Hyderabad: It has been 15 years since the bomb blast at Makkah Masjid that took away 9 lives and injured 60 worshippers on May 18, 2007, but justice remains to be served to the families of the victims and survivors.
Social activist and co-founder of Democracy Dialogue and ASEEM, SQ Masood released a statement on Twitter demanding that the Telangana state government file an intervention in the criminal appeal filed by the families of the blast victims in the Telangana high court and table Justice Bhaskar Rao Commission report in the state Assembly.
The release stated that it has become a trend for Hindutva fascists to either destroy or occupy Muslim-owned religious lands.
“The agenda of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is to convert the secular democratic country into a Hindu state and part of this agenda is targeting and attacking Muslims in every possible way,” said the release.
Taking the example of the Babri Masjid demolition, the release said that the BJP-led centre is moving toward other mosques with the present target being the Gyanvapi Masjid “where they falsely claim a fountain to be a shiv-ling”.
“On the occasion of 15 years of Makkah Masjid blast, we the people of Telangana demand the state government to combat and resist the Hindutva fascists and restore the integrity of the nation by safeguarding the democracy and constitution of the country,” the statement said.
Makkah Masjid Blast
On May 18, 2007, a bomb blast took place on the premises of Makkah Masjid which is situated near the Charminar. Nine persons, performing prayers died while 60 were injured.
As people tried helping the injured, police started firing, killing five more. The blasts were carried out by a Hindutva organisation Abhinav Bharat, founded by Ramesh Upadhyay, a retired major of the Indian Army.
This organisation is also responsible for other terrorist activities – the Malegaon blast in 2006, which killed 40 people, the Ajmer Shareef bombings in 2007 that killed 3 people, and the Samjhauta Express blast in 2007 which killed 70 people.
Even after the mastermind of the Makkah Masjid blast, Swami Aseemanand confessed to his crime, he along with 10 others was acquitted by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on April 16, 2018, citing a lack of evidence.
On the indiscriminate police firing that claimed 5 lives, the then Andhra Pradesh state government led by the late chief minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy appointed retired judge Justice V Bhaskara Rao as the head of the commission of inquiry. The report was submitted to the CM in 2010.
It was decided that the report will be tabled before the Legislature of the state within six months. However, it has not happened, to date.
This article first appeared on siasat.com
