surprised the Judge, policemen and

court officers with his humour and grasping power so much so that

he picked up Marathi and even conversed in it with everyone

around him”. Indeed, his understanding was of a very high order,

since he had, “ever since the trial began in May 2009 .... been

keenly observing the proceedings and (had) picked up bits of

English and even Marathi as witnesses, lawyers and the judge

spoke in those languages although the evidence was recorded in

English”.5

Other accounts of Kasab spoke of him as morose and taciturn. And

Mumbai’s prison authorities finally put to rest the fiction that

he had been treated to unimaginable gastronomic luxuries while in

detention. Kasab was served the same fare as all other prisoners,

they said, since departures from the prescribed regime were only

4 Saeed Shah,”Chasing a name in jihadi heartland”, The Hindu, (Delhi edition),

22 November 2012, page 11. 5 See the live online commentary posted on the website on the day of Kasab’s

execution at: http://news.rediff.com/commentary/2012/nov/21/liveupdates.htm.

Extracted at this writing, on 26 December 2012.

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permitted on health grounds.6 He was being guarded by an extra

layer of police deployment, but that was no special privilege,

just necessary precaution against an effort to rescue or

eliminate him.

It was a puzzling and inconsistent picture that emerged of the

person who had come for all of India, to symbolise the terrorist

menace. Curiously though, the rendition of Kasab’s linguistic

abilities that emerged after his execution, chimed with a random

bit of information put out during his trial in the highly secured

and fortified confines of a Mumbai prison. This solitary report

from PTI (the Press Trust of India), a news agency that does not

embellish factual recording of events with rhetoric, was

distanced from any responsibility for what was said, by the

simple device of identifying Kasab’s demonstration of Marathi

linguistic proficiency, as an “antic”.7 That rendition of events

has a troubling resonance with certain telling points made in a

book under review here, where S.M. Mushrif calls up eyewitness

testimony from one of the scenes of mayhem on 26/11 – Mumbai’s

Cama and Albless Hospital – suggesting that the attackers found

their way around in part, by interrogating those at the scene in

Marathi.8

Just under a month after Kasab’s execution, Pakistan’s Federal

Minister for the Interior, Rehman Malik, paid the visit to India

that had been earlier scheduled for mid-November, but then

deferred at Delhi’s insistence. There was no clear reason given

at the time for the postponement of the visit, which had the

agenda -- agreed well in advance -- of formalising a new

arrangement for the mutual grant of visas. But the imminence of

the 26/11 anniversary to the date originally fixed for the visit,

undoubtedly played a part. When the visit did finally occur, the

minister was characteristically blunt, seemingly unmindful of

diplomatic niceties. It is not clear that he was briefed

sufficiently in advance about the issues he would likely be

ambushed by. But Rehman Malik must surely have been aware that

Pakistan’s intent in the matter of Maulana Mohammad Hafiz Saeed,

the cleric believed to have inspired and planned the 26/11

attacks, would be among the principal questions he would have to

6 “Jail tale: Biryani myth and the quiet inmate”, The Hindustan Times, November

22, 2012, p 1. 7 The report from PTI was headlined, “Now, Kasab chooses Marathi to answer

questions” and was carried in the Times of India the following day. It is

available as of 26 December 2012 at:

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-20/india/28145555_1_ajmal-

kasab-judge-m-l-tahaliyani-girgaum-chowpatty. 8 S.M. Mushrif, Who Killed Karkare? The real face of terrorism in India, (Fifth

Edition), Pharos Media and Publishing, Delhi, 2011, pp 196. Three media reports

are cited in support of this contention: from the Maharashtra Times (a Marathi

language daily), and the Mumbai editions of the Times of India and the

Hindustan Times. The authenticity of the citation from the Times of India has

been checked. It is available at page 15 in the Mumbai edition of November 29,

2008.

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address in the odyssey to India. When the occasion arose, Malik

responded with an affirmation of Pakistan’s commitment to take

all action warranted by the evidence it was presented. India’s

bill of indictment against Hafiz Saeed, based entirely on Kasab’s

confession, by implication, did not meet the standards of proof

needed for action under criminal law.

The visiting Pakistani dignitary’s locutions were taken by Indian

counterparts as an insufferable affront, an expression of disdain

for the multiple dossiers that had been presented, which

ostensibly laid out a compelling and clear-cut case against Hafiz

Saeed. With the media proving more than willing to echo and

amplify the official sense of offended hauteur, the little

information accessible to the public was buried in rote

statements of loyalty to the theology that terrorism was

exclusively and uniquely a creation of the country next door.

In August 2009, India’s Ministry of External Affairs called in

envoys of major western nations for a briefing on the diplomatic

state of play in securing justice for 26/11. The U.S. embassy in

Delhi soon afterwards put the proceedings on record as a

diplomatic cable to the U.S. State Department and key missions

abroad. Appended to the cable was the full text of the dossier

presented that very day to the Pakistan government. In March

2011, as part of a collaborative effort with the citizen

journalism website Wikileaks, The Hindu published the text of the

diplomatic cable with the annexed dossier.9

Though it had acquired compelling mystique as a document that

applied irresistible moral pressure on Pakistan, the intelligence

dossier proved a fairly simple document to negotiate. Brief and

relatively uncomplicated in its narration of facts, it was based

entirely on the confessions rendered by Kasab and two fellow

detainees: Fahim Ansari and Sabahuddin Sheikh, who were already

in Indian custody at the time of 26/11 but went on trial with

Kasab on charges of possessing prior knowledge and making a

material contribution to the attacks.

Considering its contents, it really needs to be asked why the

dossier was not made public at the very time it was presented to

the Pakistan government. The term “public” in India is subject to

various interpretations, but it could be understood in an

inclusive sense, as anybody who has a stake – direct or indirect

– in knowing about an event of consequence. There is also in

possession of this “public”, a fair legal knowledge, as also the

ability to arrive at a reasonable assessment of the value of

confessions made in police custody. International criminal

9 See, “India’s ‘Grade 1’ Evidence Against Hafiz Saeed in the Mumbai Attacks”,

The Hindu, March 27, 2011, (Delhi edition) page 1; extracted 26 December 2012

from: http://www.thehindu.com/news/the-india-cables/article1574314.ece.

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cooperation normally requires that stringent criteria be met. The

Indian government was undoubtedly very ambitious in expecting a

foreign government to initiate criminal proceedings against a

citizen on the basis of a detailed narrative of events by an

individual of uncertain provenance but wide linguistic ability –

from Punjabi to Urdu and then, Marathi. It may have been smart as

politics, but not so convincing as legal strategy in an

international domain.

Kasab’s living testimony – rather than the confession rendered in

custody – would have been key in bringing to book others who

allegedly played a role in the 26/11 horror. And here, there was

Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi, ostensibly the military operations head of

the Lashkar-e-Taiyaba (LeT) militant outfit, who was – apart from

Hafiz Saeed -- in the line of sight of Indian enforcement

agencies.

Viewed in this manner, Kasab’s execution could be seen as a

potential impediment to the successful prosecution of other key

figures involved in the conspiracy. If the decision to bring

forward his execution – as the morbid imagery of the day puts it,

by “jumping the queue” – was made after due consideration of the

longer-term implications, there is a need to explain what it

means for the integrity of the trial process.

Among the counts on which Kasab was convicted and executed, was

the murder of eight police personnel just outside the Cama

Hospital premises. Those killed included two officers from the

IPS cadre, Hemant Karkare and Ashok Kamte, one senior inspector,

Vijay Salaskar, and five constables, Bapurao Durgude, Balasaheb

Bhosale, Arun Chite, Jayawant Patil and Yogesh Patil. Detailed

post-mortem examinations and ballistics matches for the bullets

that caused these deaths were by all accounts carried out. And

the outcome of these ballistics tests, in the case of Karkare,

was summarised in the 1,500 page trial court judgment in fairly

clear terms: “..the bullets received from the dead body were sent

to the ballistic (sic) expert. The comparison did not lead to any

conclusive opinion whether the bullets tallied with those test

fired from the weapons held by the accused number 1 (Kasab) or

the deceased accused number 1 (Abu Ismail)”.

