At least once a week, a visit to the open market is a must. For, it’s therapeutic “to dissolve into the crowd” with all that noise, grind and muck, says Maharashtra special public prosecutor Rohini Salian as her car inches slowly through the late night Colaba crowd. Sitting in the front seat, an old habit that allows her to “decide the path and have complete control over the driver”, Salian is waiting for the NIA’s next move.
On Thursday, a day after Salian told The Indian Express that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had told her to “go soft” on the accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, and 20 hours after the NIA issued a denial, she says the noise needed to grow louder. “It was time to expose. It was suffocating,” she says of her coming-out-of-the-closet moment.
Salian had said that soon after the NDA government came to power last year, she got a call from one of the NIA officers, asking to come over to speak with her. “He didn’t want to talk over the phone. He came and said to me that there is a message that I should go soft,” she had told The Indian Express.
Since the news broke, Salian has kept aside her small phone, an older Samsung model stuffed into a knitted black-and-white pouch. Journalists, former jurists, police personnel, family and friends and a few politicians have been calling, texting her. She hasn’t been responding. She says it’s a “small price” you pay when you chose to stand up. “It’s crossed hundred, both calls and messages. I do not have anything new to say,” she says.
When Salian rang the alarm bell with her charge against the NIA, it was hard not to sit up. For, this is a woman who has built a formidable reputation over three decades of legal practice, handling a number of cases as chief public prosecutor for the state of Maharashtra. Her accusation now casts a shadow over other ‘Hindu terror’ cases handled by the NIA – the 2006 Malegaon blasts case, the Samjhauta case of 2007, the 2007 Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Sharif blast and the 2008 Modasa blast.
INDIAN EXPRESS
