Intelligence Failure or Design

Revaluation of Tradition in the Ideology of the Radical Adivasi Resistance
Article 177
Intelligence Failure or History and Sociology of South Asia

7(2) 177–201
Design?: Karkare, Kamte  2013 Jamia Millia Islamia
SAGE Publications
and the Campaign for Los Angeles, London,

New Delhi, Singapore,
Washington DC
26/11 Truth DOI: 10.1177/2230807513479054
http://hssa.sagepub.com
Sukumar Muralidharan
Journalist, Gurgaon
Email: sukumar.md@gmail.com
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Abstract
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For an event that traumatised the nation and created a serious crisis of citizen
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loyalty to the Indian State, the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai have
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not been put through a rigorous process of public accountability. Information
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available in the public domain has frequently been inconsistent and the official
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responses, often reflexive and formulaic, have evaded serious scrutiny because
they have conformed to a predetermined template on terrorism. Though the
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pressures enforcing conformity have been acute, a number of independent

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analyses have emerged which point to the need for greater public engagement
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with the process of unravelling the truth behind the sixty hour siege of Mumbai.
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Dispassionate examination of all available evidence indicates that terrorism in the

current millennium is a more complex phenomenon than ordinarily supposed,
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with a vastly variegated cast of actors.

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Keywords
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Mumbai, 26/11, terrorism, Islamic jihad, Hindutva, Intelligence Bureau

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Shock and grief are the first reactions to violence committed with cruel
premeditation; and then come 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 sixty 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.
178 Sukumar Muralidharan
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 State1 and civic order. Those who suffer personal 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
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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
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for informed participation in judging how best to deal with an event that deeply
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undermined citizen loyalty to the State. IA
On 21 November 2012, just ahead of the four year anniversary of Mumbai’s
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horror, India woke up to the news that Ajmal Amir Kasab, the only survivor
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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
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that Kasab’s plea for commutation of the sentence of death had been rejected by
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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
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have been told, without any assurance that the information was accurate (since the
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headline was hedged around by an interrogation mark), that Kasab may have been
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shifted from Mumbai’s Arthur Road prison to Pune’s Yerawada Jail. There was no
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suggestion that the information, even if true, was of any significance, other than
the sensitivity of the 26/11 anniversary that approached.3
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Cold print cannot quite convey the chortling delight with which most of India’s
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channels broadcast the news of the hanging, when they were not quarrelling
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angrily over who had first rights over the breaking news. The following day,
1
In this article, ‘State’ in upper case refers to the apparatus of governance of a nation, while ‘state’ in
lower case refers 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 21
November: “President rejects Kasab’s mercy plea”, The Indian Express, (Delhi edition) November 21,
2012, p 1. 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 21 November, 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.
“Kasab may have been shifted to Pune jail”, The Times of India, Delhi edition, November 21,
2012, p 11.
History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

Karkare, Kamte and the Campaign for 26/11 Truth 179
newspapers 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 twenty-four hour cycle 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 of
their 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
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its banner headline, a story asking if Afzal Guru, the Kashmiri sentenced to death
in a judicial verdict that many question, would be next.4 HT also addressed the
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question on its front page, assuring the readership that India’s Ministry of Home
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Affairs would take a ‘quick call’ on it.5 IA
Kasab’s identity, his motivations and his antecedents were shrouded in mystery
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till the very moment of his death. His burial in the premises of the Yerawada Jail,
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after his 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
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career in extreme terror by material inducements and the illusory promise of a

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paradise to come in the afterlife. One newspaper published an account of Kasab’s

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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
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from the sketchy details that were published of his interrogation.6 A popular news
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website revealed that he was a sharp and canny learner who had picked up the
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Marathi language while in custody, from the police personnel assigned to his inner
security ring. As reported on a widely visited news website, he had, ‘during the
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26/11 trial surprised the Judge, policemen and court officers with his humour and
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grasping power so much so that he picked up Marathi and even conversed in it

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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’.7 Other accounts spoke of him as morose and taciturn. And
4
“Kasab moved up the queue, is Afzal next?”, The Times of India, Delhi edition, November 22, 2012,
page 1.
5
“Guru next? HM to take quick call”, The Hindustan Times, Delhi edition, November 22, 2012, page
1.
6
Saeed Shah, ‘Chasing a Name in Jihadi Heartland’, The Hindu (Delhi ed., 22 November 2012), 11.
7
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 (accessed 26 December 2012).

