On July 31, 2025, a special court of India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) in Mumbai delivered a verdict that was less a denouement than a damp squib. All seven accused in the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case—including Pragya Singh Thakur, a firebrand former BJP MP, and Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, an army officer with a penchant for cloak-and-dagger—were acquitted. The blast, which killed six and maimed 95 in a Muslim-majority textile town during Ramadan, was a tinderbox of communal tension. Seventeen years later, the court’s ruling, citing a paucity of “cogent and reliable” evidence, has left victims’ kin bereft, India’s investigative machinery exposed as creaky, and the nation’s discourse on terrorism mired in acrimony. This is not justice served but justice sidestepped, with a witless precedent to boot. A Detonation, a Divisive Theory On September 29, 2008, a motorcycle-borne bomb erupted near Bhikku Chowk in Malegaon, 200km from Mumbai, shattering lives...