Recently Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stated that to fight terrorism the first need was to choke terrorist funding. To do that effectively, he said, the money trail funding terrorism would have to be uncovered. However, a recent event exposes how the CBI itself was a culprit, deliberately covering up the money trail funding the terrorists.
The much publicized Jain Hawala case of the mid-1990s was registered as a TADA case as soon as it was discovered that hawala money had been paid to Kashmiri insurgents. The subsequent seizure of the Jain diaries revealed that the same conduits paid from the same hawala funds scores of India’s top politicians cutting across party lines. Under the law all of them were required to be investigated under the TADA law. The CBI stalled the TADA probe. In an astounding move it refused to charge sheet Moolchand Shah, who was apprehended during investigation of the case, and was identified as one of the prime conduits for hawala payments to the Kashmiri insurgents as well as to politicians through one Shambhu Dayal Sharma. It was the latter who personally transferred the funds to SK Jain, who in turn distributed the funds to the politicians. Earlier Moolchand Shah had been detained by the Mumbai police as a suspect for having funded the 1993 serial bomb blasts.
After discovery of the names in the Jain diaries, including those of LK Advani, Madhav Rao Scindia and VC Shukla, the CBI arrested the few Kashmiri separatists who received hawala funds and closed the TADA probe. By withholding part of the confession of Shambu Dayal Sharma from the court’s purview, it succeeded in converting the Jain Hawala Case into a corruption probe. Among those involved in the aborted TADA probe was Syed Salahuddin who heads the powerful Hizbul Mujahideen and is based in Pakistan. He was then a minor inconsequential separatist disgruntled because he thought he had been cheated out of an electoral victory in the J&K assembly poll.
Now, after a decade, the court has convicted Moolchand Shah among the hundred odd for involvement in the Mumbai bomb blasts. It was a decade during which the Hizbul Mujahideen was founded, and then flourished, under the leadership of Syed Salahuddin who escaped the heat after the CBI aborted the Jain Hawala TADA case. The latest justification of this scandalous CBI cover-up is attempted in the recently released bookWho owns CBI: The Naked Truth by retired joint director of CBI, Mr BR Lall. Mr Lall personally investigated the Jain Hawala case. Contrary to facts Mr Lall claims in his book that there was no terrorist angle to the case. The terrorist angle, he claims, was covered by the arrest of the few Kashmiri separatists.
The manipulation in the CBI probe is exposed by the CBI’s own admission that 25 names in the Jain Diaries were never identified. A crucial hawala operative in the case, Tarikh Bhai, based in Dubai has not been identified till today. What kind of probe was this? Jain was in CBI custody and was interrogated. He confessed to everything else but not these names? Further it may be recalled that at the same time as the hawala transaction occurred, Swedish engineers working in the Uri power project in Kashmir had been kidnapped by terrorists. SK Jain was the agent for the European firm which was handling the Uri project. After the hawala transaction the Swedish engineers were mysteriously released and the project was allowed to resume. And yet Mr Lall claims that there was no terrorist angle to the Jain Hawala case!
In fact CBI deliberately refrained from investigating the terrorist angle in the case. Such investigation suited neither the nation’s top politicians nor their lackeys in the CBI. Significantly, the name of Moolchand Shah does not even figure in Mr Lall’s book! Shah was the direct conduit for passing hawala funds and was detained early in the probe. Subsequently he was released after the names of the top politicians surfaced. Only now after ten years has Moolchand Shah been convicted in the separate Mumbai bomb blasts case. During the interregnum the Hizbul Mujahideen and terrorist violence in Kashmir escalated to unprecedented heights.
After the PM’s glib advice to official agencies on the need to uncover the terrorist money trail, will he now order an inquiry into this CBI lapse? It may be mentioned that former Chief Justice JS Verma, who presided over the Supreme Court bench which monitored the Jain hawala probe, recently stated publicly that the Jain Hawala case should be reopened.