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 permitted on health grounds.8 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 the Press
Trust of India (PTI), a news agency that does not embellish its factual recording
of events with rhetoric, was distanced from any responsibility for what was said
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by the simple device of identifying Kasab’s demonstration of Marathi linguistic
proficiency as an ‘antic’.9 That rendition of events as perceived by the reporter
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has a troubling resonance with certain telling points made in a book under review
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here, where S.M. Mushrif calls up eyewitness testimony from one of the scenes
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of mayhem on 26/11—Mumbai’s Cama and Albless Hospital—suggesting that
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the attackers found their way around, in part, by interrogating those at the scene
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in Marathi.10
Just under a month after Kasab’s execution, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for
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the Interior, Rehman Malik, paid the visit that had been earlier scheduled for
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mid-November, but then deferred at Delhi’s insistence. There was no clear reason
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given at the time for the postponement of a visit which had the agenda—agreed
well in advance—of formalising a new arrangement for the mutual grant of visas.
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But the imminence of the 26/11 anniversary to the date originally fixed for the
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visit undoubtedly played a part. When the visit did finally occur, the minister was
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characteristically blunt, seemingly unmindful of diplomatic niceties. Whether he

was briefed sufficiently in advance of the visit is unclear, but he must surely have
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been aware that Pakistan’s intent in the matter of Maulana Mohammad Hafiz
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Saeed, the cleric believed to have inspired and planned the 26/11 attacks, would
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be among the principal questions he would have to address. When the occasion
arose, Malik responded with an affirmation of Pakistan’s commitment to take
8
‘Jail Tale: Biryani Myth and the Quiet Inmate’, Hindustan Times (22 November 2012), 1.
9
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.
10
S.M. Mushrif, Who Killed Karkare? The Real Face of Terrorism in India (Fifth ed., Delhi: Pharos
Media and Publishing, 2011), 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 29 November 2008. “Terrorists spoke in Marathi”, The
Times of India, Mumbai edition, November 29, 2008, page 15.

all action warranted by the evidence it was presented. India’s bill of indictment
against Hafiz Saeed, based entirely on Kasab’s confession, did not presumably
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 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 had called in envoys of
major Western nations for a briefing on the diplomatic state of play in securing
justice for 26/11. The United States (US) Embassy in Delhi, soon afterwards,
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put the proceedings on record as a diplomatic cable to the US State Department
and key missions abroad. Appended to the cable was the full text of the dossier
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presented that very day to the Pakistan government. In March 2011, as part of
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a collaborative effort with the citizen journalism website Wikileaks, The Hindu
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published the text of the diplomatic cable with the annexed dossier.11
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Though it had acquired a compelling mystique as a document that applied
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irresistible moral pressure on Pakistan, the intelligence dossier proved a fairly

simple document to negotiate. Brief and relatively uncomplicated in its narration
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of facts, it was based entirely on the confessions rendered by Kasab and two
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fellow detainees, Fahim Ansari and Sabahuddin Sheikh, who were already in
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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.
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Considering its contents, it really needs to be asked why the dossier was not
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made public at the very time it was presented to the Pakistan government. The term
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‘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
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about an event of consequence. There is also in possession of this ‘public’, a fair

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legal knowledge as also the ability to arrive at a reasonable assessment of the

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value of confessions made in police custody. International criminal cooperation

normally requires that stringent criteria be met. To have expected a foreign
government to initiate criminal proceedings on the basis of a factually detailed
but legally somewhat fallible dossier may have been smart as politics, but not so
convincing as legal strategy.
In other words, Kasab’s living testimony—rather than the confession rendered
in custody—would have been key in bringing to book others believed to have
played a role in the 26/11 horror. Aside from Hafiz Saeed, Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi,
ostensibly the military operations head of the Lashkar-e-Taiyaba (LeT) militant
11
See ‘India’s “Grade 1” Evidence against Hafiz Saeed in the Mumbai Attacks’, The Hindu (Delhi ed.,
27 March 2011), 1, http://www.thehindu.com/news/the-india-cables/article1574314.ece (accessed 26
December 2012).

outfit, was in the line of sight of the Indian enforcement agencies. Kasab’s execution
could then 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 for the integrity
of the trial process, there is a need to explain the matter with greater diligence.
Among the counts on which Kasab was convicted and executed was the
murder of eight police personnel just outside the Cama Hospital premises. These
included two officers from the Indian Police Service (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
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these ballistics tests in the case of Karkare was summarised in the 1,500 page trial
court judgement in fairly clear terms:
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...the bullets received from the dead body were sent to the ballistic [sic] expert. The
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comparison did not lead to any conclusive opinion whether the bullets tallied with those
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test fired from the weapons held by the accused number 1 (Kasab) or the deceased
accused number 1 (Abu Ismail).
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Similarly, the trial court judgement summarises the findings from the technical
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analysis of two bullets recovered from Salaskar’s body in the following terms:
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‘They were sent to ballistic expert for examination. The comparison did not lead
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to any conclusive opinion.’12

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These findings were reaffirmed by the Bombay High Court which heard and
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decided Kasab’s appeal against the death penalty.13 Yet, these were not deemed
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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
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that the ballistics tests firmly established Kasab’s responsibility in the killing of
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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 (also known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or
CST) and its environs.14
12
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 (6 May 2010), paragraphs
803–04.
13
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 (21 February 2011), paragraphs 322–04.
14
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 (29 August 2012), paragraph 264.

