Killey, Part One

In less than two weeks, the Delhi police were on the way back from Nepal, transporting this small group of Kashmiri men into the universe of the theory they’d developed about the blast. It was the beginning of a maze of circumstantial evidence and retroactive speculation, aided by a single confession from Javed Khan, who was then being held in Jaipur for his alleged involvement in the Sawai Man Singh Stadium blast case, which had taken place on Republic Day earlier that year.

The jeeps plunged into the immense summer heat of the Indian plains, towards the office of the Special Cell of the Delhi Police at Lodhi Colony, in the centre of the city. “This is Delhi,” they told the men, covering their heads as they drove through. “Ab pata chalega.” Now you’ll learn. In the cells, a procession of policemen arrived, casually doling out a slap here, a ‘motherfucker’ there. The interrogations hadn’t even begun.

Ali didn’t get slapped. He said his interrogation was more or less one question, asked over and over again: how do you know Javed Kariwar? It seemed absurd to him. In the Kashmir of the 1990s, it was very ordinary to know militants—professed or alleged—by face. “I told them I know Salahuddin, I know Mushtaq Latram, I know Yasin Malik,” he remembered—all well-known militant leaders of the time. “It’s the nature of the militancy in Kashmir. These people roam around daily in our neighbourhoods. The militants had offices in the abandoned houses of Kashmiri Pandits.” (Javed Kariwar and Javed Khan are different people. Kariwar was never arrested in the Lajpat Nagar case, according to the police.)

In the cell at the Lodhi Colony station, the back-and-forth continued for 10 days. The police took the men’s signatures on blank sheets of paper and served them survival rations: rotis and the Indian police’s trademark watery dal. Sometimes there would be a break in the routine when a “good officer” doled out tea. Sometimes the men were drip-fed hope: the cops would tell them they could leave in a few days’ time.

One morning they were groomed and shaved for court. A policeman told them that this could be the day of their freedom—if they did as they were told and behaved well. Ali said that they were instructed to “remain silent and not say anything,” whatever the question. His companion Nissar argued against this: he suggested to the group that they profess their innocence if the judge asked them how they pleaded.

Perhaps because of the Hindi films they’d watched, they’d been expecting the court to be a kind of theatre. But it wasn’t what they’d imagined. The judge before whom they were produced didn’t say a word to them before ordering them into police custody. The men got no explanations about what that meant, or why it had happened: they had no lawyer at the time. Instead, they found themselves at a bus terminal, where they were paraded in front of a posse of Indian media as the men who had bombed the Lajpat Nagar market. They weren’t allowed to talk to the journalists.

For more than a week, they were back in lock-up, treated to the same regimen. Only another explosion interrupted those days: a minor one. A cop outside their three-by-eight foot cell had put a plastic bag of hot dal on a chair and disappeared. Another one came to sit down without looking first. There was a short burst and a painful, sharp scream. The Kashmiris laughed their hearts out, separated from the cop swearing at them by the bars, his ass splattered with blistering dal.

On their next court date, they were sent to judicial custody, which, given the severity of the alleged offences, was no more than a formality. It wouldn’t have taken much for a public prosecutor to convince the court that the Lajpat Nagar blast accused had to remain in jail as the police collected evidence.

They spent the night in the interim ward at Tihar jail, and were sorted into separate blocks in the morning. Ali was paired with another man, a guy he claimed had been accused in another high-profile Delhi crime. Together, they were taken to a high-security ward. He had his first brush with the power structures of prison that night. To establish his dominance over the newbie, a man asked Ali for a massage. Ali obliged.

There was unexpected warmth, too. Inmates from Mumbai, whose names he remembered even a quarter-century later, brought him a notebook, sandals and a katori, a bowl, for everyday use. It filled him with a sense of solidarity, even as a fellow Kashmiri, showing him the ropes, tried to warn him: he was going to be in here a long time.

This history, Josy argued, was one of the factors that had seeded an enduring suspicion against Kashmiri Muslim men among security agencies, even 30 years later. Continuing tensions with Pakistan, which armed and aided separatist militants in Kashmir through the worst years of the insurgency, had caused the state’s suspicions to run deeper still. Further, he said, the rise of the Hindu right wing in the 1990s and beyond had brought anti-Muslim hatred into the mainstream of Indian politics.

