Malegaon Bombing – The ‘Innocence’ of Saffron Extremists
Savera
IN the early 2000’s a series of bomb blasts targeting Muslims rocked the country. These were Malegaon (2006, 2008), the Samjhauta Express (2007), Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid (2007), Ajmer Sharif Dargah (2007) and Modasa (2008). Before that, there had been several bomb blasts in public places that were claimed by Islamist groups. It was thought that the later blasts were revenge attacks perpetrated by Hindu fanatics. But this proved to be just a pretext because later investigations revealed an insanely more dangerous vision and plan, as we will see below. Many years later one Swami Aseemanand confessed to the police after his arrest in 2021 that various Sangh Parivar outfits and individuals associated with it had indeed been among those responsible for the later blasts. He even implicated some pracharaks of RSS and a senior RSS leader in the conspiracy.
Recently, the case of the Malegaon blast in September 2008 was finally decided by the NIA court in Mumbai. Six people had been killed and about 100 injured when a crude homemade bomb exploded near a mosque in the town. The court acquitted all the 11 accused who were out on bail. These included Sadhvi Pragya Thakur, former member of parliament, some ex-army men, and some disgruntled Sangh Parivar associates. The NIA had taken over the case from the Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) in 2011 after it was found that blasts in different parts of the country were interlinked. After the Modi-led BJP came to power in 2014, the NIA’s tune changed and, in 2016, it filed a supplementary chargesheet in the case calling for discharging Pragya Thakur. The court rejected the plea, and case went to trial in 2018. The initial investigation by the ATS was largely found unacceptable by the NIA court due to various technical and procedural ‘lapses’. The court said that while the case created strong suspicion, actual evidence to prove the allegations was not presented by the prosecution. This had been hinted way back in 2015 by the special NIA prosecutor Rohini Salian who alleged that the NIA wanted her to go slow on the case as per directions from ‘higher ups’.
The chargesheet filed by the ATS had voluminous supporting evidence annexed, included video recordings of various meetings held by the accused (made by one of the participants), records of interrogations, transcripts of other meetings, apart from usual forensic reports, etc. In 2010, these records were analysed by Christophe Jaffrelot, Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London in a special article in the Economic & Political Weekly (September 4, 2010). The article and many of the key case documents are available online. A summary of the same has been published in The Wire (August 5, 2025) along with the same case documents. The analysis given below is based on the case documents given therein.
THE PLOT AND THE CONSPIRATORS
An organisation called Abhinav Bharat (‘New India’) was floated by Lt Col Prasad Purohit in 2006, according to one interrogation transcript. It was named in remembrance of the movement initiated by V D Savarkar in 1905. Himani Savarkar, niece of Nathuram Godse and wife of Savarkar’s nephew, however, claimed that the organisation was floated by Sameer Kulkarni, an RSS pracharak.
According to statements made by various accused and others, the key people involved included Swami Amritananda Dev Tirtha (also known under the names of Sudhakar Dwivedi, Sudhakar Dhar, and Dayanand Pandey), Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Major Ramesh Upadhyay, Sudhakar Chaturvedi, B L Sharma, and Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit. Meetings took place in various places to give shape to the organisation and develop its principles.
These people were an incendiary mix of religious figures, ex-army men and workers of Sangh Parivar outfits. Swami Amritananda Dev Tirtha styled himself as the Shankaracharya of Sri Sharada Sarvagyapeeth, located in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). His registered office was in Jammu and a “camp office” near Faridabad. Major Ramesh Upadhyay was a former defence services officer. He and the key figure, Lt-Col. Prasad Purohit had been imparting military training to young activists and were instrumental in procuring arms and explosives. Purohit shifted to Panchmarhi (Madhya Pradesh) in July-August 2008, where he organised training camps to handle arms and explosives. Apart from these two accused, other ex-service men were also involved in Abhinav Bharat. Colonel Aditya Dhar of the “Parachute regiment” is introduced in one meeting, and Purohit also mentions Major Parag Modak as “in charge of our international office.” The Sangh Parivar component of the conspirators included Pragya Singh Thakur, who was an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) leader in Ujjain and Indore until 1997, then a member of its national executive. Later, in 2019, she contested and won the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat as a BJP candidate. Sameer Kulkarni was a full time RSS worker (pracharak). B L Sharma, an RSS worker since 1940, took active part in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement as a Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader, and later won the East Delhi Lok Sabha seat in 1991 and 1996. He resigned his seat and membership of the BJP in 1997 and started working as state secretary of VHP.