Factually, despite Kasab’s guilt having been established and the most extreme
punishment meted out, there is sufficient reason to allow Mushrif the indulgence
of posing the question that gives his book its title. ‘Who Killed Karkare?’ might
seem a superfluous question for all signed up devotees of the official theology
on 26/11, and indeed 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 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 judgement is that Karkare paid a price that day for having dismantled the
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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
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ATS. The official narrative sought to locate this incident within the template of
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the Islamic holy war or jihad. But Karkare’s investigations revealed the hand of a
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terror ring of rather different religious stripe.
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That breakthrough opened up new lines of insight into a collaborative venture
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between Hindutva fundamentalists and an active duty military intelligence

officer. It was a campaign of provocation, well endowed and systematic, which
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was assured of impunity merely because the axiom that all acts of terror had their
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inspiration in the ideology of Islamic jihad had secured wide social diffusion and
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acceptance, in part through the lazy compliance of the media. Even when the
targets of terror were communities and symbols of the Islamic faith—as with the
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Malegaon blasts at a Muslim cemetery in September 2006; the fire–bombing of

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the Samjhauta Express near Delhi in February 2007; or the carnage at Hyderabad’s
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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
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put the atrocities down to the holy warriors.

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The volume that Mushrif has authored ranges widely over a number of other
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matters, including the manner 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 forces as a
consequence 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 night. He raises questions that are compelling, 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 tacit patronage to.
The proposition is simply that the Intelligence Bureau (IB) 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 in the ambience of violence, dissent would
be suppressed, that the ‘Bahujan’—or the disenfranchised majority—would be
herded into compliance in its designs. 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 which pointed the finger of suspicion at
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Islamic extremist organisations but were found, on closer examination, to suggest
quite a different inspiration. He lays out a trail of information that points towards
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hasty and ill-considered investigation into these actions and seemingly decisive
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results, simply because they were seen to fit the master narrative of Islamic
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terror.
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In itself, the information that Mushrif presents may not seem entirely
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persuasive. But this is only because he is assembling facts from diverse sources,
mostly in the media. These individual wisps of data suffer from the basic infirmity
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of media sources: they are partial and all stand in mutual isolation. Partly because
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of the short attention spans that are a feature of media sources—partly because
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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
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the serial bombing of a number of suburban trains during evening rush hour in
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Mumbai in July 2006—a crime that was reflexively put down to the Students
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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
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serial bombings that India witnessed between then and the 26/11 attacks. Mushrif
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has no inside knowledge, but there is a scepticism that arises from the picture he
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assembles that seems amply well placed in the light of subsequent revelations.
Though Karkare died on that night of carnage, the processes he had set in motion
had 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 the 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, which picked up young men of the Muslim faith, followed a
set pattern, which did not seriously challenge the intelligence or the imagination,
in assembling what purported to be the evidence against them. 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.15
Another case involving 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 for the police, he had, in fact,
been taken by officials of the Maharashtra ATS to a meeting with Lt Col Shrikant
Purohit, the military intelligence officer since identified by Karkare and arrested
for his involvement in the Hindutva terror ring.16
Mushrif pulls together a number of details to establish that the story of Mumbai
26/11 still remains incompletely told. These may seem like petty quibbles to
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those who have committed themselves to the official narrative, but they add
up—especially when augmented with the information available from a number
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of other sources—to a substantive case. First, an eyewitness to the beaching of
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the inflatable dinghy that brought the terrorists ashore, Mushrif points out, is on
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record as saying that she saw no more than eight individuals getting off the craft.
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This runs contrary to the official narrative that there were, in fact, ten terrorists
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from Pakistan who came ashore.17 Mushrif’s inference from here is simply that
there were already two men in Mumbai at the time who carried out a quite distinct
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agenda under the shroud of confusion caused by the seaborne raiders. He claims
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that the Indian Navy’s intelligence wing had spotted the craft bearing the lethal
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gunmen and had alerted the IB to imminent danger. The IB though chose not to
act since it, ostensibly, had other plans.18
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Mushrif finds the circumstance that the gunmen at Bombay VT targeted a large
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number of Muslim persons, many of whom bore visible markers of their faith,
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to be especially suspicious.19 This ran contrary to media reports emerging out

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15
See the very important series of six articles by Muzamil Jaleel under the strap headline, ‘The SIMI
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Scare’, which appeared in the Delhi edition of The Indian Express between 25 September and 1
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October 2012; available for download as of 16 December 2012 at http://www.indianexpress.com/

fullcoverage/the-simi-scare/459/.
16
The story originally appeared in the news magazine The Week; see ‘Smoking Gun’, The Week (19
November 2012), http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi- bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.
do?contentId=12855617&programId=1073755753&tabId=13&BV_ID=@@@&categoryId=-
189461 (accessed 31 December 2012). Later, the ToI also carried a story with a similar thrust:
‘Malegaon Blast Witness Now Blames ATS: NIA Baffled’, The Times of India (Delhi ed., 3 December
2012), 10, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/NIA-puzzled-as-Malegaon-blast-witness-flip-flops/
articleshow/17457707.cms? (accessed 31 December 2012).
17
Mushrif, Who Killed Karkare?, 207.
18
Ibid., 186.
19
He records (ibid., 198–99) that persons of the Muslim faith were twenty-two of the forty-six fatalities
at Bombay VT. According to the chargesheet filed against Kasab and taken on board by the trial court,
eighteen out of a recorded fifty-two deaths at Bombay VT were of persons with identifiably Muslim
names. Two of the casualties remained unidentified at the time of the trial.

