Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit

Class:

Anti-Muslim Bigot, Anti-Muslim Bigotry, Islamophobe, Islamophobia, Profile

Islamophobic Remarks :

Lt Col Prasad Srikant Purohit, a former army officer, is a terrorist and a supporter of Hindu nationalism. In 1994, he received his commission into the Maratha Light Infantry. He was assigned to Military Intelligence after serving in Jammu and Kashmir’s counterterrorism operations unit from 2002 to 2005.

On September 29, 2008, at Malegaon, Maharashtra, around 270 kilometers from Mumbai, two motorbike bombs detonated, killing seven Muslims and wounding over 100 others. Early inquiries put the Hindutva organisation Abhinav Bharat under scrutiny and resulted in the arrest of multiple people, including Purohit. Among the main defendants in the bombing case were Purohit and BJP politician Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur.

Purohit established Abhinav Bharat, raising enormous sums of money to buy weapons and explosives, and arranged conferences where the Malegaon attack was coordinated.

There is ambiguity surrounding the Abhinav Bharat’s beginnings. Named for and rumored to have been influenced by the student secret organization that Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar founded in 1905 while attending Fergusson College in Pune, it bears his name. He supported revolutionary violence, which he attributed to the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy movement.

However, Savarkar departed India in early 1906 after receiving a scholarship for further study in England. The Hindu Mahasabha leader dissolved the Abhinav Bharat in 1952, five years after the country’s independence, after it had been dormant for decades.

In court, the Indian National Investigation Agency had argued that Purohit’s involvement in the case was demonstrated by audio and video recordings, call data records, and witness accounts.

Purohit was the one who drafted a unique “Hindu Rashtra Constitution” complete with a distinctive saffron hue flag. In its report, NIA stated that “He also discussed taking revenge for the (alleged) atrocities committed by the Muslims on Hindus.”

Purohit is free right now thanks to bail. When the Bharatiya Janata party came to power in 2014, cases involving Hindutva militant organizations began to decline as the pace of these investigations slowed down and many witnesses became antagonistic.

Former special public prosecutor for the NIA Rohini Salian revealed in 2015 that she was urged to “go soft” on the 2008 Malegaon investigations following the election of the BJP-led government.Many witnesses became antagonistic, and investigations became less diligent.