Hindu face of terror

Velly Thevar profiles a Hindu zealot who is accused of having been involved in bomb blasts in Maharashtra

Ramesh Gadkari looked so mild that Mumbai’s Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare was stumped. “Could this harmless looking, pot-bellied man really be a terrorist,” thought Karkare, who zeroed in on Gadkari as an accused during the course of his investigations into a Thane theatre bomb blast in July.

On September 10, the ATS filed a chargesheet implicating Gadkari, his assistant Vikram Bhave, and four others in blasts that rocked Thane, Panvel and Vashi in Maharashtra in the last six months. Gadkari, 50, was a member of the Sanatan Dharma Sanstha (SDS) and the Hindu Jan Jagruti Samiti (HJJS).

The HJJS was started in 1993 by a doctor called Durgesh Samant who ran a hospital in Sangli. The police say Samant came under the influence of Jayant Athavale, who founded the SDS in 1990 and is now based in Goa. The JHHS is the “active arm” of the SDS.

“You would be surprised by the erudition and education of the members. They do not wield the trishul. They are motivated, argue well and go about with their protests in an organised manner,” says a police officer who has been documenting the HJJS’s activities for eight years. He points out that many HJJS members work in reputed organisations in India and abroad.

Gadkari, who holds a diploma in electrical engineering, used to run an electrical parts business when he came in touch with the SDS. “Till 1993, I was into alcohol, depressed and led a wayward life. Then I met a man who changed my life. He was from the Sanstha and when I started going for their discourses I started feeling better,” he says in his confession to the police.

Gadkari sold his company and property to set up in 2001 an ashram for the Sanstha in Panvel near Mumbai. In 2005, Gadkari met Bhave, a sadhak in his thirties. “We discussed the injustices heaped on Hinduism and how nobody cared. We talked about how people celebrated Diwali when the Kanchi Shankaracharya was arrested and paraded like a common criminal. Something had to be done soon,” he says in the confession.

Engineer Bhave — whose mother and father, a producer of Ayurvedic medicines, were sadhaks — sat with Gadkari for days in the Panvel ashram and tested bombs using a hollow bamboo. The police say they flung their first bombs in the direction of a church and a Muslim cemetery near the ashram three years ago.

The police started investigating Gadkari when they found he had parked his scooter at the Thane auditorium for days in a row just before the blast. The HJJS members stress they acted on their own. But the organisations, the police say, are under watch.