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 the unsubtle change in the official
story on the closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras installed at Bombay VT
far from convincing. Early reports indicated that a good part of the carnage in
the 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, was found to be malfunctioning that day and
had not succeeded in recording much that would be of investigative value.20
Early reports that Mushrif diligently tracks down point to the southern
Maharashtra town of Satara as the source for the subscriber identity module (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
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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
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through the ‘voice over internet protocol’. Not one of these, Mushrif points out,
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involved either Kasab or Abu Ismail. Other media reports quoting eyewitnesses
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describe the two gunmen who inflicted the damage at Bombay VT running down
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the platform and disappearing into the night, rather than—as the official story
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suggests—walking over a footbridge to cross the road and continue the carnage at
the Cama Hospital.21 Kasab and Abu Ismail, in other words, were already at the
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Cama Hospital, executing a quite distinct part of the Hindutva plan.

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Aside from being sole survivor of the gang of marauders, Kasab also occupies
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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
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captured in still images of remarkable clarity on the night of carnage. This was
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the accomplishment of two photojournalists from a newspaper that has an office

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adjacent to Bombay VT. Mushrif identifies this as a source of some mystery, and
also the publishing of the photograph in a variety of news platforms without clear
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attribution to be a circumstance inviting suspicion.22 Indeed, mainly by virtue of

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N
20
Mushrif, Who Killed Karkare?, 191.
21
Ibid., 193–96.
22
Ibid., 205–06. 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, http://
wearethebest.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/the-toi-lensman-who-nailed-ajmal-kasabs-fate/[accessed 31
December 2012]). 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 (In the
Supreme Court of India, Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amir Kasab versus State of Maharashtra,
paragraphs 122–34).

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 possibility that he might
have competent legal defence.23
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
audience interest but also a continuous effort at bringing its 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 a 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.24 Her account of that night focuses especially on the circumstances
SE
that claimed the life of her husband Ashok Kamte, Additional Commissioner of
Police (ACP) for Mumbai’s east zone. She had to invest a great deal of time and
U
energy merely in uncovering the basic facts that should have been hers to know
L
as a matter of right. But at every point in her effort, she encountered a dogged
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refusal by the Mumbai Police hierarchy to reveal facts about how it had lost a
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conscientious and highly regarded officer. Vinita Kamte’s book was published
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at around the one year anniversary mark of the Mumbai attacks. It is a moving
and factually valuable narrative, especially in its presentation of the record of the
M
wireless messages that were exchanged as some of Mumbai’s top police officials
M
sought to deal with a challenge that dropped on them, with neither any warning
O
nor any ‘how to’ information being made available from their training manuals.
As ATS chief, Karkare was among the first to engage the armed desperadoes
C
as they began to cut a destructive swathe through Mumbai. He was killed in the
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near vicinity of Bombay VT, soon after the armed raiders had unleashed a lethal
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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, killing
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without discrimination. Karkare was killed in an ambush in which Kamte and

O
Salaskar—an inspector held in awe for his formidable weapons expertise and his
N
record in summarily eliminating criminal suspects in so-called ‘encounters’—also

perished, alongside a number of colleagues from the police force.
23
The Supreme Court in its judgement (paragraph 121) had words of high praise for the two
photographers: ‘While dealing with the VT carnage, we must take 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 predetermined 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 (16 November 2012), http://www.frontline.in/fl2922/stories/20121116292203700.htm
(accessed 31 December 2012).
24
Vinita Kamte with Vinita Deshmukh, To the Last Bullet: The Inspiring Story of Braveheart Ashok
Kamte (Pune: Ameya Prakashan, 2009).

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 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’—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
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beside him and Karkare in the row behind. In the rear of the vehicle which is
normally configured with three rows of seats, were Jaywant Patil, Yogesh Patil
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and Balasaheb Bhosale. A fourth constable, Arun Jadhav, Salaskar’s subordinate
L
in the Anti-Extortion Wing of the Mumbai Police, had arrived there responding
IA
to superior orders and also took his place in the rear row. The idea ostensibly
C
was to drive through the Rangbhavan Lane (officially known as the Badruddin
ER
Tyabji Marg), which connected two major thoroughfares in the area, and enter
the hospital, then in the grip of terror, through the front gate. The police team was
M
fired upon and returned fire as it drove through Rangbhavan Lane. One among
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the eyewitness accounts speaks of a ‘hefty man in a police uniform’ stepping

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out of the front left seat of the Qualis and firing at the attackers before a deathly
silence descended.25 Everybody in the vehicle had been hit, though perhaps not
C
immediately killed. Only Jadhav lived to tell the tale.

