There are two ways in which to recreate the short life of Gulam Yazdani, or Naveed as he was called at home. The first relies on IB dossiers, interrogation reports and news reports based on the first two. In this narrative, Yazdani appears as an engineering student who turned to a life of terrorism and met his well-deserved end at the hands of the police in 2006. A native of Nalgonda, Yazdani was said to have been among the 14 men from the state who were recruited to be trained by the Lashkar in Pakistan after the Gujarat riots. Alleged mastermind of the Dilsukhnagar Saibaba temple blast in 2002, Haren pandya murder in 2003 and suicide attack on STF Headquarters in Hyderabad in 2005, the bombing of Delhi Patna Shramjeevi Express at Jaunpur in 2005, Yazdani quickly rose to head the Lashkar’s South India operation and was among the most wanted men on the Andhra Pradesh police list. He had also allegedly hatched a plan to blow up a Ganesh temple near Secunderabad railway station . And then there is a more complex plot. Leave for the moment, these secret documents and look at the court records. In late 1999, Manik Prabhu Medical Stores, owned by a RSS worker, witnessed a shootout, leaving the owner’s brother, Devender,dead. An FIR was lodged in the Saidabad police station . The investigation was transferred to the CID in the month of May. The new agency booked a completely different set of accused; among them was Syed Maqbool, recently in the limelight for apparently revealing that Dilsukhnagar was on the hit-list of terrorists. In the period when Yazdani was in the custody of the Task Force, two more cases were slapped against him: in the first, which was also transferred to the CID, Yazdani was charged with conspiracy and waging war against the nation; in the second, lodged just a day before he was produced in court, the police showed recoveries of detonators and pistols, and booked him under the Arms Act and Explosive Substances Act. Released on bail, Yazdani was ultimately discharged from the Devender murder case and acquitted in the other two cases. It is not clear how Yazdani came to be called the architect of the Haren Pandya murder, but in circles whose denizens go by the label of ‘security experts’, this has become an article of faith. Yazdani, in fact, is not named an accused in the Haren Pandya murder case. In the years closely following the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the cult of the Hindu hriday samrat was being carefully crafted. The numerous conspiracies ‘detected’ against Narendra Modi were crucial in fashioning the principal Hindutva icon and cementing the loyalties of his followers. This was the period when the police and investigating agencies in Gujarat claimed to have foiled a series of potential assassination attempts on Modi by liquidating ‘terrorists’. Registration of POTA cases also surged: all those booked under POTA were Muslims accused of either plotting to kill BJP leaders or conspiring to terrorize Hindus of Gujarat. The most gargantuan of these was the Gujarat ISI Conspiracy Case, more popularly known as the DCB 6 case, registered in April 2003, a month after Haren Pandya was killed. It had a mammoth list of over 80 accused — a list which kept swelling well after the chargesheets had been filed, and POTA had been repealed.
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“We only saw his dead body.”
We do not know what he did in those intervening years. How he lived, where he lived. We will never know perhaps.
Intelligence reports say he rose to prominence in the Lashkar ranks, planning, for example, the suicide attack on the Special Task Force (STF) headquarters in Hyderabad. Did he?
A man with backpack walked into the deserted STF headquarters — Dussehra eve had kept most STF personnel away from office — and blew himself up. His severed head and torso were recovered from outside the office. How he was identified as Mohtasin Bilal, a Bangladeshi national, carrying out the HUJI-B’s first such operation,(8) is itself interesting. From the charred debris of this human bomb, investigators recovered a suicide note(9), and a rubber slipper with a tell-all price tag that read ‘Taka 100’.(10) These clues, salvaged extraordinarily from the burnt body, disclosed to the investigators his
“We only saw his dead body.”
We do not know what he did in those intervening years. How he lived, where he lived. We will never know perhaps.
Intelligence reports say he rose to prominence in the Lashkar ranks, planning, for example, the suicide attack on the Special Task Force (STF) headquarters in Hyderabad. Did he?
A man with backpack walked into the deserted STF headquarters — Dussehra eve had kept most STF personnel away from office — and blew himself up. His severed head and torso were recovered from outside the office. How he was identified as Mohtasin Bilal, a Bangladeshi national, carrying out the HUJI-B’s first such operation,(8) is itself interesting. From the charred debris of this human bomb, investigators recovered a suicide note(9), and a rubber slipper with a tell-all price tag that read ‘Taka 100’.(10) These clues, salvaged extraordinarily from the burnt body, disclosed to the investigators his