Aseemanand continued, “Then they told me, ‘Swamiji, if you do this we will be at ease with it. Nothing wrong will happen then. Criminalisation nahin hoga (It will not be criminalised). If you do it, then people won’t say that we did a crime for the sake of committing a crime. It will be connected to the ideology. This is very important for Hindus. Please do this. You have our blessings.’” He told me one story about the aftermath of the tsunami in 2004. “A Christian woman came for milk for her child,” he recalled. “My people said no. She said that the kid had not had any food for three days, and pleaded that it would die if we didn’t give some milk. So please give some. Then they said go ask Swamiji. I told her that what they are doing is right. You won’t get any milk here.” It is a story he likes to repeat. Aseemanand proudly claimed. “We demolished 30 churches and built temples. There was some commotion. “To stop conversions is an easy job,” Aseemanand told me. “Use the route of religion. Make the Hindus kattar [fanatic]. The rest of the work will be done by them.” he claimed: “The wiping out of Muslims from this area was also overseen by me.” - On 16 February 2007—a Shivratri day—Joshi and Aseemanand met again, at the Kardmeshwar Mahadev Mandir in Balpur, Gujarat. “There is going to be some good news” in the next few days, Joshi told Aseemanand, according to the confession. Two days later, the Samjhauta Express was bombed. A day or so after that, Joshi, Aseemanand and some members of the larger conspiracy met at Rateshwar’s house, where Joshi took credit for the attack. This time he told Aseemanand that Dange and his aides carried out the blast. Attacks continued over the next eight months; in May, the group bombed Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid and, in October, they bombed the Ajmer dargah. Aseemanand was thrown in a Hyderabad jail and soon confessed. “The CBI already knew the whole story,” Aseemanand told me. One statement Aseemanand made included a surprising account of why he decided to confess .... A few days after his detention, he met a Muslim boy named Kaleem, who was also imprisoned in Hyderabad. Kaleem was accused of the Mecca Masjid blasts which Aseemanand had plotted. Kaleem used to wait on Aseemanand, and his kindness aggravated Aseemanand’s conscience. He was confessing, Aseemanand claimed, out of remorse. During our interviews, prison officers often stopped by to ask Aseemanand how he was doing. “They all tell me ‘jo hua accha hua,’” Aseemanand said—whatever happened is good. “They don’t know whether I have done it or not, but they believe that whoever did it, did the right thing.”
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 09:40:26 +0000
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