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What Jadhav has said in the courtroom tallies with the account rendered by
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one other eyewitness.26 The bare details also tally with Kasab’s account, which
of course was rendered from a rather different perspective. Incapacitated by the
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gunfire and cramped for space by the three injured policemen who had collapsed
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around him, Jadhav was unable to reach for his rifle to engage the terrorists any
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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 seemingly jammed, 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 stature, sat in the seat beside.
25
Ibid., 50. ‘Hefty man in a police uniform’ is a description that matches Ashok Kamte.
26
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: Sole Survivor of the Gunbattle Which Claimed ATS Chief and Team Remembers the
Encounter from his Hospital Bed’, The Indian Express (Delhi, 30 November 2008), 7, http://www.
indianexpress.com/news/-they-threw-salaskar-kamte-and-karkare-s-bodies-from-the-vehicle-/392336

The two then drove towards Nariman Point, but their vehicle had been damaged in
the exchange of gunfire and indeed, one of the tyres had been punctured. 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 took the wheel once again
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.
SE
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
U
Chowpatty, just around the halfway point of the route the two terrorists intended
L
to traverse. Forced to stop by the formidable double barricade they faced, the two
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marauders emerged, one of them flopping down on the road in feigned helplessness,
C
while the other, coming out of the driver’s seat, began firing at the assembled
ER
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
M
managed to eliminate the more aggressive among the duo, later identified as
M
Abu Ismail. As Assistant Sub-Inspector Tukaram Ombale began approaching the

O
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
C
fell upon his assailant, allowing his colleagues sufficient time to come into the
R
action. Kasab, for that was the identity of the terrorist who had played dead at
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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
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led to Mumbai’s sixty hour ordeal of terror.

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Arun Jadhav has been a key witness for the prosecution, as too have been the
N
owner and other occupants of the car that Kasab and Ismail 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 traverse from the Cama Hospital premises
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 judgement of the court, could be forgiven for this seeming effort
to sensationalise his trauma that day for the benefit of news channels then in
search of sensation even at the cost of veracity.27
27
In the Court of Sessions for Greater Mumbai, The State of Maharashtra versus Mohammad Ajmal
Mohammad Amir Kasab and Others, 1189 (paragraph 992).

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 lived to tell the tale by playing
dead 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
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windshield and witnessed the exchange of fire that followed shortly afterwards
with a police car, established by temporal correspondence to have been the vehicle
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carrying Karkare, Kamte and Salaskar.
L
Major newspapers on 1 December had pictures of Kasab in his hospital bed
IA
and reports in the press at the time offered a reconstruction of the entire operation,
C
from the point of embarkation in Karachi to the raiders’ landing on a small stretch
ER
of beach adjoining Badhwar Park near Mumbai’s Colaba neighbourhood. Kasab’s

confession from his hospital bed provided valuable clues for the search operation
M
already launched by the Indian Navy and Coast Guard, which shortly afterwards
M
brought to shore the M.V. Kuber, a fishing boat registered in Gujarat, in which the
O
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
C
designated to steer the terrorists to their destination and brutally disposed of once
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he had served his purpose. A headless body was also recovered in the open sea
FO
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
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Porbandar Port on 14 November for what was a routine fishing expedition have
O
not been traced.

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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 attests to 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 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 process of documenting 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 the 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.
SE
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
U
of information outside the public dialogue. No clear explanation exists for this
L
indifference towards a documentary that laid out, in ruthless detail, how those days
IA
of terror unfolded—other perhaps than the self-evident one that the Indian news
C
channels were in complete denial about the moral and material sustenance they
ER
had possibly rendered the terrorists with their overheated, breathless and factually
challenged coverage.28 A Mumbai-based tabloid, among the few newspapers to
M
take note of the documentary, reported that it had left the police ‘red-faced’. An
M
unnamed senior officer of the Mumbai Police, ‘on condition of anonymity’, told
O
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’.
C
Producer Dan Reed denied any agreement, ‘verbal or otherwise’, over the use
R
of the footage in his documentary: ‘This material was not released to us by the
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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
T
main worry of the Mumbai Police—that the telecast of the documentary would
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prejudice trial proceedings against Kasab—was without substance.29 The Mumbai

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Police, however, are yet to come out 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
they were given 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.
28
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 402–07.
29
‘Terror in Mumbai is Eye-Opener for Police’, MidDay (13 July 2009), available as of 31 December
2012 under the byline Alisha Coelho, http://www.mid-day.com/news/2009/jul/130709-Mumbai-
terror-attack-Mumbai-police-Ajmal-Amir-Qasab-confession-26-11-Dan-Reed.htm.

There is a young boy, Afroz Ansari, not more than 12 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.30
By January 2009, Vinita Kamte had exhausted all hope of gaining credible
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answers to the questions that came crowding into her mind. On 11 January, The
Hindu carried an account of her disappointment that the Maharashtra Police—
U
which she considered part of her own extended family—was being completely
L
inattentive to her need to know.31 Vinita Kamte was especially offended that her
IA
partner’s death was being put down to impetuosity and a tendency to rush into
C
situations without an assessment of the risks involved. Her inquiries, including
ER
interviews with eyewitnesses to the Rangbhavan Lane encounter—among them

residents of the near neighbourhood—had convinced her that Ashok Kamte had
M
gone in with full knowledge of what he was getting into. His weapons expertise, in
M
fact, had been instrumental in incapacitating one of the terrorists then holding Cama
O
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
C
was convinced that the response of the police force then had been inadequate.
R
She had reason to believe that ‘there were many calls made to the (police) control
FO
room by people near the Cama hospital who saw the two terrorists’.32 And yet, she
discovered, there were no instructions relayed to Karkare, Kamte and Salaskar
T
that driving into Rangbhavan Lane could put them at risk of a vicious ambush.
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Vinita Kamte was deeply troubled about the circumstances in which Ashok
N
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
30
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 11 June 2010. See a version of the story at
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Karkare—s-bullet-proof-vest-misplaced-in-hospital—
Police/632616 (accessed 31 December 2012).
31
‘My Husband Died a Hero’s Death: Vinita Kamte’, The Hindu (11 January 2009), 9, http://www.
hindu.com/2009/01/11/stories/2009011160430900.htm (accessed 31 December 2012).
32
Vinita Kamte, op. cit, p. 38.