Similarly, the trial court judgment summarises the findings from

the technical analysis of two bullets recovered from Salaskar’s

body in the following terms: “They were sent to ballistic expert

for examination. The comparison did not lead to any conclusive

opinion”.10

10 In the Court of Sessions for Greater Mumbai, Sessions Case Number 175 of

2009, The State of Maharashtra versus Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amir Kasab and

others, judgment dated 6th May 2010, paragraphs 803-4.

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These findings were reaffirmed by the Bombay High Court which

heard and decided Kasab’s appeal against the death penalty.11 Yet

these were not deemed to be a serious infirmity in the case of

the prosecution, since proof of guilt did not require that every

piece of evidence should tally: merely that the preponderance of

evidence should suggest guilt. At the final stage of appeal, the

Supreme Court held that the ballistics tests firmly established

Kasab’s responsibility in the killing of at least six people, not

including either Karkare or Salaskar, while Kamte’s death was in

all probability caused by Abu Ismail, who accompanied him in the

rampage of terror through Bombay VT and its environs.12

Factually, despite Kasab’s guilt being established and the most

extreme punishment meted out, there is sufficient reason to allow

S.M. Mushrif the indulgence of posing the question that titles

his book: “Who Killed Karkare?” might seem a superfluous question

for all signed up devotees of the official theology on 26/11 and

the wider issue of terrorism. But the plain facts, which the

evidence recorded in judicial proceedings vouch for, show that

this is a far from settled question.

Hemant Karkare is the most senior Indian official to fall to

terrorism in recent years. Chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad

(ATS) of Maharashtra Police, he was killed in a firefight in the

near vicinity of Mumbai’s iconic railway station – the

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST, or Bombay VT in common usage)

– during the very early hours of the attacks. Having joined

Maharashtra Police in 1976 and been inducted into the IPS in

1981, Mushrif was one year ahead of Karkare in cadre seniority.

And his judgment is that Karkare paid a price that day for having

dismantled the official theology while investigating a September

2008 bomb blast in Malegaon town in Maharashtra, among the first

terrorist acts to occur under his watch at the ATS. The official

narrative sought to locate this incident within the template of

the Islamic holy war or jihad. But Karkare’s investigations

revealed the hand of a terror ring of a rather different

religious stripe.

That breakthrough opened up new lines of insight into a

collaborative venture between Hindutva fundamentalists and an

active-duty military intelligence officer. It was a campaign of

provocation, well-endowed and systematic, which was assured of

impunity merely because the axiom that all acts of terror had

their inspiration in the ideology of Islamic jihad, had secured

wide social diffusion and acceptance, in part through the lazy

11 In the High Court of Judicature at Bombay, Criminal Appellate Jurisdiction,

Confirmation Case Number 2 of 2010 in Sessions Case Number 175 of 2009, The

State of Maharashtra versus Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amir Kasab alias Abu

Mujahid, 21st February 2011, paragraphs 322-4.

12 In the Supreme Court of India, Criminal Appellate Jurisdiction, Criminal

Appeal Numbers 1899 and 1900 of 2011, Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amir Kasab alias

Abu Mujahid versus State of Maharashtra, August 29, 2012, paragraph 264.

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compliance of the media. Even when the targets of terror were

communities and symbols of the Islamic faith – as with the

Malegaon blasts at a Muslim cemetery in September 2006, the fire-

bombing of the Samjhauta Express near Delhi in February 2007, or

the carnage at Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid in May 2007 and Ajmer’s

Dargah sharif in October 2007 – theories were easily deployed of

sectarian divisions between various schools of Islam, to put the

atrocities down to the holy warriors.

The volume that Mushrif has authored ranges widely, including in

considering the fashion in which the multiple terrorist incidents

in India over the last decade have been investigated, and the

culture of absolute exemption from informed public scrutiny that

has flourished among the police force because of the reflexive

tendency to blame the country’s Muslim population for every

outrage against innocent civilian life. Mushrif’s forensic

abilities are evident in the manner that he sifts through

mountains of information, gathered in the main from media

reports, unravelling the truly important narrative details. The

official narrative of events is placed in the spatial and

temporal context of Mumbai as it was that fateful night of 26/11.

Mushrif raises a number of compelling questions, though the

embellishments he adds on how the police force is organised and

the ideological doctrines that inspire the country’s main

intelligence agency, may detract from the factual narrative.

Beyond all the mystifying details which Mushrif assembles, the

inference he points towards is simple: Karkare may have been

victim of a conspiracy intended to keep the lid on the Hindutva

terror ring that India’s principal intelligence agency had

extended its patronage to.

The proposition is simply that the Intelligence Bureau is a

bastion of a particular variety of chauvinism, intent on little

less than the transformation of the character of the Indian

State. “Brahminism” as Mushrif characterises it, adopted the

communal riot as the preferred stratagem in the first few decades

of Indian independence, confident that dissent would be

suppressed in the ambience of violence between religious

communitiesThe “Bahujan” – or the disenfranchised majority –

would in the process, be herded into compliance designs of the

Brahminical majority. When this stratagem reached its limits,

without really managing to quell all sources of dissent, the

focus shifted to “Islamic terror”.

Mushrif prefaces his formal entry into the forensic analysis of

26/11 with an excursus into recent terrorist strikes. These

seemed to point the finger of suspicion at Islamic extremist

organisations. On closer examination though, they were seen to

suggest quite a different religious and ideological inspiration.

He lays out a trail of information that points towards hasty and

ill-considered investigation into these attacks which led

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seemingly, to instant and decisive results, simply because they

were seen to fit the master narrative of Islamic terror.

Information that Mushrif presents may not, in itself, seem

entirely persuasive. But this is only because he is assembling

facts from diverse sources, mostly from the media. These

individual wisps of data suffer from the basic infirmity of media

sources. Partly because of the short attention spans that are a

feature of media sources – partly because of their acquiescence

in the master narrative of Islamic terrorism -- these isolated

bits of information are not integrated into a broader picture.

Mushrif begins with the serial bombing of a number of suburban

trains during evening rush hour in Mumbai in July 2006 – a crime

that was reflexively put down to the Students Islamic Movement of

India (SIMI) and to various confederate bodies overseas,

including the LeT. The narrative then looks at other key episodes

in the chain of serial bombings that India witnessed between then

and 26/11. Mushrif has no inside knowledge, but there is a

scepticism arises from the picture he assembles that, in light of

subsequent revelations, seems amply well-placed.

Though Karkare died on that night of carnage, the processes he

had set in motion acquired a certain momentum. Investigations

have now uncovered that the relatively minor terrorist incident

of September 2008, which first led him to the Hindutva terror

ring, was part of a sequence of provocative actions, all

undertaken in the evident belief that the true perpetrators would

enjoy impunity in an environment dominated by the belief that all

terrorism was necessarily Islamic in origin. Diligent media

investigations have also uncovered how the prosecution in all

these cases, followed a set pattern, which did not seriously

challenge the intelligence or the imagination, in assembling what

purported to be the evidence against young men of the Muslim

faith picked up at random. The same SIMI pamphlet and a well-

thumbed copy of the Islamic scripture had a tendency to turn up

in various locations. And all those who were taken in on terror

charges showed very similar proclivities to declaim angrily in

public about the grievances of the Muslim community and their

intent to seek vengeance.13

The case case of a Muslim youth implicated in the Malegaon blast

of 2006 who since turned approver, adds a further element of

mystery. Now at liberty, this individual has testified that he

had been pressured by the Maharashtra ATS to name a number of

other innocent men from the community as a price of his freedom.

