On the 14th of May, the 2008 Malegaon blast case accused retired major Ramesh Upadhyay in his court statement said that he was “falsely framed” by the state’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) due to political pressure from then-UPA governments to justify their Hindu terror theory. He stated that the “ATS created evidence against him with sinister motives to please political masters”.
In its charge sheet, the prosecution highlighted transcripts of phone conversations between Upadhyay and the chief accused, Shrikant Purohit, as primary evidence against him.
However, in his statement to the court, Upadhyay said he was “beaten mercilessly, tortured ruthlessly, and asked to confess to a crime he had not committed.”
Besides the physical torture, Upadhyay claimed, he was subjected to psychological coercion as well. He said that he was threatened that his wife would be paraded naked, and his son would be attacked adding that the ATS executed its threats by conducting searches at the residences of his married daughters to humiliate his family to exert pressure on Ramesh Upadhyay to confess to the crime he is accused of committing.
“I was threatened that my wife would be paraded naked, my unmarried daughter would be raped, son’s jaw would be broken. To execute the threats, they started visiting and searching the houses of my married daughters to insult them and their in-laws in the society and to further mount psychological pressure on me to confess to a crime I hadn’t committed,” Upadhyay said.
He also accused the then DGP Maharashtra D.N. Roy of threatening to “pulverise” him. Upadhyay said that when he “flatly refused to bow down to their wishes to give a confession or falsely name any other person or co-accused,” the ATS arrested him on Diwali night and brought him before a judicial magistrate in Nashik during a holiday. “I spoke to the learned magistrate, showed him torture marks on my body, agreed to co-operate with the investigation and also to Narco Analysis Tests to prove my innocence,” he said.
He claimed that polygraph and narco-analysis tests ‘exonerated’ him of any involvement in the case and that despite the results handing him a ‘clean chit’, ATS failed to submit the reports in court. He further stated that the chargesheets and witness statements included no ‘iota of evidence’ against him.
Furthermore, Upadhyay claimed that during the investigation, the then-Additional CP Sukhwinder Singh interrogated him in the presence of two other police officials, who audio- and video-recorded it and told him to read out passages, after which Singh obtained Upadhyay’s signature on some blank papers, diaries, and printed pages in Marathi, as well as his thumb and fingerprints. Upadhyay said that Singh claimed that it was all part of police procedure.
Urging the court to acquit him of all charges, Ramesh Upadhyay said, “I have suffered immense pain physically, mentally, financially, and socially and my family life has been ruined. The culprits who framed me in this false case should be proceeded against as per law. I further pray that I be honourably acquitted of all charges in the interest of justice.”
This comes just days after Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Prasad Purohit, who was accused of an alleged role in the 2008 Malegaon blast under the UPA government, disclosed that ATS officers illegally questioned and tortured him to name prominent right-wing leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Vishva Hindu Parishad including Yogi Adityanath.
