The eerie similarities between Sanaullah and Sarabjit

There was Sanaullah Ranjay, the long-bearded, ageing man who posed for photographs playing, improbably, the bagpipes with Kot Bhalwal’s prison band.  Then, there was Sanaullah Ranjay, the man in court records, responsible for a string of bombings across Jammu that claimed dozens of lives.  In between those images lies a truth we shall never know. His death in prison violence, we know, was a lot like that of Sarabjit Singh, who millions have mourned this past week.  The lives of both men, its less well understood mirrored each other almost down to the last detail—as if they were one person, surreally split into two by a freakish act of fate. This we know: the official Sanaullah Ranjay was a murderous terrorist. First Information Report 164, filed at the Nagrota police station in 1994, records a bomb went off on a bus carrying pilgrims to the Vaishno Devi Shrine.  Ten people were killed, and 43 injured. Ranjay was convicted for the bombing on 12 August, 1995, and sentenced to life imprisonment.  He was given a second life sentence for the bombing of a passenger van in Jammu’s Satwari area, which left seven dead and 30 injured; 10 years for a blast on another van outside the Ziarat Pir Baba shrine which injured nine. [caption id=“attachment_767523” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The similarities between the two men are eerie[/caption] In 1995, police documents show, he was responsible for another series of horrific attacks: the bombing of a bus outside at Jammu’s crowded Jewel Chowk shopping area, for which he received a 19-year sentence; another bus-bombing in the city for which he was sentenced to 11 years, and a grenade attack for which he received eight years.  He was acquitted in a fourth 1995 case, a bomb attack on the Central Bank of India in Jammu in which two people were killed and 27 injured. There’s little doubt, though, that the evidence that surfaced in these trials was thin. In case after case, documents seen by Firstpost show, Haq was convicted on little else than his own confession—a controversial feature of Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act, that eventually led to its being struck off the statute. “Frankly”, a Jammu and Kashmir government prosecutor familiar with two of the cases told Firstpost “you couldn’t have convicted a pickpocket on this kind of evidence, if he’d had a half-decent lawyer”. Lawyer Awais Sheikh, who represented Sarabjit during his death-row appeals, pointed to dozens of similar errors in proceedings—though he didn’t have much luck persuading Pakistan’s Supreme Court.  Sheikh pointed out that even Singh’s confessional statement was made to television cameras, not in a court of law. Ranjay couldn’t even muster the resources for a decent lawyer in appellate hearings, or the several cases in which he was still facing trial.Like Indian officials did with Singh, Pakistanis have been engaged in loud breast-beating on Ranjay. Memon said on Thursday that Ranjay’s killing “was an extra-judicial murder and we need to expose it”. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh lauded Singh’s “valiant fortitude”. Neither nation, though, actually paid for legal representation for the men when it might have mattered. Intelligence sources have told Firstpost they had known of Ranjay since the late-1980s, as a sometime-smuggler, trafficker and informant—one of hundreds of criminal entrepreneurs who made a living moving liquor, drugs and explosives across the India-Pakistan border, in return for occasional collaboration with security services on both sides. Low-grade smugglers have long had a critical role in Indian and Pakistani intelligence operations —the hired sherpas, as it were, of sahib-officers who operate from the comfortable environs of their offices. The two men, interestingly, also came from similar social backgrounds: Ranjay was the son of an agricultural labourer in Dallowali, near Sialkot in Pakistan’s Punjab; Singh, a farmer from Bikhiwind. Ever since Firstpost reported that Singh may have been linked to Research and Analysis Wing covert actions to retaliate against Pakistani backing for Khalistan terrorists, there have  been a string of corroborating accounts .  Pakistan claims Singh planted a bomb on a bus near Multan, killing 14. Exactly like Singh, Sanaullah appears to have been a bit-actor, playing a relatively small role in supporting larger terrorist operations. There’s no record in Indian intelligence dossiers, notably, that Ranjay was connected with any jihadist group operating in Jammu and Kashmir. Interestingly, top Hizb-ul-Mujahideen operative Wasim Malik, was held in 2009 on charges of staging multiple bombings in Jammu in the mid-1990s—including a 1995 attack which claimed 12 lives , targeting a Republic Day parade. The arrest raised the possibility that Ranjay may have been linked to Malik’s bombing campaign. Malik, police sources said, was never investigated on other bombings which took place in the Jammu region—and since Ranjay had already been convicted, he wasn’t questioned either. “Back in the 1990s”, a senior police official said, “the whole state was in flames. No one had the time or energy to spend too much time investigating these things. There had been a bombing, Ranjay was a likely suspect, and that was that”. That, indeed, was that—until the end. Police sources close to the investigation say Ranjay was a good prisoner, not allowing his possible resentments about his prison sentences to translate into aggressive behaviour.  There is no truth, records obtained by Firstpost show, that he was involved in an attempt to tunnel his way out of prison , as widely reported.  Instead, he busied himself learning the bagpipes—an effort, a prison source said, he took up impressed by watching marching bands on television.  In this, he was exactly like Sarabjit Singh, who excelled in crafts-work in prison. Investigators say there’s no real mystery about Ranjay’s death.  His fellow prisoner Vinod Kumar, a former soldier, said he began fighting with  Ranjay after the two exchanged some barbed comments on the Singh case.  The two men had been working a fatigues shift together unsupervised, one digging trenches, the other laying bricks—this in violation of express instructions from the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. They were last seen sharing a beedi—before Kumar picked up a pickaxe, and hit Ranjay twice.  The two men, according to investigators, had a cordial history.  Kumar, however, had a violent past: he was serving time for shooting dead a fellow soldier in 2006, after a brawl. For its part, Pakistan insists the attack on Singh was also a mistake: two prisoners, it claims, overwhelmed four guards , using nothing other than bricks and shards of glass. In this case, though, the killers are alleged to have admitted planning the strike, fearing that the government would release Singh. In neither case is the story wholly plausible — and judging by everything else to do with the two men’s lives.