The Indian American Muslim Council, an advocacy group dedicated to safeguarding India’s pluralist and tolerant ethos, has called upon Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to act on the request of the Maharashtra State Government to ban right-wing terrorist organisation Sanatan Sanstha. In a letter to the Prime Minister, IAMC has also urged him to ban terror outfit Abhinav Bharat based on the recommendation of the Maharashtra State Police.
In a statement on October 1, IAMC said: “Sanatan Sanstha activists were convicted in the bomb blasts in June 2008 in Thane and thereafter at Vashi, Panvel and Ratnagiri. The organization has also been implicated in the bomb blast in Goa in October 2009 on the eve of Diwali. Abhinav Bharat, a Hindutva terror network similar to Sanatan Sanstha, has been implicated in the bomb blasts at Malegaon in 2006 and 2008, Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid (Hyderabad), Ajmer and Modasa (Gujarat).
“Not only have the terrorist activities of these two organizations resulted in terrible loss of life and property, innocent people that had nothing to do with these crimes, have been falsely implicated and imprisoned, in some cases for several years,” the letter, signed by IAMC President Shaheen Khateeb stated. ”Recently, the National Investigation Agency concluded that the nine men that had spent five years in prison on charges of masterminding the Malegaon blasts of 2006 were innocent. This was over a year after Swami Aseemanand’s confession about Abhinav Bharat’s involvement in the multiple terrorist acts throughout the country. This is just one of many instances, where law enforcement agencies have harassed innocent individuals from the minority communities, while the actual perpetrators have escaped punishment. Such incidents further erode the people’s confidence in the government’s willingness to treat all citizens as equal before the law. They also embolden the votaries of emergent Hindutva terrorism,” the letter stated.