A 2019 survey conducted by Common Cause and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies attempted to quantify the bias in police forces against Muslims around India. It found half of all police personnel surveyed believed that Muslims are “naturally prone” towards committing violence. “When we looked at what the police personnel think about various communities, the data indicated a significant bias against Muslims,” the authors wrote.

“The anti-Muslim bias in the police is very obvious,” the writer and retired police officer Vibhuti Narain Rai told me. “It didn’t come from a vacuum, and was aggravated by the role of Muslims in acts of armed violence against the state.” A state is given to seeing crimes committed by its minorities as an attack on its existence. Rai put it like this: “The state is always favouring Hindus, so why would they need to do blasts? Naturally Muslims will bear the brunt.”

Rai was the lead investigator in a case that he describes as the worst case of prejudice ever committed by the Indian state against Muslims: the 1987 Hashimpura massacre, in which armed policemen killed 42 Muslim men in a neighbourhood in Meerut. Thirty-one years later, in 2018, the Delhi High Court reversed a trial court’s acquittal and sentenced 16 ex-policemen to life imprisonment for their role in the killings. The trial court had concluded that the police lacked the motive to kill the Muslim men. The high court, on its part, unequivocally held that it was a “case of a targeted killing revealing an institutional bias within the law enforcement agents.” (It even cited the 2018 edition of the Common Cause-CSDS Status of Policing Report: “Institutional discrimination is another component of policing that cannot be denied.”)

This bias—and the state’s playbook to act on it—is endemic to Muslim life in India. It has become unremarkable for many Muslims, though not for the same reasons as it has for Hindus. This is especially true for Kashmir, where a man like Ali can casually point out to a building adjoining a park in Srinagar and say he was tortured there for seven days in the 1990s.

This bias is also how the names of unsuspecting Muslim men become a part of the court record, leaving them branded for life, irrespective of the outcome of litigation. They are picked up, asked questions that their captors have already decided the answers to, and incarcerated as the police system goes about reverse engineering a chain of supposed evidence and linkages. By the time lawyers are found, a defence is constructed brick-by-brick and the holes in the arguments of the prosecution are revealed to be vacuums, a lifetime has passed. The taste of freedom itself has changed, as it happened in the case—cases, actually—of Mohammad Ali Bhat.

In the morning, he was taken to a judge in Mahwa tehsil in Dausa district. Ali said the judge told him: “Son, I know you are innocent, but I can’t do anything to help you.” He refused to grant the Rajasthan Police’s request for a fortnight’s custody, and delivered an order for fewer days. “Do you have to crucify him so soon?” the judge remarked, in Ali’s memory. They shared a beedi together afterwards, and Ali always remembered him afterwards as the “charsi judge,” the stoner judge.

As he’d entered the court premises, he’d seen two men leaving in a police truck. They were Farooq Khan and Abdul Gani, his co-accused in the Samleti and Lajpat Nagar cases. Of those who were rounded up in Nepal, Nissar was brought to Rajasthan a few days after Ali, but Latif was taken to Gujarat for interrogation in a separate case.

Ali and Nissar spent the next five months inside their cell, where they ate, shat, bathed and slept. Not once were they allowed outside, Ali said. “I started losing my hair there.” He believes they were interrogated by police, the Indian Army, and other agencies he could not name. “I didn’t know anything, so I couldn’t tell them anything,” he said.

In Rajasthan, unlike Tihar, other inmates weren’t allowed to meet or mingle with them. But even without the bonhomie he’d known before, life seeped through. A Pakistani inmate named Parvez brought Ali a bar of Lifebuoy from the canteen one day. Ali hadn’t had a proper bath in months, and, in his excitement, he couldn’t help but share the development with a Sikh inmate in a cell close to his. “Raju,” he said, “I’ve got soap!” Raju didn’t believe him, so Ali showed him the soap. Raju asked if he could use it for a bath. With all that hair beneath his turban? Ali thought, I won’t be getting anything back. He took the first bath, rubbing, squeezing and clenching the soap over every inch of his body. Then he gave the soap to Raju, not expecting him to return it but too content with his freshly clean body to feel bad about it.

