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 and communal calm. The explosion, timed with Machiavellian precision before Navratri and during Ramadan, claimed a 10-year-old girl, Farheen, and a 19-year-old student, Azhar, among others. The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), under the intrepid Hemant Karkare, initially sniffed out a Muslim terror plot but soon veered into uncharted territory: a conspiracy by Hindu extremists tied to Abhinav Bharat, a right-wing outfit. The ATS fingered Thakur as the motorcycle’s owner and Purohit as the purveyor of RDX, igniting the incendiary notion of “saffron terror”—a phrase that sent Hindu nationalists into apoplexy and critics of the then-ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) crying foul.
The case became a political crucible. Thakur, arrested in 2008, decried torture and framed herself as a martyr of a secularist witch-hunt. Purohit, a military intelligence officer, insisted he was infiltrating Abhinav Bharat, not orchestrating mayhem. The investigation, handed to the NIA in 2011, lurched through a labyrinth of legal contortions, with charges under the draconian Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) jettisoned in 2016. By the time the trial began in 2018, the case was less a quest for truth than a Sisyphean slog.
Evidence Evaporates, Doubt Prevails
Special Judge A.K. Lahoti’s verdict was a masterclass in juridical restraint—and investigative ignominy. The prosecution, he ruled, had flubbed its lines spectacularly, failing to muster evidence “beyond reasonable doubt.” The motorcycle’s chassis number was illegible, scuttling claims of Thakur’s ownership. Allegations that Purohit procured RDX from Kashmir were dismissed as fanciful. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) was deemed inapplicable due to bungled sanction orders. Most damningly, 39 of 323 witnesses turned hostile, and 26 shuffled off this mortal coil before testifying—a grim tally that speaks to coercion, neglect, or both. “Terrorism has no religion,” intoned the judge, but convictions, alas, require proof, not platitudes.
The case’s collapse is a litany of institutional ineptitude. The ATS, lionized for its audacity, leaned on confessions later ruled inadmissible. The NIA, taking the baton in 2011, faced accusations of torpor under the BJP’s aegis, with former prosecutor Rohini Salian alleging in 2015 that she was nudged to “go soft.” Forensic fiascos—unreadable chassis numbers, unverified explosives—compounded the mess. The witness debacle, with nearly one in eight retracting or perishing, betrays a witness-protection regime more porous than a colander. This was not a trial but a slow-motion shipwreck.
A Fractious Fallout
The acquittal has poured ghee on India’s communal embers. Thakur, who parlayed her 2019 Lok Sabha win into a saffron-hued halo, crowed of “victory” and lamented her “ruined” life, casting herself as a Hindu Joan of Arc. Purohit, reinstated in the army post-bail in 2017, branded his accusers “mentally ill.” BJP heavyweights like Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Uttar Pradesh’s Yogi Adityanath exulted, with Fadnavis proclaiming, “Saffron can never be terror”—a soundbite that risks whitewashing a murky narrative. Such triumphalism has left critics aghast, fearing the verdict buries the “saffron terror” hypothesis under political rubble.
For Malegaon’s victims, the ruling is a laceration. Liyakat Shaikh, Farheen’s father, spoke of a “heartbroken” family, while Firoz Ahmed Azmi of Kul Jamat-e Tanzeem demanded, “If not these, then who?” AIMIM’s Imtiaz Jaleel urged an appeal, decrying a justice system that leaves the guilty at large. The court’s largesse—₹2 lakh for the deceased’s kin, ₹50,000 for the injured—feels like a paltry sop to those whose lives were sundered. After 17 years, Malegaon’s wounds fester, unavenged.
A Precedent of Peril
This verdict is a requiem for investigative rigour. India’s terror probes, too often swayed by political zephyrs, falter when evidence is thin and witnesses vanish. The Malegaon case, with its allegations of bias under both UPA and BJP regimes, exposes a system where justice is less blind than blinkered. The acquittal risks emboldening those who dismiss extremist violence—Hindu, Muslim, or otherwise—without forensic reckoning. Worse, it leaves the question of Malegaon’s true culprits unanswered, a specter haunting India’s conscience.
The path forward demands reform: ironclad witness protection, forensic excellence, and agencies insulated from political meddling. Without these, India’s terror trials will remain kabuki theatre—long on drama, short on resolution. For now, Malegaon’s survivors, like the nation itself, are left to grapple with a verdict that offers neither closure nor clarity, only the bitter aftertaste of justice deferred.
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