The acquittal by the Bombay High Court of 12 men accused of being responsible for the 2006 serial bomb blasts on Mumbai’s suburban trains has triggered a much-needed discussion on our criminal justice system, on the police and the investigative agencies, and the absence of closure in so many such cases.

On the evening of July 11, on a typically rainy monsoon day, millions of Mumbaikars made their way to take a train back to their homes. The suburban train system in Mumbai has often been referred to as a “lifeline”. However, on this particular evening, it turned out to be a “death line”. The seven blasts that occurred as the trains pulled into different stations along the route, all in the First-Class compartments, killed 189 people and injured 827.

Even as reporters scrambled to reach the stations, speculation about this being a “terror attack” had started. The front pages of newspapers a couple of days after the blasts carried stories of not just of how Mumbai, a city that apparently never sleeps, leapt back to normal the day after, but reports about how Pakistan was the main suspect behind the blasts. Within a day, a special anti-terror squad, led by senior police officer K P Raghuvanshi, was handed the responsibility to investigate the case. 

Within three months, this anti-terror squad claimed that the case had been solved. It picked up suspects not just in Mumbai but from other cities including Secunderabad. All the suspects were Muslim men. Thirteen of them were charged. 

The case was heard in a trial court which finally gave its ruling in 2015, nine years after the arrests. One man was acquitted, five were awarded death sentences and seven life sentences. Of these, one died in jail before the recent ruling acquitting all.  

Apart from what this case tells us about the criminal justice system and the glacial pace at which it works, there is another question: are there lessons that the media can draw from the coverage of such cases? 

While this case is high-profile and is based in a metropolitan centre like Mumbai, every now and then there are reports about cases of people who have spent long years in jail only to be acquitted of all charges. There are few if any follow-up stories on their families, how they survived, and how the released adjusted back to their lives after release. It’s almost as if such acquittals are so routine that they don’t merit any media attention. 

After the recent Bombay High Court ruling, the founding editor of Maktoob Media, Aslah Kayyalakkath posted this on X which ought to give us in the media a reason to pause and think:

“Since 2020, I have been collecting screenshots of news stories about Muslim men jailed in terror cases. Almost every single one-barring one or two-described these men as ‘terrorists,’ ‘bombmakers,’ ‘fugitives,’ or ‘commanders.’ There were so-called ‘explainers,’ ‘long forms,’ and ‘investigations’ about the ‘crime they committed.’ But remember, these were not stories about convicted men. These were about Muslim men who were accused or suspects. Legally, they were not proven guilty, but not a single media house chose to call them that. Some of them were acquitted because not a single piece of evidence stood against them. These news websites, without any shame or accountability, will publish a small story about the acquittal. They won’t feel regret for being complicit in the vendetta, just like the State doesn’t.”

You can agree or disagree with his point that some news websites are “complicit” but even a cursory glance at news coverage suggests that there is an absence of scepticism and a willing acceptance of the official version of such incidents. 

Going by the reporting in the newspapers on the morning after the Bombay High Court judgment, the coverage has followed a predictable pattern. There are detailed stories on the judgment and explanations about it, there are stories on the anguish felt by survivors of the blast who feel there is no closure, there are detailed sketches of the men released with their photographs (almost identical in each paper as the matter has obviously been supplied by the police), and an occasional piece on how the lawyers of the accused fought the case (including this interesting piece in Indian Express on how RTI was used to access information that blew apart the prosecution’s case). 

Yet, so far, there is little about the families of the accused and what they feel except this article by Tabassum Barnagarwala in Scroll. It is possible that in the days to come, some mainstream newspapers will make the effort to reach out to these families to give their side of the story too. 

Where mainstream media does need to introspect, perhaps an unrealistic expectation, is to look at how such cases are routinely reported from the time the incidents, like these serial train blasts, occur, to when the investigative agencies announce a breakthrough, to the case as it makes its slow way through courts.  

The norm has been to give the official version and leave it at that. The names and faces of the suspects are reported without clarifying that these people are “accused” and not convicted as pointed out by Aslah. That under the justice system, they deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt.  

The men acquitted by the Bombay High Court were not given the benefit of doubt. They were convicted by a court and that was that. Yet this ruling tells us that the story never ends with the first conviction. More so, the judgment itself should instruct us in the media why we need to be sceptical when confessions are readily provided by investigative agencies.

The judgment addresses the use of torture to extract confessions in this case and has termed it “barbaric and inhuman”. It has also questioned the confessions because it found them to be “incomplete and not truthful as some parts are a copy-paste of each other”.

For more details on the kind of torture used on the accused to extract confessions, this is a good time to read Josy Joseph’s book “The Silent Coup: A short history of India’s deep state”.  Published in 2021, Joseph looks at several such “terror” attacks in different parts of the country and raises legitimate questions.

He has a chapter on the 2006 Mumbai blasts in which he interviews the one man who was acquitted in 2015, Wahid Sheikh. In graphic detail, Sheikh describes the torture he went through and how he was framed. Incidentally, since his release in 2015, Sheikh has been part of the team that assembled invaluable evidence that contributed to the ultimate discharge of the accused in this case.

Mainstream media remains in thrall of official versions when it comes to a suspected terror attack. It is as if raising questions on these versions or even trying to unearth some other aspect of the story is “anti-national”.  

From my own experience, I can recall being told by one of my editors that we cannot question an official version as the media does not have the ability to independently verify what happened. This was after I raised questions, as did some others in the media about the daylight encounter killing of three men and one woman by the Gujarat police on June 15, 2004. The media was told that this was a terrorist module on its way to assassinate the then Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. The woman shot dead was 19-year-old  Ishrat Jahan, from Mumbra just outside Mumbai. Till today, we do not know the truth as the suspects are dead.  We are left only with what the police want to tell us.

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