In the sixth month, the superintendent permitted them to leave their cell for 30 minutes a day. Walking around the ward, Ali began to wonder what had happened to Zafar, his brother. For all this time, he’d had no way to reach his family, or send them news. This didn’t change until the day a Kashmiri woman showed up in the courtroom on a routine court date. It was the wife of Farooq Khan, who’d come all the way to Rajasthan with her two small daughters to look for her husband. She didn’t see him; Farooq had been transferred to Delhi. But the woman agreed to take word of Ali to his family. Before she left, she brought the men food and items of use. It was one of the few acts of kindness he could remember from this time.

Later, he pieced together fragments of what his family went through after his arrest. Rumour had gotten around that Ali and the others had been killed. Sher Ali went to Nepal to look for his sons. There, he found Zafar, who’d been held for over 40 days after his arrest before he was set free. Then, Sher Ali began to look for his other son: a fruitless search, until Farooq Khan’s wife brought him news from Jaipur.

Haji Sher Ali Bhat was a proud man. When an officer at a checkpoint once asked him, “Ab kya karna hai?” Sher Ali retorted, “Maar do, aur kya?” What shall we do with you now? Kill us, for all I care. But for the rest of his life, Ali told me, his father strived for his son’s release. He lost his business, but held on to his faith, and bore the humiliation that came his way with stoicism, even during the time when he showed up to a court date and was barred from meeting Ali.

Ali and Nissar were in Rajasthan for nine months. Then, they were returned to Delhi, where they were remanded to judicial custody again and sent to Tihar. Around the time of the Kargil War, in the summer of 1999, they were moved back to Rajasthan. The penultimate round of this agonising prison ping-pong came in the summer of 2000, when they were brought to Delhi and charged by the court in the Lajpat Nagar case. Ali would stay in Tihar for the next 12 years.

A lot of his reading was done at night, a hard time for him. He’d developed insomnia, but couldn’t bring himself to take the anti-anxiety medicine a doctor had prescribed. He went through phases in which he felt unable to eat, going hungry until a fellow inmate forced some food into him.

Among those charged with Ali in the sessions court in Delhi were the feared international gangsters Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim. Neither is Kashmiri. Ali became ‘accused number six,’ or A6. He was going on trial for multiple charges under the Indian Penal Code, Explosive Substances Act, and Arms Act, including murder (302) and attempt to murder (307) in the Lajpat Nagar FIR.

Additional charges were filed against him and two other co-accused in the Nizamuddin FIR, about the missing car. Ali’s alias in the hundreds and thousands of court documents prepared over the next two decades was “Killey.” It was a bureaucratic shortening and misspelling of “Ali Clay,” his nickname in his Srinagar neighbourhood after his legendary namesake, Muhammad Ali, who’d been born Cassius Clay.

Ali and the other accused were represented by Raja Mohammad Tufail, a renowned Delhi criminal lawyer. But Ali was puzzled by his approach. “He was like ‘Yes, charge us, our crime is that we are Kashmiris and Muslims,’” Ali told me. “I thought: why isn’t he arguing to get the charges dismissed instead?”

Tufail did have a flair for drama and fought his cases passionately. He’d once slapped a sub-inspector of the same Delhi Police Special Cell in the courtroom, in a different bombing case. Whatever the efficacy of this theatrical approach, it made Ali so apprehensive that he sometimes doubted his very motives in defending them. I spoke to Anwar Ahmad Khan, who’d been Tufail’s junior during this trial, and who Ali had liked rather better. Anwar had melancholy news. Tufail, who suffered a haemorrhage last year, is partially paralysed at the time of this writing, and barely able to speak.

There had been lapses in their defence, Anwar admitted, though he refuted the idea that Tufail might have had ulterior motives. “He didn’t get paid to do such cases,” Anwar argued. “To my knowledge he didn’t take any money, ever, from anyone. Even when he travelled to Rajasthan, he would use his own car. It was often other inmates caught in similar circumstances who would tell the accused to reach out to Tufail to fight for them, knowing that he worked pro bono.”

Ali pleaded not guilty to his charges and claimed trial. He was in and out of court at regular intervals over the next ten years. At a typical hearing, his presence would be recorded; a witness statement or two heard; an objection occasionally registered; a cross-examination now and again, then close of business until the next date.