The plot to carry out a bombing in Malegaon, a Muslim concentration town in Nasik, Maharashtra, was evolved over four meetings in 2008, according to the chargesheet. On January 25-27, 2008, Purohit, Upadhyay, Kulkarni, Chaturvedi and Swami Amritananda met near Faridabad. The main agenda was a discussion on and finalisation of the constitution of the Hindu Rashtra. It also discussed strategies for uniting Hindus. On April 11-12, 2008, the same people met with Pragya Singh Thakur in Bhopal and decided the location for bombing – a thickly populated area of Malegaon. While Purohit took the responsibility of arranging explosives, Pragya Singh Thakur assured that she would depute men for planting them. Later, Pragya Singh Thakur introduced Ramchandra Kalasangra and Sandip Dange, associated with RSS, to Amritananda Dev Tirtha as two reliable persons who would plant the bomb in Malegaon. On August 3, 2008, in a meeting held at the dharmshala of Mahakaleshwar temple in Ujjain, Purohit was asked to procure and give RDX to Kalasangra and Dange. Purohit then asked Rakesh Dhawade, “a trained expert in committing explosions and assembling improvised explosive devices”, to provide explosives to Kalasangra and Dange at Pune, where they met on August 9 and 10, 2008.
HINDU RASHTRA WAS THE GOAL
“We will fight the Constitution to fight for our Nation.” This is how Purohit opened the Faridabad meeting being held on Republic Day 2008. He was referring to the Indian Constitution.
“We have to establish this country in accordance with the vedic procedures, we want the sanatan dharma, the vedic dharma,” he explained.
Purohit had prepared a draft constitution of the Hindu Rashtra excerpts of which he placed before the meeting. It provided for “one-party rule” and a “presidential form of government.” There would be little scope for dissent, as Purohit explained: “Very important point: political excommunication of people whose ideas are detrimental to Hindu Rashtra…some of them should be killed.”
How was this end to be achieved? It was suggested that the first step was to unite all Hindus. This would be possible only by terrorising Muslims because that would force them to unite leading to the final battle which Hindus were bound to win. He says at the Faridabad meeting, “The day Muslims get united that will be our biggest victory. (…) The plan is to begin striking at them and let the Imam Bukhari stand up for the community. He has to say that I will not tolerate injustices in Maharashtra; let them unite, start shouting together…we are working for unification of Islam, Christians and Maoists against us.”
Initially, Abhinav Bharat should become a “Phantom organisation – like a ghost that appeared from nowhere” Purohit says. It will gain “nuisance value”, blast after blast by striking Muslims without claiming responsibility for any of these attacks. Eventually, this “nuisance value” was supposed to give it some bargaining power, so much so the organisation could join the political process – by taking over the VHP and transforming itself into a political party.
Clearly, just revenge for Islamic terrorist activities was not the reason why these people were acting together. The strategic goal was much bigger, even though the plan of action was rather fantastical.
At Faridabad, Purohit claimed that Abhinav Bharat had already carried out two blasts. It can be surmised from a private conversation between Swami Amritanand and Maj. Upadhyaya on January 25, 2008, that one of them was the Mecca Masjid, Hyderabad blast. “There was no one involved from the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) or anything. It was one of our men only. I can say this on the basis of my knowledge. This was done in the name of duty,” Upadhyaya says. The other attack could well be that of Nanded or that of Parbhani or Jalna, two bomb attacks in which Rakesh Dhawade – one of the accused in the Malegaon case – had been implicated.
The organisation was not short of funds. The Malegaon FIR says that Purohit collected considerable funds “to the tune of Rs 21,00,000 for himself and for his Abhinav Bharat organisation” to promote his plans.