As part of his work as an informer, he had in fact, been taken by

officials of the Maharashtra ATS to a meeting with Lt-Col

13 See the very important series of six articles by Muzamil Jaleel under the

strap headline “The SIMI Scare” which appeared in the Delhi edition of the

Indian Express between September 25 and October 1 2012; available for download

as of 16 December 2012 at: http://www.indianexpress.com/fullcoverage/the-simi-

scare/459/.

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Shrikant Purohit, the military intelligence officer since

identified by Karkare and arrested for his involvement in the

Hindutva terror ring.14

Mushrif pulls together a number of details to establish that the

story of Mumbai 26/11 remains incompletely told. These may seem

like petty quibbles to those who have committed themselves to the

official narrative, but they add up – especially when augmented

with the information available from a number of other sources –

to a substantive case. First, an eyewitness to the beaching of

the inflatable dinghy that brought the terrorists ashore, Mushrif

points out, is on record saying that she saw no more than eight

individuals getting off the craft. This runs contrary to the

official narrative that there were in fact, ten terrorists from

Pakistan who came ashore.15 Mushrif’s inference from here is

simply that there were already two men in Mumbai at the time, who

carried out a quite distinct agenda under the shroudThe Indian

Navy’s intelligence wing, he claims, had spotted the craft

bearing lethal gunmen to Mumbai and had alerted the IB to

imminent danger. The IB though, chose not to act since it

ostensibly, had other plans.16

Mushrif finds the circumstance that the gunmen at Bombay VT

targeted a large number of Muslim persons, many of whom bore

visible markers of their faith, to be especially suspicious.17

This ran contrary to media reports emerging out of Kasab’s

preliminary interrogation, where he is believed to have said that

his mission was to kill without discrimination, but to avoid

harming those who could be identified as Muslims. Further,

Mushrif finds it far from convincing that the official story on

the closed-circuit TV cameras installed at Bombay VT, should have

gone through a rather unsubtle change in a rather limited time.

Early reports indicated that a good part of the carnage in the

Bombay VT concourse through which long-distance passengers pass,

had been captured in CCTV footage. About a fortnight afterwards,

the narrative changed: the crucial security equipment, it was put

out, were found to be malfunctioning that day and had not

14 The story originally appeared in the newsmagazine The Week, see: “Smoking

Gun”, The Week, published November 19, 2012, extracted on 31 December 2012

from: http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi-

bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.do?contentId=12855617&programId=10737

55753&tabId=13&BV_ID=@@@&categoryId=-189461. Later, the ToI also carried a

story with a similar thrust, see: “Malegaon Blast Witness now Blames ATS: NIA

Baffled”, The Times of India, Delhi edition, December 3 2012, page 10;

available on December 31 2012 at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/NIA-

puzzled-as-Malegaon-blast-witness-flip-flops/articleshow/17457707.cms?. 15 Mushrif, page 207.

16 Ibid, page 186.

17 He records (page 198-9) that persons of the Muslim faith were 22 out of the

46 fatalities at Bombay VT. According to the chargesheet filed against Kasab

and taken on board by the trial court, 18 out of a recorded 52 deaths at Bombay

VT were of persons with identifiably Muslim names. Two of the casualties

remained unidentified at the time of the trial.

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succeeded in recording much that would be of investigative

value.18

Early reports that Mushrif diligently tracks down, point to the

southern Maharashtra town of Satara as the source for the SIM

cards used in mobile telephones that Kasab and Abu Ismail

carried. This trail of investigation, like much else that called

into question the master narrative, soon ran dry. And during the

sixty hours of siege, the terrorists wreaking havoc in Mumbai and

their handlers in Pakistan engaged in no fewer than 284 telephone

calls through the “voice over internet protocol”. Not one of

these, Mushrif points out, involved either Kasab or Abu Ismail.

Other media reports quoting eyewitnesses, describe the two gunmen

who inflicted the damage at Bombay VT running down the platform

and disappearing into the night, rather than – as the official

story suggests – walking over a foot-bridge to cross the road and

continue the carnage at the Cama Hospital.19 Kasab and Abu Ismail

in other words, were already at the Cama Hospital at this time,

executing a quite distinct part of the plan.

Aside from being sole survivor of the gang of marauders, Kasab

also occupies another unique niche: of the ten terrorists who

allegedly landed their craft on a small stretch of beach in the

south of Mumbai, he is the only one to be captured in still

images of remarkable clarity on the night of carnage. This was

the accomplishment of two photojournalists from a newspaper with

an office adjacent to Bombay VT. Mushrif finds this to be the a

source of some mystery. The publishing of the photograph in a

variety of news platforms without clear attribution, he suggests,

is a circumstance inviting suspicion.20 Indeed, mainly by virtue

of these pictures, Kasab’s guilt was regarded so much of a

theological certainty, that the Shiv Sena, a political party

which believes that its writ should be the law in Mumbai, managed

at several junctures to thwart any possibiity that he might have

competent legal defence.21

18 Ibid, page 191.

19 Ibid, pages 193-6.

20 Ibid, page 205-6. The circumstances in which the pictures of Kasab were taken

and published have been narrated in the Supreme Court verdict dealing with

Kasab’s appeal. Sebastian D’Souza and Sriram Vernekar, both of whom work at the

Times of India building just opposite Bombay VT, have been identified as the

photographers. D’Souza is widely credited with the best known picture of Kasab,

“striding across the corridors of Bombay VT” (see the commentary on the media

website, extracted 31 December 2012 from:

http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/the-toi-lensman-who-nailed-ajmal-

kasabs-fate/). According to the deposition made before the Supreme Court as it

heard Kasab’s appeal, D’Souza “shot over one hundred photographs, but most of

them were blurred”. This is because “he was not using the flash-gun and the

light was not good for taking photographs”. The picture of Kasab that has been

widely published was one among three that he shot from behind a pillar. (See In

the Supreme Court of India, Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amir Kasab versus State of

Maharashtra, paragraphs 122 to 134). 21 The Supreme Court in its judgment (paragraph 121) had words of high praise

for the two photographers: “While dealing with the VT carnage, we must take

12

Mushrif’s volume emerged in its first edition in 2009, well

before Kasab’s trial was concluded. It has since gone into five

editions, representing not just a certain degree of audience

interest, but also a continuous effort at bringing inferences

abreast of best available facts. Many of the new revelations in

fact, emerged on account of the diligence of Vinita Kamte, widow

of one of the police officers killed on the night of terror. A

lawyer with specialisation in labour matters, Vinita Kamte was

impelled into making her own inquiries about 26/11 by a sense of

personal loss and by a lawyer’s reluctance to accept illogical

and factually implausible scenarios.22 Her account of that night

focuses especially on the circumstances that claimed the life of

her husband Ashok Kamte, Additional Commissioner of Police for

Mumbai’s east zone. She had to invest a great deal of time and

energy merely in uncovering the basic facts that should have been

hers as a matter of right. But at every point in her effort she

encountered a dogged refusal by the Mumbai police hierarchy to

reveal facts about how it had lost a conscientious and highly

regarded officer. Vinita Kamte’s book was published at around the

one-year anniversary mark of the Mumbai attacks. It is an

emotionally moving narrative, factually invaluable in its

presentation of the wireless record of messages exchanged as some

of Mumbai’s top police officials sought to deal with a challenge

that dropped on them, with neither any warning nor any “how to”

information being available from their training manuals.

As ATS chief, Karkare was among the first to engage the armed

desperadoes as they began to cut a destructive swathe through

Mumbai. He was killed in the near vicinity of Bombay VT, soon

after the armed raiders had unleashed a lethal storm of bullets

on the commuter crowd taking trains home after a day’s hard work

and then run rampage through the long-distance train terminal.

Karkare was killed in an ambush in which Kamte and Salaskar -- an

inspector held in awe for his formidable weapons expertise and

his record in summarily eliminating criminal suspects in so-

called “encounters” – also perished, alongside a number of

colleagues from the police force.

