A special court in Gujarat, on Tuesday, gave its verdict in the 2008 serial bomb blasts in Ahmedabad. A total of 77 accused were put on trial out of which the court found 49 to be guilty and the remaining were acquitted. The quantum of punishment will be announced by the court on Wednesday.
On July 26, 2008, a series of bomb blasts ripped through Ahmedabad city in a span of 70 minutes, instantly killing 56 innocent people and injuring more than 200 people. A series of 21 blasts took place at various places across Ahmedabad. It was just a day after a similar set of serial bomb blasts had rocked Bangalore city in Karnataka.
The city of Surat was also targeted just three days after Ahmedabad, as many as 23 bombs were found planted at various places in Surat including the diamond market and residential areas. However, the bombs did not explode and were diffused.
Important locations like the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital Trauma Centre, L.G.Hospital in Maninagar, Hatkeshwar Circle and Sarkhej among other crowded places were targeted to ensure maximum loss and harm to human life.
The uniqueness of this blast was, probably for the first time, an email was sent to various media outlets five minutes before the blasts. The email read “Await 5 minutes for the revenge of Gujarat”. A reference to the 2002 Gujarat riots.
In the email, the terror outfit, ‘Indian Mujahideen’ (IM) had claimed responsibility of the blasts. It also gave threats to then Chief Minister of Maharashtra Vilasrao Deshmukh and then Home Minister R.R.Patil. The email also threatened several Bollywood celebrities asking them to stop acting.
However, through this very email, the Mumbai Police busted the entire media cell of IM and arrested 21 accused, including a software engineer who was working in a reputed MNC. The cell was operating from a rented apartment in Pune and had managed to build an entire operation centre from where terror-related emails were being sent to news organizations and other information was being passed on the members of IM in India, Pakistan, and other parts of the world.
Another terror outfit, named, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami had also claimed responsibility for the serial blasts.
Within a month of the blasts, the Gujarat police announced that they had cracked the case. The then Gujarat Director General of Police (DGP) P.C.Pande, said that Mufti Abu Bashir who belongs to the Pakistan-based terror outfit Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami. Bashir and 10 of his associates were arrested by the Gujarat Police and the entire case was cracked. Several members of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), including Safdar Nagori, were also arrested in the case. The Gujarat police also said that it had busted a nationwide network of militants with these arrests. It was perhaps the fastest detection of a serial bomb blasts case in India ever.
Unfortunately, the same speed could not be maintained during the court trial of one of the most high-profile cases of Gujarat. The fact that it took more than 13 years for a verdict, is a case of justice delayed and hence justice denied to the victims and their families.
More than 1,100 witnesses were examined and the charge-sheet itself was more than 2000-pages and 77 accused were tried in the case. After a protracted trial of more than 13 years, 49 of the 77 have been found to be guilty and 28 have been acquitted.
Even in the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, the trial had gone on for more than 15 years before the first verdict came in the case.
Such delays, apart from delaying and denying justice for the victims and their families, also put a huge burden on the state exchequer. It also puts tremendous pressure on the jails as they are already crowded beyond their capacity.
As per the latest available statistics, occupancy rates in prisons in India was as high as 118.5% in 2019, this resulted in a massive increase in funds for the maintenance of the prisons. In 2021, in the wake of the Corona Pandemic, the Supreme Court had ordered the release of undertrials from prisons, apart from the safety and health of undertrials, this was also done to reduce the burden on jail administration across the country.
Indian prisons have two major problems to deal with. One is overcrowding. This is a major issue, if the Arthur Road Jail is taken as an example, it is reported to be occupied three times its capacity and the maximum number being that of undertrials. The second problem faced by prison administration is that they are perennially understaffed and poorly funded. This results in poor administration of jails and the inmates.
As per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report published in 2019, India has the highest population of undertrials in the world. The number stands at a staggering 68%.
More than half of those undertrials are detained for less than six months. This could be indicative of the fact that majority of the undertrials may be languishing in jails because of unnecessary arrests and/or ineffective legal aid.
There is a need to take up urgent measures to ensure that undertrials don’t languish in jails and the burden on our jail administration and state exchequer is lessened.
The Supreme Court-appointed Justice Amitava Roy (retd.) Committee had given some important recommendations for prison reforms. It had been said that speedy trial remains one of the best ways to remedy the unwarranted phenomenon of overcrowding in prisons. It had also recommended that there should be at least one lawyer for every 30 prisoners, which is not the case at present.
The committee had further recommended that adjournments should be avoided and the concept of plea bargaining (in which the accused admits guilt for a lesser sentence) should be promoted.
One of the recommendations was that courts may be asked to use their discretionary powers and award sentences like fines and admonition, if possible, instead of sending the offenders to jails. Courts may also be encouraged to release offenders on probation at pre-trial stages or after a trial in deserving cases.
Even the Law Commission of India, in 2017, had recommended that undertrials who have completed a third of their maximum sentence attracting up to seven years of imprisonment should be released on bail.
(The writer is the Director-General of Police (DGP) (Retired), Maharashtra, former Police Commissioner of Mumbai & Ex-chief of the elite Mumbai Crime Branch. He is also an award-winning author.)
