Mufti Abdul Qayyum, who was acquitted by the Supreme Court in the 2002 Akshardham temple terror attack last year, has a story to tell.
After spending 11 years of his life behind bars, for a crime he never committed, Mr Qayyum has spent the last one year penning a 200-page book recounting his personal account of injustice due to state excesses. The book will be released next week.
In his book, titled 'Gyarah Saal Salakhon Ke Peeche,' Mr Qayyum provides a detailed account of what he calls is a life branded as a terrorist without evidence. "This book is not just for the Muslims, it is for the most oppressed class of the country. If through my book, even one person is spared from state sponsored excesses then I will be happy that I have achieved something," Mr Qayyum told NDTV.
He was 29 at the time of arrest in 2003 - a year after the attack on the Akshardham temple. The police had accused him of writing a letter that was recovered from the possession of two terrorists, who were killed in the attack.
A lower court in Gujarat later convicted him and two others, sentencing them to death. But on May 17 last year, the top court acquitted him of all the charges.
Since his release, the 40-year old Madrassa teacher has been trying to piece together his fragmented life. At the time of his arrest, 12 years ago, his now grown up son was barely ten months old. His wife Sujiya, not only struggled to bring up their children, but also had to live with the stigma of being called a 'terrorist's wife.'
"As my son grew older, his only constant question was about his father. Every day before going to school he would always ask; when will father come home. Every moment was filled with pain," says Mr Qayyum's wife.
The book, for Mr Qayyum, is a sad testimony of all that transpired in his life behind jail. Ironically, for him writing the book was easy, but he hasn't been able to gather courage to read it again.
A new book, Gyarah Saal Salakhon Ke Peeche (Eleven Years Behind Bars) exposes how innocent Muslims in India are being framed in terror cases by police and intelligence agencies, subjected to brutal torture and convicted by spineless trial court judges on the basis of fabricated evidence and confessions extracted under duress, but are honorably acquitted by the top court.
It’s tempting to sing paeans of praise for India’s Supreme Court judges who are evidently men of character. But is it enough to release people rotting in jail on trumped up charges? Justice demands that fearless judges who set the innocent free must also mete out exemplary punishment to guilty policemen and award compensation to the victims. A test case before the Supreme Court will soon reveal how far the judges are prepared to go.
Abdul Qayyum, author of the bombshell, was imprisoned for 11 years – including eight on death row — with five others for the Sept. 25, 2002 attack on Ahmedabad’s Akshardham temple that killed 33. They were arrested on the basis of letters the police claim to have recovered from the pockets of two terrorists killed by security forces on that fateful day.
The six were sentenced to death before the Supreme Court threw out the case in May 2014 and blasted the police. Qayyum took a year to write his jail memoir in Urdu, which was released this month throwing a spotlight on a malaise that mocks India’s democracy and slogans likeSabka Saath Sabka Vikas Narendra Modi coined for the general elections.
The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind and its president, Syed Arshad Madani, must be complimented for rescuing Qayyum and his co-accused from the jaws of death by arranging their legal defense after the malafide conviction. Thanks to Madani’s campaign, 50 Muslims have been absolved so far of terror charges in several cases across India. But hundreds are still languishing behind bars on trumped up charges awaiting trial.
After Qayyum’s book was released, Madni urged the Modi government to set up a high-level committee of jurists and legal luminaries to investigate and probe all terror-related cases, as prosecutors’ credibility is at all time low because of the abysmally law rate of conviction and acquittal by the higher courts of those convicted.
Before Qayyum’s exoneration, Muslims falsely accused of triggering the May 18, 2007 blast in Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid, were not only freed but also paid Rs7 million by Andhra Pradesh’s Congress government. As in the Mecca Masjid case, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) found that it wasn’t Muslims but Hindu terror group Abhinav Bharat run by army officers and RSS that was responsible for the Malegaon, Ajmer Sharif and Samjhauta Express bombings, which killed eight, three and 68 persons respectively in 2007-2008.
A few months before Qayyum’s book hit the stands, Manisha Sethi’s Kafkaland: Prejudice, Lies and Counter-terrorism, was released. The book examines prominent terror cases to show that the hallmark of investigations is not just a casual subversion of norms but cynical prejudice and brutal violence inflicted in the knowledge of absolute impunity. It highlights the disquieting trend of judicial abdication; courts indulgently ignore tell-tale signs of torture, lack of evidence and absence of procedural norms while trying terror cases.
Sethi’s eye-opening analysis challenges the dominant narratives of counterterrorism where impunity, bias and suspicion are sustained by laws, where erosion of constitutional guarantees is advertised as internal security, and corporate greed masquerades as national interest.
There is a rather disturbing question I can’t help but ask. Among the high-profile terror cases in which Muslims have been acquitted is the murder of then Gujarat Home Minister Hiren Pandya in 2003. Several Muslims were arrested and convicted by the trial court. But the Gujarat High Court set all of them free.
I would like to know that if Muslims did not kill Pandya, then who did? It seems that Muslims were arrested and sentenced only to shield the real culprit. Similarly, all the 12 Muslims accused of the February 1998 Coimbatore blasts, which killed 65 a day before L. K. Advani’s visit, were ultimately acquitted. Among those who walked free was Abdul Nasir Madani. National elections held a few days after the Coimbatore bombings ushered in a BJP government — that’s a matter of record. But if those 12 Muslims did not carry out the blasts, then who did?
This cannot be undone and I am sure it will be greatly appreciated.
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