The three officers are today remembered for their sterling sense

of duty in confronting terrorist attackers whose intent was

shrouded in mystery. According to the prosecution case which led

note of two witnesses. Their evidence is extraordinary in that they not only

witnessed the incident but also made a visual record of the event by taking

pictures of the two killers in action and their victims… Both the witnesses,

caring little for their own safety and displaying exemplary professionalism,

followed the killers”. It was rare, considering the pre-determined character of

Kasab’s guilt, to find any manner of media analysis of the numerous procedural

infirmities in his trial. An exception is V. Venkatesan, “Gaps in Kasab case”,

Frontline, November 16 2012, extracted on 31 December 2012 from:

http://www.frontline.in/fl2922/stories/20121116292203700.htm. 22 Vinita Kamte with Vinita Deshmukh, To The Last Bullet, The Inspiring Story of

Braveheart Ashok Kamte, Ameya Prakashan, Pune, November 2009.

13

to Kasab’s conviction, the terrorists began their mass murder at

various spots in Mumbai – Bombay VT and the Leopold Cafe in

Colaba – between 21:15 and 21:30 hours that night. Karkare, Kamte

and Salaskar converged at Bombay VT at different times, but after

the two (or more) desperadoes had fled the venue. The three

policemen then followed the trail to the premises of the nearby

Cama Hospital.

At one point, a police vehicle, described in prosecution

documents as a “Qualis belonging to ACP Pydhonie” – or, in plain

language, a vehicle of Toyota make assigned to the Assistant

Commissioner of Police in the Pydhonie division of Mumbai city --

drove up to the venue of the mayhem. As the prosecution case then

states, the three officers took over the vehicle – Salaskar at

the wheel, Kamte beside him and Karkare in the row behind. In the

rear of the vehicle, normally configured with three rows of

seats, were Jaywant Patil, Yogesh Patil and Balasaheb Bhosale. A

fourth constable, Arun Jadhav, Salaskar’s subordinate in the

Anti-Extortion Wing of the Mumbai police, who had arrived at the

site responding to superior orders, also took his place in the

rear row. The idea ostensibly was to drive through the Rangbhavan

Lane (officially known as the Badruddin Tyabji Marg), which

connected two major thoroughfares in the area and enter the

hospital that was then in the grip of terror, through the front

gate. The police team was fired upon and returned fire as it

drove through Rangbhavan Lane. One among the eyewitness accounts

speaks of a “hefty man in a police uniform” stepping out of the

front left seat of the Qualis and firing at the attackers, before

a deathly silence fell.23 Everybody in the vehicle had been hit

though perhaps not immediately killed. Only Jadhav lived to tell

the tale.

What Jadhav has said in the courtroom tallies with the account

rendered by one other eyewitness.24 The bare details also match

Kasab’s account, which of course was rendered from a rather

different perspective. Incapacitated by the gunfire and cramped

for space by the three injured policemen who had collapsed around

him, Jadhav was unable to reach for his rifle to engage the

terrorists any further. Playing dead was his only recourse. As he

lay in what was undoubtedly a state of deep trauma in the rear

seat, in close proximity with three inert bodies, he sensed the

two terrorists trying to open the rear door of the vehicle.

Failing in that effort since the doors had jammed after absorbing

a severe volley of bullets, they opened the front door and pulled

out the bodies of the three senior policemen. The taller among

the two then took the wheel, while the other, of markedly shorter

23 Vinita Kamte, page 50. “Hefty man in a police uniform” is a description that

matches Ashok Kamte. 24 The first media reports citing Arun Jadhav’s testimony from that night were

also consistent with what later became the prosecution case. See “’They Threw

Salaskar, Kamte and Karkare’s Bodies from the Vehicle’”, The Indian Express,

Delhi, November 30, 2008, page 7.

14

stature, took the seat beside. The two then drove towards Nariman

Point, but their vehicle had been damaged and indeed, one of the

tyres had been punctured in the exchange of gunfire. Realising

they could not get far, the terrorists stopped in the vicinity of

Nariman Point, and waved down a passing car that was on its way

to pick up somebody who had providentially escaped the massacre

in the Oberoi Trident hotel. Jadhav registered the make of the

car in his mind’s eye as a Honda Accord, but subsequent police

action, which led to the seizure of the car, established that it

was a Skoda.

Kasab has then recounted that his companion who again took the

wheel , drove towards Marine Drive with the intention of finally

arriving at Malabar Hill. This is one of Mumbai’s most storied

neighbourhoods, where much of its wealth resides, but Kasab at

this point was unclear about the deeper intent. The precise

location they were driving towards, was to be revealed only after

they arrived in the neighbourhood.

Alerted by now, police personnel from various locations had

converged at a few key points and set up protective barricades.

Among these points was Girgaon Chowpatty, just around the halfway

point of the intended traverse of the two terrorists. Forced to

stop by the formidable double barricade they faced, the two

marauders emerged, one of them flopping down on the road in

feigned helplessness, while the other, who came out of the

driver’s seat, began firing at the assembled police contingent.

Though only armed with service revolvers and weapons that were no

match for the firepower of the AK 47 they faced, the police

contingent managed to eliminate the more aggressive among the

duo, later identified as Abu Ismail. As Assistant Sub-Inspector

Tukaram Ombale began approaching the prone figure of the other

terrorist, it suddenly sprang into action, spewing deadly gunfire

at him. Though seriously – and as it turned out, fatally –

injured, Ombale fell upon his assailant, allowing colleagues

sufficient time to come into the action. Kasab, for that was the

identity of the terrorist who had played dead at Chowpatty, was

overpowered in quick time and thus did he end up on a hospital

bed, from where he recounted over the next few days, the sordid

conspiracy that led to Mumbai’s sixty hour ordeal of terror.

Arun Jadhav has been a key witness for the prosecution, as too

have been the owner and other occupants of the car that Kasab and

Ismail supposedly hijacked at Nariman Point. Jadhav may have at

one point added an unseemly embellishment to his account, for

which the trial court felt compelled to admonish him. Jadhav’s

testimony indicated that during their drive from Cama Hospital to

Nariman Point, the terrorists who had commandeered the police

vehicle, had fired bursts of gunfire at random. This was an

obvious untruth, the trial court observed, though one that did

not invalidate the rest of Jadhav’s testimony. The policeman in

the judgment of the court could be forgiven for this seeming

15

effort to sensationalise his trauma that day for the benefit of

news channels in search of sensation even at the cost of

veracity.25

The court’s determination aside, it is a fact that there was a

drive by shooting in the vicinity of Bombay VT the night of

26/11. That incident, captured in blurred images by a TV news

crew as curious onlookers scattered in panic, has not been

accurately placed within the day’s events.

Another key witness for the prosecution who played dead only to

live to tell the tale, was Maruti Phad, driver for a senior civil

servant, called to duty at the late hour after an urgent meeting

was summoned at the Maharashtra state government secretariat.

Phad, who lived in the vicinity of Bombay VT, started his car and

took the Rangbhavan Lane to get to his superior official’s

residence, but was confronted with a withering hail of gunfire.

Injured in his hand and lower abdomen, he locked the car from

within and played dead. The gunmen then made an effort to

commandeer the car but gave up on finding it locked and retreated

into the bushes fringing Rangbhavan Lane. Phad got a clear view

of the two through his windshield and witnessed the exchange of

fire that followed shortly afterwards with a police car,

established by temporal correspondence to have been the vehicle

carrying Karkare, Kamte and Salaskar.