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.33
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
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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
U
flee the scene. But beyond this concession that Ashok’s intervention was in some
L
measure crucial, his widow records that Police Commissioner Ghafoor ‘appeared
IA
unwilling to go into the details’.
C
A meeting followed with Rakesh Maria, then Joint Commissioner of Mumbai
ER
Police and a key figure in the response to the terrorist assault. Taking charge of
the police control room soon after the shooting began, Maria had directed the
M
deployment of men and material through various nodes of the city where the most
M
serious threats were anticipated. Maria proved a reluctant speaker as Vinita Kamte
O
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
C
under orders from Commissioner Ghafoor to drive towards Nariman Point, Maria
R
pleaded ignorance.
FO
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
T
hours. Ghafoor proved amenable to the request and referred it to Maria for further
O
action, and then followed a complete silence. Vinita Kamte later obtained the
N
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 records 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 the police control
room for orders. These are referred to the commissioner of police to begin with,
but at 23:17 hours, he is told explicitly by the control room to report to the Special
33
‘They Threw Salaskar, Kamte and Karkare’s Bodies from the Vehicle’.

Branch office of the force, 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, Jayawant 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
instructions down the chain of command 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
SE
team were at the site. That deployment of police personnel was not adequate
in his judgement. ‘Therefore,’ he continues, ‘we need a team from the front
U
side.34 We need to encircle Cama and surround it. Also tell Mr Prasad to speak
L
to the army authorities.’ As Ashok Kamte had said just around then, probably
IA
thinking aloud rather than ordering any operational response, the situation at
C
the time seemed to require an army deployment. And the Prasad that Karkare
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mentioned was obviously the Joint Commissioner of Mumbai Police for Law
and Order, K.L. Prasad, the designated authority within the police hierarchy
M
to make an assessment of when the military should be called in, in aid of civil
M
authority.
O
Minutes after this quite explicit request from Karkare, Inspector Bapurao
Dhurgude approached the front gate of Cama Hospital and apparently saw the
C
two terrorist gunmen walking towards Rangbhavan Lane. Phad witnessed how
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he challenged the duo though he lacked any kind of backup in terms of men,
FO
material or firepower, and was ruthlessly gunned down. The two marauders then
presumably ducked into the Rangbhavan Lane where they took cover behind the
T
bushes on one side. Vinita Kamte estimates that a number of calls were made
O
from then on to the police emergency number 100, indicating that the two killers
N
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.
34
Vinita Kamte, p. 41.

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, which is what he is
shown to have done in the official prosecution documents. Eight minutes after
Jadhav 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
SE
to life with an urgent message to the control room, confirming that he had, along
with Kamte and Salaskar, been injured and was being taken to hospital.
U
At 56 minutes past midnight, control room records show the Commissioner of
L
Police, Hasan Ghafoor, in conversation with Joint Commissioner Rakesh Maria.
IA
Kasab has by this time been nabbed at Chowpatty and Ghafoor is underlining the
C
need for subjecting him to an immediate interrogation. But to a specific query
ER
about the whereabouts of Karkare and Kamte, Maria remained unresponsive. He

mentions that Sadanand Date, an Additional Commissioner of Police for central
M
Mumbai was at the Cama Hospital and Kamte in the Special Branch office area.
M
Karkare was, to the best of his knowledge, in Bombay VT. To a specific inquiry
O
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
C
able to hide her sense of betrayal. In her first media interview since the siege of
R
Mumbai, she expressed her disappointment at the initial reluctance of the higher
FO
police command to recognise the contribution that Ashok had made towards
capturing Kasab. It was his determined engagement with the armed marauders
T
in the Rangbhavan Lane that had incapacitated them both and neutralised their
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possible intent to create further havoc. But far from hearing words of commendation
N
for this act of commitment, she only encountered condescension at the supposed
folly three senior officers showed in walking into an ambush without securing
their flanks.35
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 in the gun
battles he had engaged in. Yet, within days of 26/11, the dean of Nair Hospital,
where Kasab was reportedly taken from the spot of his capture, was disputing
35
See ‘My Husband Died a Hero’s Death’. A point further underlined in Kamte and Deshmukh, To the
Last Bullet.

that entire account. A national newspaper on 2 December 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.’36
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 intent to seek martyrdom in the righteous struggle for the true 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 professional training and integrity. Kasab’s photograph, as published in major
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newspapers on 1 December, was tightly cropped, with just the face visible. The
video recording of his interrogation utilises a wider frame that shows him with a
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blanket drawn up to his chest and a surgical patch on the right side of his neck.
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There is a band-aid adhering to his lower left jaw (visible also in the still pictures)
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and as the Nair Hospital dean indicated, some signs of abrasions on his left cheek.
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The voice though is steady and the eyes focused. At certain points, he shows a
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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
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patience that a teacher would normally reserve for a slow student that he was there
M
to just kill whoever came into his line of vision.

