Less than a week after the multiple bomb blasts ripped through the city of Mumbai, killing 257 innocents and injuring another 700 people in March 1993, a family of ten were quietly flown from Dubai to Karachi. Whisked through the then tiny airport, they had no papers, no passports, no exit or entry stamps to indicate they had ever made that journey. This was the Memon family, in shock after their discovery that two of their own were behind the horrific blasts that became the first act of urban terrorism of its time.
On Monday, the lone death row convict in the Mumbai serial blasts — Yakub Memon — mounts a last ditch effort to save himself from the noose with a mercy plea to the Supreme Court. Yakub Memon’s sensational surrender before Indian authorities at a Delhi railway station, some 17 months after the blasts, and which gave India the most clinching evidence of Pakistan’s complicity in the ghastly terrorist acts that ripped through the financial capital of the country, did not stop the judge in 2007 or the judgement last week in reinforcing the decision that Yakub must hang.
Not least because it sends a message by the Narendra Modi government of its tough anti-terror approach to those in Pakistan who continue to direct terror against India. Would it have worked in Yakub’s favour if he had surrendered when a BJP government was in power, ask some. Would that have clinched the deal for Yakub to be saved from the gallows? Except, even with the Congress in power, 26/11 convict Ajmal Kasab was hanged. CBI officials who worked closely with the Memon family say that Yakub’s surrender and turning approver does not in any way lessen the degree of his criminality under the law, and that all those behind the attack must be punished severely.
“The time gap of 22 years hasn’t diminished the brutality of the Mumbai serial blasts,” the CBI official said. One of the key reasons that some CBI officers are uncomfortable with a hanging is however, because it will close the door once and for all, on any other terrorists choosing to come across, even the unlikely crossover of a Dawood Ibrahim or a Tiger Memon, which would help them penetrate and unravel the terror factory that is being run by Pakistan’s ISI. Yakub could have been the man who could have been that bridge. His hanging will foreclose that option.
CBI officials also say that even Yakub’s realisation of the folly of playing into the hands of Pakistani spy agency ISI does not take away from the need to punish him. As is now well known, Yakub made the move, much against the counsel of his brother Tiger who warned him, he would be made a scapegoat. “Tum Gandhiwadi ban ke ja rahe ho, lekin wahan atankwadi qarar kiye jaoge,” recounted journalist Maseeh Rahman in his piece in August 2007 where Yakub tells him the details of that surrender.
But whether a surrender — without which Indian sleuths would never have laid their hands on him — should be punished by death is moot. Officials point to the freedom with which the ’93 blasts mastermind Dawood Ibrahim operates in Karachi, running his hawala and terror machinery even as successive Indian governments know they can never bring him back to face a trial, similar to Yakub’s, in India. The same is true with Yakub’s brother and prime accused in 93 blasts Tiger Memon, the 26/11 terror attack masterminds Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi and IC 814 hijackers who will never face the noose. Yakub’s hanging will send the message that India will not stand for terror.
Those who were instrumental in Memon’s return from Kathmandu with the R&AW playing a key role, have claimed that Memon was more than willing to take the risk and surrender himself to Indian authorities to clear his name and face trial. Being accused as a key co-conspirator, even Memon knew that the journey ahead would be tricky. But the fact that he would be the only one to hang for the crime 22 years later was something Memon had not factored in, as he worked with R&AW to bring the other members of his family home, including a daughter, born, after the family had escaped from Karachi and were ensconced in Dubai, under the CBI’s close supervision.
This gains credence from the amazing account of the case narrated by B. Raman, who passed away in 2013, and was the head of the Pakistan desk in the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) when he coordinated the operation to bring back Yakub and other members of the Memon family from Karachi. In a piece written in 2007, and published on Friday, he, like Rahman, focuses on the “moral dilemma” in his mind ever since he had read about the sentencing of Memon to death by the apex court in 2006.
“There is not an iota of doubt about the involvement of Yakub and other members of the family in the conspiracy and their cooperation with the ISI till July 1994. In normal circumstances, Yakub would have deserved the death penalty if one only took into consideration his conduct and role before July 1994. “But if one also takes into consideration his conduct and role after he was informally picked up in Kathmandu, there is a strong case for having second thoughts about the suitability of the death penalty in the subsequent stages of the case,” said the article which has been published in a leading online portal.
Raman says Yakub had cooperated with the probe agencies and assisted them by persuading other members of the Memon family to flee from the protection of the ISI in Karachi to Dubai and surrender to the Indian authorities. “…this constitute, in my view, a strong mitigating circumstance to be taken into consideration while considering whether the death penalty should be implemented,” he had argued in his article. “In their eagerness to obtain the death penalty, the fact that there were mitigating circumstances, do not appear to have been highlighted,” he adds.
Raman writes that in July 1994, some weeks before his retirement, Yakub was informally picked up in Kathmandu, with the help of the Nepal police, driven across Nepal to a town in Indian territory, flown to Delhi by an aircraft of the Aviation Research Centre and formally arrested in Old Delhi by the investigating authorities and taken into custody for interrogation. “The entire operation was coordinated by me,” Raman said.
Yakub was in Kathmandu to consult a lawyer about surrendering before the court but was advised against it and asked to return to Pakistan. “Before he could board the flight to Karachi, he was picked up by the Nepal police on suspicion, identified and rapidly moved to India,” he said. There may be no parallel to Yakub’s case in India. Whether the hangman comes calling or not, either way, the moral dilemma on how to treat a ‘spy’ who came in from the cold, and the final outcome of the case will set precedents for the future…For a long time to come.