Major newspapers on December 1, had pictures of Kasab in his

hospital bed. Reports in the press at the time offered a

reconstruction of the entire operation, from the point of

embarkation in Karachi to the raiders’ landing on a small stretch

of beach adjoining Badhwar Park near Mumbai’s Colaba

neighbourhood. Kasab’s confession from his hospital bed provided

valuable clues for the search operation already launched by the

Indian Navy and Coast Guard, which shortly afterwards brought to

shore the M.V. Kuber, a fishing boat registered in Gujarat, in

which the terrorists had completed a crucial stretch of their

journey. Seized on the high seas, the Kuber still had on board

the decapitated body of the hapless crew member designated to

steer the terrorists to their destination and brutally disposed

of, once he had served his purpose. A headless body was also

recovered in the open sea and identified as the remains of

another Kuber crew member, killed at the moment the boat was

seized. Others among the five-member crew that embarked from

Porbandar port on November 14 for what was a routine fishing

expedition, have not been traced.

Court proceedings indicate that the Kuber was brought ashore and

recorded as evidence in the criminal prosecution late on the

night of 27 November. The panchanama -- or witness testimony that

25 In the Court of Sessions for Greater Mumbai, The State of Maharashtra versus

Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amir Kasab and others, page 1189 (paragraph 992).

16

attests to the the accuracy of the official record on the event -

- was signed by Chandrakant Jadhav, a Sub-Inspector in Mumbai

Police, who was on duty at his post through the night of 26

November and beyond. At 10:30 on the morning of 27 November, he

was summoned to Mumbai’s Nair Hospital to record the confessional

statement of the lone terrorist seized alive. Late that evening,

he was called to Mumbai’s Sassoon Docks to officially sign the

panchanama on the seizure of the M.V. Kuber. Doubtless under the

pressure of the workload he had been asked to undertake,

Chandrakant Jadhav made the error of recording the date as 27

November, when the actual documentation of the evidence on board

the Kuber, was only completed the following day.

These details emerged from Kasab’s trial in the Mumbai Sessions

Court and have been reaffirmed as reliable findings of fact by

the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court. While the trial

process was underway, other developments, driven in particular by

the media, seemed to cause a few dissonances in the theological

narrative of guilt and punishment that had enveloped public

perceptions of 26/11. On 29 June 2009, Channel 4 in Britain

broadcast an hour-long documentary titled “Terror in Mumbai”,

with extensive footage from the interrogation of Kasab in his

hospital bed and recordings of phone conversations between the

terrorist raiders at three other spots in Mumbai and their

handlers. Close-circuit TV cameras at the Taj Mahal and Oberoi

Trident hotels had recorded crucial stages of the unfolding

tableau of destruction, revealing in some parts the cool

deliberation of the armed intruders, their remorseless intent and

occasional sense of awe at the opulence of the milieu they were

wreaking havoc within.

India’s official investigation was thrown into deep confusion,

but spared serious embarrassment by the seeming complicity of the

media in keeping these vital bits of information outside the

public dialogue. No clear explanation exists for this

indifference towards a documentary that laid out in ruthless

detail how those days of terror unfolded – other perhaps than the

self-evident one, that the Indian news channels were in complete

denial about the moral and material sustenance they had possibly

rendered the terrorists, with their over-heated, breathless and

factually challenged coverage.26 A Mumbai-based tabloid, among the

few newspapers to take note of the documentary, reported that it

had left the police “red-faced”. An unnamed senior officer of the

Mumbai police, “on condition of anonymity”, told the newspaper

that Channel 4 was in breach of a “verbal understanding” that the

“footage would be aired only after Qasab's (sic) trial was over”.

26 The Supreme Court, in disposing of Kasab’s appeal, reserved a few choice

words of censure for the media for precisely this. See In the Supreme Court of

India, Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amir Kasab versus State of Maharashtra,

paragraphs 402-7.

17

Producer Dan Reed denied any agreement “verbal or otherwise” over

the use of the footage in his documentary: “This material was not

released to us by the Mumbai police. My documentary has been

screened in the UK only. Channel 4 websites carrying the material

are not accessible from India”. In other words, the main worry of

the Mumbai police – that the telecast of the documentary would

prejudice trial proceedings against Kasab – was without

substance.27 The Mumbai police however, are yet to come up with a

credible explanation of how the entire video documentation of

26/11 was made available to a British TV channel, when most of

India had no clear understanding, aside from the theological

rendition provided in the early hours of the atrocity.

Citizens in India would have another reason to worry at the

denial of information, including the first confessional statement

from the solitary survivor. There is a young boy, Afroz Ansari,

not more than twelve years old, who appears in the Channel 4

documentary in its early minutes, asking what the gunmen could

possibly gain from the slaying of both his parents, sister and

three others among his immediate family. There is Bharat Navadia

who was hit on the shoulder in that initial killing spree and saw

his wife falling, while his young children, unable to understand

their mother’s collapse in an inert heap, hugged her close with

tears streaming down their faces. And then there is Vinita Kamte,

who was not featured in the documentary but has emerged as a

major spokesperson for the public right to know the full story,

who fought a long battle to dispel the shroud of theological

certainty over 26/11, and motivated Kavita Karkare, another

person with a deep sense of loss, to ask the questions that would

bring the official narrative to a crisis of credibility.28

By January 2009, Vinita Kamte had exhausted all hope of gaining

credible answers to the questions that came crowding into her

mind. On January 11, The Hindu carried an account of her

disappointment that the Maharashtra police -- which she

considered part of her own extended family -- was being

completely inattentive to her need to know.29 Vinita Kamte was

especially offended that her partner’s death was being put down

27 “Terror in Mumbai is Eye-Opener for Police”, MidDay, July 13, 2009, available

as of 31 December 2012 under the byline Alisha Coelho, at: http://www.mid-

day.com/news/2009/jul/130709-Mumbai-terror-attack-Mumbai-police-Ajmal-Amir-

Qasab-confession-26-11-Dan-Reed.htm. 28 Karkare’s widow indeed found from her inquiries, that the bullet-proof jacket

worn by the ATS chief as he went into his armed engagement with the terrorists,

had been lost shortly afterwards. Suspicions were naturally aroused over a

possible intent to hide some damaging information. An official inquiry by the

Maharashtra police, concluded by mid-2010, established that this was sheer

negligence, rather than intent. The news agencies reported this finding on June

11 2010. See a version of the story at this link, extracted on 31 December 2012

from: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Karkare--s-bullet-proof-vest-misplaced-

in-hospital--Police/632616. 29 “My Husband Died a Hero’s Death: Vinita Kamte”, The Hindu, January 11, 2009,

p 9: extracted on 31 December 2012 from:

http://www.hindu.com/2009/01/11/stories/2009011160430900.htm.

18

to impetuosity and a tendency to rush in to situations without an

assessment of the risks involved. Her inquiries, including

interviews with eyewitnesses to the Rangbhavan Lane encounter,

had convinced her that Ashok Kamte had gone in with full

knowledge of what he was getting into. His weapons expertise in

fact, had been instrumental in incapacitating one of the

terrorists then holding Cama hospital hostage. He had made a

quick assessment following this first exchange of fire and spoken

out aloud about the need to bring the army in. Vinita Kamte was

convinced that the response of the police force then had been

inadequate. She had reason to believe that “there were many calls

made to the (police) control room by people near the Cama

hospital who saw the two terrorists”. And yet, she discovered,

there were no instructions relayed to Karkare, Kamte and

Salaskar, that driving into Rangbhavan Lane could put them at

risk of a vicious ambush.