O
Incompetence and insensitivity—serious charges in themselves—seem

eminently warranted by the facts uncovered by Vinita Kamte. Her narrative also
C
paints an intimate portrait of factionalism within the police force and a collapse of
R
command and coordination. A failure to stand together in an hour of dire threat was
FO
also exposed in the stocktaking, as when Hasan Ghafoor was relieved of charge as
Commissioner for suggesting that certain among his subordinate officers lacked
T
the commitment to directly take on the challenge of 26/11.

O
Vinita Kamte maintains a sense of propriety when addressing the many

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mysteries of that night of terror. The former policeman, Mushrif, is unconstrained

by these proprieties. He narrates a tale of conspiracy perpetrated with a deep
ideological agenda.37 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
36
‘No Bullet Hit Kasab, No Active Treatment On, Says Hospital’s Dean’, The Indian Express
(2 December 2009), 1, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/no-bullet-hit-kasab-no-active-treatment-
on-says-hospital-s-dean/393116 (accessed 31 December 2012).
37
Mushrif, Who Killed Karkare?

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 Hotel, directly in the line of fire of the raiders, but reprieved
because they pleaded their Islamic allegiance.38
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
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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
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Hospital and elsewhere, were perhaps working on a different agenda.
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Implausible is the judgement Mushrif delivers about the official narrative
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on the Cama Hospital shoot-out. He finds it difficult to believe, for instance,
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that a severely injured constable in the backseat of a police vehicle could have
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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
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hijacked police vehicle was abandoned and another car seized by terrorists who
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intended to drive towards Malabar Hill, is another tall tale. Mushrif is convinced
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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
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force, he is absolutely convinced that any criminal captured in the circumstances

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that prevailed in Mumbai that fateful day would not have been left alive. The fate
FO
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
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without serious public dissent as legitimate self-defence.

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Kasab has been, for obvious reasons, the principal focus of both the prosecution
N
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
38
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 signalled 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.

rendered material assistance to the plotters by, among other things, providing a
hand-drawn map of all vital locations in the crosshairs of the terror plot. The map
in the prosecution narration was crafted by Ansari and handed over to Sheikh at a
meeting in Kathmandu.
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 being found by the police: an extended seaborne
journey on three vessels; a lethal shoot-out; and a final, fatal encounter with the
police. For all that, the map as it was produced as evidence in court was spotless
and uncreased.
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In dismissing this piece of evidence, the trial court judge termed it ‘highly
doubtful’. He also wondered what precise purpose a hand-drawn map would serve
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when the Internet makes it possible to easily download all maps necessary for
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an operation such as 26/11 with much greater authenticity. The prosecution case
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that Ansari and Sheikh had met in Kathmandu to plan out certain elements of the
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terrorist strike on Mumbai was also discounted by the court, as was the claim that
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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
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to land.
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Evidently, despite the experience of severely botched up investigations since

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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
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were not quite willing to go back on old proclivities. Where evidence could not
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be found, it could be manufactured to serve a predetermined case. This was the

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organisational culture, drawing on wider social prejudices and reinforcing them,

that Karkare pushed back against.
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Mushrif makes out a case that Karkare paid with his life for this sin of non-
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conformity. On 10 February 2010, as hearings in the 26/11 trial were nearing

N
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 16 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 his life. 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 five years
without charge—for most of the time in Delhi’s Tihar Jail—he was set at liberty 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 on to 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 judgement
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.39
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 attacks in the US, when Modi
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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
U
formulation, later reiterated by none less than the Israeli ambassador to the
L
US.40 Karkare proved oblivious to this wisdom which obviously was among the
IA
unstated premises of the global war on terror, most actively pursued since 2001
C
by the US–Israeli axis.
ER
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
M
supposed sadhvi (a woman who had taken the vows of renunciation and a lifetime
M
of religious piety), the self-proclaimed head of a religious foundation, a serving

O
army officer and sundry others. They all drew their inspiration from Hindutva, the
same ideological fount at which Narendra Modi was nurtured.
C
Just two days before he was killed, Karkare had met with a news team and
R
confessed to a certain befuddlement over the outrage that had followed his
FO
pursuit of the Hindutva terrorism ring. ‘I don’t know why this case has become so
political. The pressure is tremendous and I am wondering how to extricate it from
T
all the politics,’ he said in an interview with The Indian Express, published on 28
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November 2008. These were remarks made off the record, which the newspaper
N
thought could be published after the unexpected turn of events of 26/11. Karkare’s
39
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?’, http://kafila.org/2012/11/24/remembering-
shahid-azmi-can-the-love-of-justice-be-assassinated-arvind-narrain-saumya-uma/(accessed 31 December
2012). Also, see Mahtab Alam, ‘Remembering Shahid Azmi, the Shaheed’, written on the one year
anniversary of the murder, http://kafila.org/2011/02/10/remembering-shahid-azmi-the-shaheed-mahtab-
alam/(accessed 31 December 2012).
40
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 (Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003). The
remarks by the Israeli ambassador were widely reported at the time. See http://www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601466.html (accessed 31 December 2012).

