A new book explores how defendants on terror charges cope with their grinding cases

While the Delhi trial courts were on their summer recess in 2012, I went to Srinagar (in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir) to meet several men who, like the majority of people accused of terrorist crimes in India, had been acquitted of the charges. I met one of them, who I call Mohsin, with his two nephews, at his brother’s home in Srinagar. He would tell me about how his life had been ruined by a trumped-up terrorism charge.

In January 1996, 16-year old Mohsin came to Delhi to help with his brother’s handicrafts business. In May of that year, a bomb placed in a car exploded in a market in South Delhi. The Delhi Police’s Special Cell claimed that a Kashmiri terrorist group was behind these explosions. They alleged that the conspiracy was hatched in Pakistan, explosives were sent across the border, and that a group of Kashmiri men, one of whom was Mohsin, executed the plan. The trial court acquitted Mohsin and his ten co-accused in 2010, by which time Mohsin had spent 14 years in prison.

Mohsin began by telling me about the main charge against him: that he had harboured people who had been behind the bomb...

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