Vinita Kamte was deeply troubled about the circumstances in which

Ashok was summoned out of his distant jurisdiction towards a

virtual battle zone, when the officers with direct responsibility

were not very much in evidence. Her own telephone calls to Ashok

as he set out from his distant Chembur residence, revealed that

his destination was the Oberoi Trident in Nariman Point, where

Mumbai’s Police Commissioner, Hasan Ghafoor had directed him. At

some point, Ashok Kamte who had packed his AK 47 weapon as he set

out, was ordered off that course and shifted – obviously by an

officer in the higher chain of command -- towards Bombay VT. And

then followed the events that Arun Jadhav narrated from the

hospital bed where he was confined soon after the events.30

Vinita Kamte’s inquiries unravelled more mystifying details about

the events of 26/11. Her request to be given Ashok’s autopsy

report was thwarted and grudgingly granted after great effort on

her part. And with all the connections she had within the IPS

cadre, always portrayed as a family united in common endeavour,

she never could find a satisfactory explanation of the sequence

of decisions from higher in the chain of command, which brought

Ashok to the Bombay VT area. An interview with commissioner Hasan

Ghafoor revealed that Ashok’s arrival and the first bursts he had

fired from his AK 47 had perhaps convinced the terrorists then

holding Cama hospital, that they faced a serious challenge,

forcing them to flee the scene. But beyond this concession that

Ashok’s intervention was in some measure, crucial, police

commissioner Ghafoor “appeared unwilling to go into the details”.

A meeting followed with Rakesh Maria, then joint commissioner of

Mumbai police and a key figure in the response to the terrorist

30 “They Threw Salaskar, Kamte and Karkare’s Bodies from the Vehicle: Sole

Survivor of the gunbattle which claimed ATS chief and team remembers the

encounter from his hospital bed”, The Indian Express, Delhi, November 30 2008,

page 7; extracted on 31 December 2012 from: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/-

they-threw-salaskar-kamte-and-karkare-s-bodies-from-the-vehicle-/392336.

19

assault. Taking charge of the police control room soon after the

shooting began, Maria had directed the deployment of men and

material through various nodes of the city where the most serious

threats were anticipated. Maria proved a reluctant speaker as

Vinita Kamte interviewed him, asking right at the beginning what

she expected. To a pointed question about how Ashok had ended up

in the Bombay VT area when he was under orders from commissioner

Ghafoor to drive towards Nariman Point, Maria pleaded ignorance.

Vinita Kamte proved a tenacious fighter, petitioning the Mumbai

Police through the right to information (RTI) law to release its

wireless log from those crucial hours. Ghafoor proved amenable to

the request and referred it to Maria for further action. And then

followed a complete silence. Vinita Kamte later obtained the

wireless log records as a set of loose leaves. She was told that

these were copies since the originals had been transferred to the

R.D. Pradhan committee, mandated by the Maharashtra state

government to identify the security lapses that opened Mumbai’s

doors for the 26/11 rampage. A direct inquiry with V.

Balachandran, a retired official from India’s espionage service

who made up the other half of the Pradhan committee, revealed

that he too had not been able to get the original wireless log

from the Mumbai police.

What Vinita Kamte finally found, after all the arduous effort, is

revealing. Setting off from Chembur, Ashok is revealed

persistently asking police control for orders. These are referred

to the commissioner of police to begin with, but at 23:17 hours,

he is told explicitly by control room to report to the Special

Branch office, which is at one extremity of Rangbhavan lane, not

far from the back gate of Cama hospital. Vinita Kamte put through

a call to her husband’s mobile phone at 23:58 hours and found his

orderly Jaywant Patil at the other end, alive and able to advise

her that the time was not quite right for a conversation. Maria

as she narrates, kept a “straight face” when confronted with

these findings of fact, but made no effort to explain why he had

represented the moment of Ashok Kamte’s fatal encounter as 23:50,

or disavowed any role in chain of command instructions that

brought him to the Bombay VT area.

The wireless log also reveals Karkare to be lucid, in control and

well aware of what the best response should be, to a situation

that was rapidly spiralling out of control. At 23:28 hours he is

recorded in the wireless log as saying that the “QRT” (presumably

the quick response team) from the ATS and a Crime Branch team

were at the site. That deployment of police personnel was not

adequate in his judgment. “Therefore”, he continues, “we need a

team from the front side. We need to encircle Cama and surround

it. Also tell Mr Prasad to speak to the army authorities”. As

Ashok Kamte had said just around then, probably thinking aloud

rather than ordering any operational response, the situation at

the time seemed to require an army deployment. And the Prasad

20

that Karkare mentioned was obviously the Joint Commissioner of

Mumbai Police for Law and Order, K.L. Prasad, designated

authority within the police hierarchy to make an assessment of

when the military should be called in to aid civil authority.

Minutes after this quite explicit request from Karkare, Inspector

Bapurao Dhurgude approached the front gate of Cama hospital and

apparently saw the two terrorist gunmen walking towards

Rangbhavan lane. Phad witnessed how he challenged the duo though

he lacked any kind of backup in terms of men, material or

firepower, and was ruthlessly gunned down. The two marauders then

supposedly ducked into the Rangbhavan lane where they took cover

behind the bushes on one side. Vinita Kamte estimates that a

number of calls were made from then on, to the police emergency

number 100, indicating that the two killers were in Rangbhavan

lane. At 23:52 hours, a message went out from the control room,

asking personnel from the nearest police station to challenge a

red vehicle in the vicinity of St George’s hospital, in a quite

different quarter of the city. A minute after midnight, the

instructions were amended to identify the location of the suspect

vehicle as the Metro Cinema junction, down the road from the

front gate of the Cama hospital. Shortly after midnight came the

encounter in which Karkare, two fellow officers and three

constables were killed – an event which Vinita Kamte estimates,

was reported at the emergency number 100 to the police control

room. Eyewitnesses then reported seeing a police vehicle with a

flashing beacon drive past the Qualis in which the six police

personnel and Arun Jadhav had been hit.

Arun Jadhav’s own account of the encounter was clocked in the

control room at 25 minutes past midnight. He reports that the

Qualis had been hijacked and that Karkare, Kamte and Salaskar had

been shot. But there is no mention of the gunmen having driven

off in a Skoda or a Honda Accord. Eight minutes after Jadhav has

alerted control room of the hijack and the gunning down of the

three officers, a patrol vehicle attached to the Azad Maidan

police station reports that three persons were lying injured in

the Rangbhavan lane and that a stretcher would be required to

evacuate them. At forty minutes past midnight there is a specific

request from the Inspector of the Lokmanya Tilak Marg police

station, located less than a kilometre from the scene of the

encounter, asking that assistance be rendered immediately to the

“two, three people” lying injured, including possibly “Kamte

sahib”. And at 47 minutes past midnight, Karkare’s own wireless

crackles to life with an urgent message from a policeman who had

gained access to it, confirming him being taken to hospital in

severely injured state, along with Kamte and Salaskar.

At 56 minutes past midnight, control room records show the

commissioner of police Hasan Ghafoor in conversation with joint

commissioner Rakesh Maria. Kasab has by this time been nabbed at

Chowpatty and Ghafoor is underlining the need for subjecting him

21

to an immediate interrogation. But to a specific query about the

whereabouts of Karkare and Kamte, Maria remained unresponsive. He

mentions that Sadanand Date, an Additional Commissioner of Police

for central Mumbai was at the Cama Hospital and Kamte in the

Special Branch office area. Karkare was to the best of his

knowledge in Bombay VT. To a specific inquiry about their

physical state, Maria says that he was “trying” to find out.

Vinita Kamte is unable to make any sense of the police response

and hardly able to hide her sense of betrayal. In her first media

interview since the siege of Mumbai, she expressed her

disappointment at the initial reluctance of the higher police

command to recognise the contribution that Ashok had made towards

capturing Kasab. It was his determined engagement with the armed

marauders in the Rangbhavan lane that had incapacitated them both

and neutralised their possible intent to create further havoc.

But far from hearing words of commendation for this act of

commitment, she only encountered condescension at the supposed

folly that the three senior officers showed in walking into an

ambush.31

There are sufficient questions posed here without numerous other

complications being factored in. Eyewitness testimonies and the

accounts rendered by participants in the armed encounter with the

two terrorists who carried out the Bombay VT-Cama hospital-

Chowpatty operation, concur on one important detail: that the

only person captured alive that day had been seriously wounded.