commitment indeed was, as he told the newspaper, to ‘pursue this case very
objectively and not start with assumptions’.41
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 statewide bandh to protest the supposed torture
of the sadhvi that Karkare had arrested on suspicions of involvement in a number of
bomb attacks.42 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
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clarity on the status of India’s IB. The petition filed before the High Court of
Karnataka by a former officer of the IB mentioned that the agency formed in
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1887, by the then British secretary of state as a sub-sect of the Central Special
L
Branch, had since ‘remained like a ghost, without a statute’.43 India meanwhile
IA
moved through long years of strife and struggle towards independent nationhood,
C
adopting a republican constitution as a gesture of faith in the people. But the IB
ER
remained resolutely beyond the pale of public scrutiny.

Mumbai 26/11 showed one possible pathway that a democratic polity could take
M
to purge itself of residual vestiges of power without accountability. India though

M
seems intent on taking the opposite path. In April 2012, the US government—in a
O
relapse of infantilism reminiscent of the George W. Bush presidency—announced

a 10 million dollar bounty on the head of the Pakistani cleric Hafiz Mohammad
C
Saeed, believed, through the rapidly mutating organisations that he spawned with
R
active support from military intelligence agencies and sponsors in the oil-exporting
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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
T
frontier justice. India’s insistence on Saeed’s villainy and the need to punish him
O
by all means, lawful or otherwise, had earned vindication at the ultimate fount of
N
international legitimacy. Increasingly unmindful of basic verities as its courtship

of the US 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.
41
‘His Response to a Death Threat: A “Smiley”’, The Indian Express (Delhi ed., 28 November 2008), 6,
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/karkare-s-response-to-a-death-threat-a-smiley/391325/
42
‘Sena Picks Up Anti-ATS Baton from BJP’, The Economic Times (27 November 2008), 2, http://
articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2008-11-27/news/28464191_1_malegaon-blast-dayanand-
pandey-lt-col-prasad-purohit (accessed 31 December 2012).
43
See the Times News Network story datelined Chennai, 26 March 2012, http://articles.timesofindia.
indiatimes.com/2012-03-26/india/31239443_1_ib-r-n-kulkarni-intelligence-bureau (accessed 31
December 2012).

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.
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Intelligence Failure or Design

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Intelligence Failure or Design

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Revaluation of Tradition in the Ideology of the Radical Adivasi Resistance

Intelligence Failure or History and Sociology of South Asia

and the Campaign for Los Angeles, London,

pressures enforcing conformity have been acute, a number of independent

Dispassionate examination of all available evidence indicates that terrorism in the

with a vastly variegated cast of actors.

Mumbai, 26/11, terrorism, Islamic jihad, Hindutva, Intelligence Bureau

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

career in extreme terror by material inducements and the illusory promise of a

paradise to come in the afterlife. One newspaper published an account of Kasab’s

life which was as much the documentation of a determined investigative effort

grasping power so much so that he picked up Marathi and even conversed in it

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

characteristically blunt, seemingly unmindful of diplomatic niceties. Whether he

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

irresistible moral pressure on Pakistan, the intelligence dossier proved a fairly

‘public’ in India is subject to various interpretations, but it could be understood in

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 cooperation

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

to any conclusive opinion.’12

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

between Hindutva fundamentalists and an active duty military intelligence

Malegaon blasts at a Muslim cemetery in September 2006; the fire–bombing of

put the atrocities down to the holy warriors.

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

of their acquiescence in the master narrative of Islamic terrorism—these isolated

Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and to various confederate bodies overseas,

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

to be especially suspicious.19 This ran contrary to media reports emerging out

October 2012; available for download as of 16 December 2012 at http://www.indianexpress.com/

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

of Kasab’s preliminary interrogation where he is believed to have said that his

Cama Hospital, executing a quite distinct part of the Hindutva plan.

the accomplishment of two photojournalists from a newspaper that has an office

attribution to be a circumstance inviting suspicion.22 Indeed, mainly by virtue of

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

without discrimination. Karkare was killed in an ambush in which Kamte and

record in summarily eliminating criminal suspects in so-called ‘encounters’—also

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

the eyewitness accounts speaks of a ‘hefty man in a police uniform’ stepping

immediately killed. Only Jadhav lived to tell the tale.

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

Abu Ismail. As Assistant Sub-Inspector Tukaram Ombale began approaching the

led to Mumbai’s sixty hour ordeal of terror.

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

of beach adjoining Badhwar Park near Mumbai’s Colaba neighbourhood. Kasab’s

not been traced.

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

Mumbai police. My documentary has been screened in the UK only. Channel 4

prejudice trial proceedings against Kasab—was without substance.29 The Mumbai

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

interviews with eyewitnesses to the Rangbhavan Lane encounter—among them

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

about the whereabouts of Karkare and Kamte, Maria remained unresponsive. He

History and Sociology of South Asia, 7, 2 (2013): 177–201

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

to just kill whoever came into his line of vision.

Incompetence and insensitivity—serious charges in themselves—seem

the commitment to directly take on the challenge of 26/11.

Vinita Kamte maintains a sense of propriety when addressing the many