The trial ended in 2010, thirteen years after the case had been committed to the court. By this time, the prosecution had called on a total of 107 witnesses. But these depositions didn’t always support the police’s theory. Gajender Kumar, Witness 15 of the prosecution, was a parking attendant at Lajpat Nagar who had himself sustained injuries in the blast. He was declared hostile after he said in court that he didn’t remember the vehicle in which the blast had occurred. “I have heard statement Mark A4 which I did not make to the police,” he stated before the judge.

“It is incorrect to suggest that on that day at about 5.30pm, I had seen two Kashmiri youth parking a white colour Maruti car in the parking. It is also incorrect that they hurriedly left the parking leaving behind the car, towards the main road. It is incorrect that at about 6.30pm the explosion took place in the same car. It is incorrect to suggest that I had given the age and other particulars of the boys in my statement to the police.”

“It is also incorrect that accused Mohd Killi and accused Mirza Nisar Ahmed @ Naza were the same persons who had parked the car in the parking that day.”

Gajender’s testimony rescinded the statement that the police claimed he had given them. He was cross-examined by the additional public prosecutor, but stood his ground. Another witness for the prosecution was a scrap dealer, a neighbour of one of the accused. This witness, Ikram, denied having said to police that he had seen Kashmiri youth at the house of the accused neighbour on a particular day. He also denied that he had identified those Kashmiris in police custody later.

Gajender, a Hindu from Bihar, and Ikram, a Muslim, were both working-class, low income-earning men. (Their testimonies were not expressly mentioned in the judgement.) It would have taken great courage on their part to tell the court that the police were lying. Many others, better situated, in later stages of the trial, were not to muster that courage.

The state claimed that Farooq had made calls to several media outlets on the evening of the day of the blast. Without revealing his name, he introduced himself as the “chief spokesperson” of “Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front,” and claimed responsibility for the blast. A journalist named Vinod Kapri, then working with Zee TV, testified that he’d received a call of this nature, in which the caller hadn’t revealed his name. “He appeared to be a resident of Kashmir,” Kapri told the court, “as he was frequently using Urdu words.” However, he did not state the numbers from which the call had been made and received. Inexplicably, the investigators had failed to produce a recording of the conversation.

A second journalist, Amitabh Rai Chaudhary of the Press Trust of India, also said he’d answered a call on an office number on the night of the blast, and that “the voice of the caller appeared to be that of a young man and he was speaking in Hindi just like the Kashmiris speak.” Rai said the caller told him the blast at Lajpat Nagar had been caused by the JKIF. Rai did not have the telephone number from which the call had come. A third journalist, Suparna Singh of NDTV, did not support the prosecution’s line of questioning, and was ultimately declared hostile.

“From the testimonies of people from Media,” the judgement said, “nothing is clear if it was only A1 who had made telephone calls to them to own responsibility of the bomb blast at Lajpat Nagar (sic).”

Accused number 2, a woman named Farida Dar, was clubbed as a co-conspirator by the police because of frequent phone calls between her number and Farooq’s. In his disclosure statement, Farooq claimed that he had been calling Farida’s daughter on a purely personal basis.

Farooq’s statement to the court seemed to cut through the tangle of theories. He stated that he lived in Srinagar and not Anantnag, from where the phone calls to the journalists had allegedly been made. The phone was in his father’s name and did not support STD calling, meaning it couldn’t have made calls to Delhi, or anywhere outside the state. Farooq also made serious allegations about how the police had treated him, denying him his legal right to be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours, and subjecting him to torture at the Lodhi Colony police station.

The police claimed to have recovered arms and ammunition from the houses of Farooq and Farida. The witnesses produced to support these findings included members of the Border Security Force, which is a police agency. Indeed, Inspector Prem Bhallab Dhayani of BSF, one of the prosecution’s independent witnesses, admitted to the court that the recovery and raid was conducted under the supervision of M.S. Sharma, a joint director of the BSF.

Farooq and Farida maintained that all the evidence was planted. The prosecution admitted in court that the recoveries from Farooq and Farida’s houses were not linked with the Lajpat Nagar bombing.

Hostile witnesses, procedural lapses, the conflict of interest of supposedly independent testifiers: taken together, all this had the trial court’s alarm bells ringing and pointed out the inconsistencies in the prosecution’s grand theory. Then, over time, the case swung in favour of the state, and the ordeal grew longer than Ali could ever imagine. Beyond the prison bars and witness stands, the world went on. But so, somehow, did Ali.

The second and final part of “Killey” is here.