Yet, within days of 26/11, the dean of Nair hospital, where Kasab

was reportedly taken from the spot of his capture, was disputing

that entire account. A national newspaper on December 2 had Dr

Ravi Ranade of Nair hospital saying: “He had some aberrations

(sic, abrasions) and bruises on his upper and lower limbs. He did

not have any bullet injury and did not require surgery. He was

given treatment on the spot and there has been no active

treatment on him after that”.32

Indeed, the evidence of the Channel 4 documentary telecast in

June 2009, which included the recording of Kasab’s first

interrogation on the morning of 27/11, indicates a person

speaking without difficulty, delivering set-piece statements

about his quest for martyrdom in righteous struggle for the

faith. A lifetime in paradise awaited, once the mission was

completed. And there was no measure of accomplishment, other than

death in the cause. A police officer sits next to him, posing

questions in a sober and level tone that denotes a high degree of

31 See “My husband died a hero’s death: Vinita Kamte”, The Hindu, January 11

2009, page 9. A point further underlined in Kamte and Deshmukh, To The Last

Bullet, op cit. 32 “No bullet hit Kasab, no active treatment on, says hospital’s dean”, The

Indian Express, December 2 2009, page 1; extracted on 31 December 2012 from:

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/no-bullet-hit-kasab-no-active-treatment-on-

says-hospital-s-dean/393116.

22

professional training and integrity. Kasab’s photograph, as

published in major newspapers on December 1, was tightly cropped,

with just the face visible. The video recording of his

interrogation utilises a wider frame, that shows him with a

blanket drawn up to his chest and a surgical patch on the right

side of his neck. There is a band-aid adhering to his lower left

jaw (visible also in the still pictures) and as the Nair hospital

dean indicated, some signs of abrasions on his left cheek. The

voice though, is steady and the eyes focused. At certain points,

he shows a didactic tendency, as when he explains to his

inquisitor that his mission was to kill “people”. And when asked

who these “people” could be, he explains with the patience that a

teacher would normally reserve for a slow student, that he was

there to just kill whoever came into his line of vision.

Incompetence and insensitivity – serious charges in themselves –

seem eminently warranted by the facts uncovered by Vinita Kamte.

Her narrative also paints an intimate portrait of factionalism

within the police force and a collapse of command and

coordination. A failure to stand together in an hour of dire

threat was also exposed in the stocktaking, as when Hasan Ghafoor

was relieved of charge as commissioner, for suggesting that

certain among his subordinate officers lacked the commitment to

directly take on the challenge of 26/11.

As a former policeman familiar from the inside with the

machinations that drive the force, Mushrif dispenses with the

proprieties that Vinita Kamte maintains in addressing the many

mysteries of that night of terror. He narrates a tale of

conspiracy perpetrated with a deep ideological agenda. Mumbai

26/11, he argues, was not about one single plot to strike at

different nodes of civic life in the city: it was about two

distinct plots. The visitation of terror at Bombay VT, which then

ran its course through Cama hospital – and ostensibly Marine

Drive – was distinct from the other three assaults launched that

night. From Leopold Cafe in Colaba to the Taj Mahal hotel, there

was one track of destruction that the armed intruders cut. And

then there were two other tracks, leading to the Oberoi Trident

in Nariman Point and a centre of Jewish proselytism supported by

the Israeli government, within easy walking distance from Colaba.

Mushrif has found testimony in secondary sources, from

individuals at the Cama hospital at the time of the terrorist

ingress, who managed to evade the lethal attention of the

intruders by proclaiming their Hindu faith. This adds some heft

to his earlier suspicion, that the number of Muslim persons

gunned down at Bombay VT showed that the raiders there harboured

no sense of sympathy for their faith. These inferences also

resonate with the experience of a Turkish couple in the Taj Mahal

23

hotel, directly in the line of fire of the raiders, but reprieved

because they pleaded their Islamic allegiance.33

Diligently scouring through the news reporting of 26/11, Mushrif

finds that the Bombay VT attackers were not just two in number,

but quite likely four. Two of the attackers, after sowing

destruction through the railway station, were reported to have

fled the scene. The duo who went on to greater acts of havoc in

Cama hospital and elsewhere, were perhaps working on a different

agenda.

Implausible is the judgment Mushrif delivers, about the official

narrative on the Cama hospital shoot-out. He finds it difficult

to believe, for instance, that a severely injured constable in

the backseat of a police vehicle could have registered all

details of events unfolding outside. That double police

barricades could be set at Chowpatty, just an eight minute drive

from the point at which the hijacked police vehicle was abandoned

and another car seized by terrorists who intended to drive

towards Malabar Hill, is another tall tale. Mushrif is convinced

that few police stations have the ability to respond in such

short time to security challenges of this magnitude. And with his

knowledge of the culture of the police force, he is absolutely

convinced that any criminal captured in the circumstances that

prevailed in Mumbai that fateful day, would not have been left

alive. The fate reserved for such a captive, rather, would have

been summary execution, either under the weight of police lathis,

or a bullet to the head that could be portrayed without serious

public dissent, as legitimate self-defence.

Kasab has been for obvious reasons, the principal focus of both

the prosecution and the media. But there is a great deal that is

revealed from the case made against two co-defendants who went on

trial with him. Fahim Ansari and Sabahuddin Sheikh, natives of a

northern Mumbai suburb and Bihar’s Madhubani district

respectively, were in custody at the time of 26/11, facing

charges stemming from quite another terrorist incident. Yet they

were implicated in 26/11 for having rendered material assistance

to the plotters by, among other things, providing a hand-drawn

map of all vital locations in the cross-hairs of the terror plot.

The map in the prosecution narration, was crafted by Ansari and

handed over to Sheikh at a meeting in Kathmandu.

33 Seyfi Muezzinoglu is the name of the Turkish hostage who appears at the

beginning of the Channel 4 documentary and then at minute 17. And his narration

is clear. He and a number of other hostages were herded up to an open area and

lined up against a wall. Just as he prepared to face a volley of bullets, his

wife loudly shouted out his Turkish nationality and Islamic faith. At that

point, his terrorist captor signaled that he should lie flat on the ground.

Fahadullah was who he identified the leader of the terrorist raiders as. And

Fahadullah was kind to him, since everybody else in that gathering, except his

wife and he, was shot with lethal intent. Seyfi Muezzinoglu in fact was

traumatised by the effort he had to expend in digging himself and his wife out

from under a mountain of corpses.

24

Prime evidence in this regard was one such map, plotting the

route to Bombay VT and from there to Malabar Hill, found in the

pocket of Kasab’s confederate Abu Ismail, after he was killed in

the encounter in Girgaon Chowpatty. Defence counsel for the two

men argued that the map, ostensibly carried on Abu Ismail’s

person from the time he set off from Pakistan, must have gone

through some severely arduous events before its discovery by the

police: an extended seaborne journey on three vessels, a lethal

shoot-out and a final, fatal encounter in which its bearer was

slain. For all that, the map as it was produced as evidence in

court, was spotless and uncreased.

In dismissing this piece of evidence, the trial court judge

termed it “highly doubtful”. He also wondered what purpose a

hand-drawn map would serve when the internet allows the easy

download of all maps necessary for an operation such as 26/11.

The prosecution case that Ansari and Sheikh had met in Kathmandu

to plan out certain elements of the terrorist strike on Mumbai

was also discounted , as was the claim that Ansari had spent many

weeks in keen but ultimately futile quest of a residential

quarter in the south of Mumbai, near the beach where the

terrorist gang planned to land.

Evidently, despite the experience of severely botched up

investigations since the July 2006 serial bombings in Mumbai’s

suburban railway system and the high degree of public scrutiny

likely over the 26/11 prosecution, the Maharashtra police were

not quite willing to go back on old proclivities. Where evidence

could not be found, it could be manufactured to serve a

predetermined case. This was the organisational culture, drawing

on wider social prejudices, that Karkare pushed back against.

