By Amit Kumar, Twocircles.net
Wahid Sheikh is a 40-year-old school teacher at Abdus Sattar Shuaib Primary School for the past 18 years. But if you check the school’s attendance register, you would find his name missing for a sizeable part. Eight years, in fact. Wahid, a resident of Vikhroli, was not off to some place honing his skills as a teacher; instead, he was trying to fight off that one tag that seems to be disturbingly common among Muslims: that of being a terrorist. Now out of jail after being acquitted of all charges, Sheikh is looking forward to a moment almost 11 years in the making. On March 1, his Urdu book, “Be-gunah Qaidi” (Innocent prisoner), will be released in Mumbai in the presence of various dignitaries. For Sheikh, this will hopefully mark the end of a period that spans over 15 years during which he has been at the wrong end of justice for no fault of his except, of course, the fact that he was a Muslim.
In 2015, Shaikh was released after a special court acquitted him of all charges. This brought to an end a tumultuous period which lasted close to 9 years, following the July 2006 blasts which killed over 180 people in Mumbai. But in a conversation with Twocircles.net, Sheikh pointed out that the police had “marked” him in the aftermath of the ban on SIMI. “As early as 2001, I was returning from the mosque when the police came and asked me to come with them. They alleged that I and a few others were members of SIMI (which was banned in 2000) and that we were caught in a raid at the SIMI office while we were having a meeting at about 3 am,” says Shaikh. In truth, he had never been affiliated with SIMI. But despite that, a case was filed against him and hence, when serial blasts ripped across Mumbai, he was one of the first people called up by the police. “Over the next one month, I was interrogated by the local police station and the local crime branch, and both gave me a clean chit saying I had nothing to do with this case,” he says. “What could they prove, when I had done nothing. The SIMI case was going on even then, but soon that case got sidelined in September 2006, when the ATS knocked on his door.
The SIMI case meanwhile, was dismissed in 2011. Not that it mattered for Sheikh.
The next year or so saw the ATS inflict all forms of torture on Shaikh and others arrested in order to make them ‘confess’. To what? He did not know. “It is a pretty simple strategy,” says Shaikh. “There are three forms of torture: beating us black and blue was just the first level of torture: next was electrocuting our private parts, and the third level was waterboarding, keeping us awake for days on end, no food, etc,” he adds. Shaikh still carries the pain to this day: he got diagnosed with Glaucoma a few years ago after he was kept blindfolded for days on end.
Mind you, until this point, he had no clue what he had been detained for. “It was only after we were brought to the jail that we came to know exactly what the cases were against us. We were told to keep quiet during the court sessions, and threatened with dire consequences if we disobeyed them,” says Sheikh.
From the time he was arrested in 2006, Sheikh knew that he was being tried for no reason, but he did not want to just sit and watch the horror. He decided to chronicle all the events, discussions, court sessions, interrogations, etc and write a book. However, a few months after he started writing, the police found out and burnt all the pages he had written. “Then, till 2009-end, I could not write because we were tortured so much,” he says. But after that when the trial started, he was allowed to keep pen and paper, and he started writing his book. “My book, which will be coming out in a week, is a thorough documentation of the entire case. I talk about how even though some ATS people knew of our innocence, they could not do much because of the political pressures. I have also named all the officers who assaulted, tortured and threatened my family if I did not confess or worse, turn an approver,” says Shaikh.
An entire chapter of the book sheds light on the conversations between the late ACP Vinod Bhatt and accused Ehtesham Siddiqui, who was later sentenced to death. According to the book, the officer allegedly confessed that he knew the accused were innocent but was being compelled to charge them for the terror attack, under pressure from his seniors, former ATS chief KP Raghuvanshi and former commissioner AN Roy.
“The book is just an attempt to show the society the other picture. The media relays the police version, and we become terrorists for everyone. The police need to know how we are blackmailed; our families threatened and our bodies tortured till a point where we break down and sign any and everything that they give us. What can you do when the entire state machinery is against you? Hence, the need to write this book and set the record straight,” says Shaikh.
The book which will be first released in Urdu, followed by a Hindi edition in a few months. Shaikh added that an English edition is also being planned soon.