SEARCH FOR FOREIGN SUPPORT
As Purohit explained at the Faridabad meeting, the Hindus could be considered a nationality searching for official recognition, which could be attained from the United Nations. They wanted to create “a central Hindu government in exile” and use the UN as a global forum to espouse their cause much like the Kashmiris (JKLF and Hurriyat) had tried to do.
There is another civilizational dream that is discussed: a union of Hindu and Buddhist nations “to fight Islamic and Christian invasions”. Purohit sees a political union in the future which he calls the “Hindu and Oriental Nations Union”. It consists of “Cambodia, Thailand, Bharat, Nepal, Bhutan, Japan, Korea”.
But besides all this lofty, aspirational stuff, foreign sponsors were needed for immediate material support. Purohit reported at the Faridabad meeting that they had already contacted people in Israel and Nepal, and found support.
“I made contacts in Israel – one of our ‘captains’ has already gone and come back from there. We had a very positive response from their side. They told us, ‘You should show us something on the ground.’
He said that they had “demanded four things from them (Israelis)”: i) uninterrupted supply of equipment and training; ii) permission to start an office with saffron flag in Tel Aviv; iii) political asylum; iv) “support our cause in the UN that a Hindu nation is born”. According to Purohit the Israelis agreed to political asylum and equipment and training “once we show something on the ground”. It appears that even the Israelis balked at the idea of flying the saffron flag in Tel Aviv and supporting the Hindu Rashtra in UN. Purohit says that the Israelis were hesitant on these counts because their relations with India had started improving in recent times and they didn’t want to jeopardise that.
In Nepal, the Abhinav Bharat group was apparently in touch with some royalist groups, which had been declared terrorist groups only recently, according to Dr R P Singh speaking in one of the meetings. Purohit claimed that every six months 200 men from India will be trained as soldiers by Nepali forces. He also claimed that he told the Nepali people that they should buy “AKS from Czechoslovakia”, for which “we will pay money”.
FRUSTRATION WITH BJP
The meeting records show a running thread of frustration with the RSS/BJP for going slow in the drive towards realising the Hindu Rashtra. As B L Sharma put it mordantly in the Faridabad meeting: “It’s been a year that I have sent some three lakh letters, distributed 20,000 maps of Akhand Bharat on 26 January, but these Brahmins and traders have never done anything and neither will they do...Ultimately they do things that are feasible. One Chankaya comes up and becomes a moderate ruler…I believe that you have to set fire in the society, at least a spark.”
It is this feeling that led many Sangh Parivar cadres to join up with Abhinav Bharat type groups. Swami Assemanand’s confession (made under Sec. 164 of CrPC) has indicated several names of such persons.
But that was then, in early 2000’s. What has been happening since 2014, once Modi came to power? The basket of ideas and aspirations that are espoused by different conspirators in the above described case documents are integral to the thinking of most people in power today, whether it is at the centre or in the states. Some of the ideas are being translated into reality by government action – slow and steady dismantling of the Constitution and its three pillars of secularism, democracy and federalism being the most important one. As far as the objective of ‘awakening the Hindus’ is concerned, the government is sharing the responsibility with extra-governmental forces like the RSS. PM Modi will inaugurate the Ayodhya Temple while Bhagwat the RSS supremo will laud the glorious past of Hindu India. But more direct action – of the kind that the Abhinav Bharat conspirators were envisaging – is now outsourced to scores of organisations committed to the bigoted Hindu supremacist ideology. They will incite mob lynchings, kill alleged beef eaters, provoke violence against mosques and churches, kill rationalist thinkers, whip up militaristic hysteria against enemies, hunt down so-called infiltrators, and call for boycott and violence against vulnerable minority community members. If culprits are caught by law enforcement, their cases flounder or they get acquitted. So much so that convicts of heinous crimes are getting remission of their sentences, as in the Bilkis Bano case. The seeds of this poison tree that we see today can be found in the thoughts of the Malegaon conspirators.