Mushrif makes out a case that Karkare paid with his life for this

sin of non-conformity. On 10 February 2010, as hearings in the

26/11 trial were nearing conclusion, Shahid Azmi, defence counsel

for Fahim Ansari, was shot dead in his Mumbai office. Police put

the crime down to a dispute between rival underworld gangs and

arrested three persons shortly afterwards. Investigations have

since been paralysed.

In many ways, Shahid Azmi’s life story is an illustration of the

culture of lawlessness that has flourished under the fog of the

war on terror. Radicalised by his experience as a sixteen-year

old, of Mumbai’s horrific communal violence in 1992 and 1993,

Azmi travelled to Kashmir to volunteer for the jihad there. He

found little to engage him and soon returned to Mumbai to resume

a life interrupted by the trauma of communal hatred seen from up

close. In 1999, he was picked up on charges of involvement in a

conspiracy to assassinate the leader of the Marathi-Hindu

chauvinist organisation, the Shiv Sena. Held without charge – for

most of the time in Delhi’s Tihar Jail -- he was set at liberty

25

in 2004. While in Tihar, Azmi managed to complete his school and

graduate courses. Since securing his freedom, he completed a

course in law and went onto become a redoubtable practitioner,

ever willing to take up the defence of youth accused of terrorist

offences for no reason other than communal prejudice. As the

judgment of the trial court makes clear, his forceful and

compelling cross-examination of key prosecution witnesses was key

in securing Ansari’s acquittal in the 26/11 case. Whether that

was a professional sin that cost him his life, is a matter that

perhaps, needs further inquiry.34

On 21 November 2008, just a few days before he was killed,

Karkare had uncovered terrorism in a quarter where it was least

suspected to exist. The reigning orthodoxy at the time was

articulated by Narendra Modi, well before he earned worldwide

notoriety as the architect of the Gujarat 2002 bloodbath. The

context was the September 2001 terror attack in the U.S., when

Modi pronounced his authoritative verdict in a TV studio, that

“all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists certainly are

Muslims”. It was a justly famous formulation, later reiterated by

none less than the Israeli ambassador to the U.S.35 Karkare proved

oblivious to this wisdom which obviously was among the unstated

premises of the global war on terror, most actively pursued since

2001 by the U.S.-Israeli axis.

Karkare’s principal sin may have been that he actually followed

evidence and logic, rather than theology. And his inquiries led

him to a terror ring involving a supposed sadhvi (a woman who had

taken the vows of renunciation and a lifetime of religious

piety), the self-proclaimed head of a religious foundation, a

serving army officer and sundry others. They all drew their

inspiration from Hindutva, the same ideological fount at which

Narendra Modi was nurtured.

Just two days before he was killed, Karkare had met with a news

team and confessed to a certain befuddlement over the outrage

that had followed his pursuit of the Hindutva terrorism ring. “I

34 Shahid Azmi’s life story has become a Bollywood film titled Shahid, which

premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival in December 2012. But

without any of the embellishments of fanciful film scripts, his life story is

recounted by legal practitioners and activists Arvind Narrain and Saumya Uma in

“Can the love of justice be assassinated?”, available as of 31 December 2012

at: http://kafila.org/2012/11/24/remembering-shahid-azmi-can-the-love-of-

justice-be-assassinated-arvind-narrain-saumya-uma/. Also see Mahtab Alam,

“Remembering Shahid Azmi, the Shaheed”, written on the one-year anniversary of

the murder and available as of 31 December 2012 at:

http://kafila.org/2011/02/10/remembering-shahid-azmi-the-shaheed-mahtab-alam/. 35 The quotation from Narendra Modi can be found in the introduction to the

invaluable volume edited by Siddharth Varadarajan, Gujarat: The Making of a

Tragedy, Penguin Books, Delhi, 2003. The remarks by the Israeli ambassador were

widely reported at the time and are available as of 31 December 2012 at this

link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601466.html.

26

don’t know why this case has become so political. The pressure is

tremendous and I am wondering how to extricate it from all the

politics”, he said in an interview with The Indian Express,

published on November 28. These were remarks made off the record,

which the newspaper thought could be published after the

unexpected turn of events of 26/11. Karkare’s commitment indeed

was, as he told the newspaper, to “pursue this case very

objectively and not start with assumptions”.36

Karkare had earned the bitter ire of the principal national

opposition party and its allies, which accused him of leading a

politically motivated investigation and inflicting thoroughly

unconscionable indignities on persons of the true faith.

Ironically, on the very day that the terror attack in Mumbai

began, the Shiv Sena had announced plans to observe a state-wide

bandh to protest the supposed torture of the sadhvi that Karkare

had arrested on suspicions of involvement in a number of bomb

attacks.37 There was grim irony then, in seeing the same political

dignitaries jostling to offer tribute to the fallen officer, in a

cynical effort to leverage his death for maximum advantage.

In March 2012, a story tucked away in the more obscure corners of

the Indian press told of a petition filed under public interest

jurisdiction, seeking official clarity on the status of India’s

Intelligence Bureau (IB). The petition filed before the High

Court of Karnataka by a former officer of the IB, mentioned that

the agency formed in 1887, by the then British secretary of state

as a sub-sect of the Central Special Branch, had since “remained

like a ghost, without a statute”.38 India meanwhile moved through

long years of strife and struggle towards independent nationhood,

adopting a republican constitution as a gesture of faith in the

people. But the IB remained resolutely beyond the pale of public

scrutiny.

Mumbai 26/11 showed one possible pathway that a democratic polity

could take to purge itself of residual vestiges of power without

accountability inherited from colonialism. India though, seems

intent on taking the opposite path. In April 2012, the U.S.

government in a relapse of infantilism reminiscent of the George

W. Bush presidency, announced a ten million dollar bounty on the

head of the Pakistani cleric Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, believed

through the rapidly mutating organisations that he spawned with

36 “His response to a death threat: a ‘smiley’”, The Indian Express (Delhi

Edition), November 28, 2008, p 6; extracted on 31 December 2012 from:

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/karkare-s-response-to-a-death-threat-a-

smiley/391325/. 37 “Sena picks up anti-ATS baton from BJP”, The Economic Times, 27 November

2008, page 2; extracted on 31 December 2012 from:

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2008-11-

27/news/28464191_1_malegaon-blast-dayanand-pandey-lt-col-prasad-purohit. 38 See the Times News Network story datelined Chennai, March 26 2012, extracted

on 31 December 2012 from: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-03-

26/india/31239443_1_ib-r-n-kulkarni-intelligence-bureau.

27

active support from military intelligence agencies and sponsors

in the oil exporting Arab world, to be the central ideological

inspiration for the Mumbai attacks. India cheered the invocation

in international relations of the “wild-west” notion of frontier

justice. India’s insistence on Saeed’s villainy and the need to

punish him by all means, lawful or otherwise, had earned

vindication at the ultimate fount of international legitimacy.

Increasingly unmindful of basic verities as its courtship of U.S.

patronage has proceeded, India forgot yet again that the rule of

law is among the few assurances of security that those of lesser

power in the global pecking order can count on.

An alternative way of seeing – indeed of engaging with the rule

of law -- is illustrated in the life and death of Hemant Karkare.

More than all the serial bombings that India has seen, the siege

of Mumbai posed, in terms of its ramifications, a clear danger to

every value on which the country rests: openness, diversity and

tolerance. Discretion and secrecy are the particular attributes

of intelligence services. To be otherwise would be to deny the

very identity and purpose of the intelligence activity. And there

is enormous power that comes with the territory since these

agencies are the eyes and ears of the highest executive

authorities, whose every consequential action is shaped by their

advice. This is in short, a recipe for power without

accountability. And it is not a luxury that a complex and diverse

democracy such as India can afford any more.