Not only the family members of the Karkare and other officers who were killed along with him, see foul play in their killing, but also a section of society believes that in the shadow of Mumbai attack some Hinduvaites forces killed ATS chief Hemant Karkare in a side operation.

Several articles and essays have been written about the 26/11 attack and the killing of Hemant Karkare, but latest revelation and suspicion over the later killing has come in the form of a book written by a former IG of Maharashatra police.

In his book 'Who Killed Karkare? The Real Face of Terrorism in India', the author S M Mushrif not only tried to convince his readers that Karkare had become the victim of a larger conspiracy of Hindutva forces. He has also tried to unravel a nationwide network of Hindutva terror that has its tentacles spread up to Nepal and Israel.

Mushrif, who knows the system inside out says that two teams were at work on 26/11 - one which did the maximum damage, and was from outside. The smaller team took advantage of the confusion of the moment and acted only on the relatively small CST-CAMA-Rangbhavan stretch that killed Karkare. It was a Desi unit that wanted Karkare and his men out of the way.

The author feels that the Hindutva forces are out to destroy the India and want to re-mould it into some kind of Afghanistan under the Taliban.

The book has reconstructed a fearsome picture out of former Maharashtra ATS chief Hemant Karkare's chargesheet against alleged Hindutva terrorists like Lt. Col. Purohit, Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur and others.

The chargesheet pointed towards a mind-boggling nationwide conspiracy with international support to destabilise the constitutional order and the secular democratic Indian state that upholds it, to be replaced by a Hindutva state run according to a new Constitution. For that the conspirators were prepared for a massive bloodbath, using bomb attacks on religious places to trigger an anti-Muslim holocaust.

Mushrif, who has over three decades of diligent policing behind him and whose feats include exposing the Telgi scam, has made an elaborate case out of nearly a dozen blasts over a large area of the country conducted by Hindutva terror groups of different stripes. He found that a section of India's intelligence services, a miniscule group in the armed forces and a section of different state police forces have been compromised and infiltrated by these elements, a development that bodes ill for the future of the country.

In Hemant Karkare's net many big and small fishes of VHP, RSS, Bajrang Dal and Sanatan Sanstha (which has been found to be involved in Diwali-eve blasts in Goa last week) had been trapped. Serving and retired army officers, academicians, serving and retired officials of India's premier intelligence service were ensnared in Karkare's fishing net. The menacing power of the latter groups, inspired by sustained anti-Muslim hate campaigns of the last six decades, gave the plot a sinister and highly destructive character.

The author writes all in black and white as who started terrorism in India and who created and sustains the terrorism label against Indian Muslims. How investigations are manipulated by the IB and security agencies which not only play blind to the Hindutva terror but even encourage it. How innocents are picked up without any proof and how evidences are cooked up to implicate them in crime they never committed only to keep the myth of 'Islamic terrorism' alive.

He musters “evidence” to show that the IB has regularly been interfering with regular police investigations to let Hindutva terrorists slip out of the net and replace them with random Muslim youth. To fudge the issues further obliging police officers in the states would not mind exterminating a few Muslim youth to be branded posthumously as “terrorists”.

There are quite a few such cases where such extra-judicial killing of Muslim youth has turned out to be false police encounters. All this is done to cover up tracks of Hindutva terror. Mushrif says a “Brahminist” network that has its origins in Maharashtra, and is closely knit across political parties, government services, including IB, and other vital sectors of life is behind the terror that seeks to destroy the secular, democratic state. He, however, clarify that very few Brahminists are Brahmins. Many are from other high Hindu castes, some from middle and lower castes.

Most Brahmins are fair-minded and would not like to associate themselves with hate ideologies. Hemant Karkare, too, was a Brahmin, Mushrif says. So is Mushrif's son-in-law.

Once Karkare was removed from the scene, the IB moved in to fill his position with KP Raghuvanshi, a pliant police officer with extremely low credibility among Muslims for his record of letting off known Hindutva terrorists and implicating innocent Muslim youth even in bomb attack cases on mosques.

There are quite a few interesting vignettes in the book, like Raghuvanshi and Col. Purohit's association with Abhinav Bharat in Maharashtra, whose hand was evident in a series of blasts across the country. It has old connections with men like Veer Damodar Savarkar (whose relative Himani Savarkar leads the Abhinav Bharat movement), Dr Munje, who led the Hindu Mahasabha, and other Hindutva luminaries. It is at the Bhonsala Military Academy run by these groups that Purohit trained police officers, including Raghuvanshi.

Mushrif asks a pertinent question: Will Raghuvanshi pursue the investigation against Purohit, his guru? A plausible answer is, perhaps no. Already charges have been dropped by a special court under MCOCA against 11 accused, including Purohit, on the grounds of insufficient evidence produced in the court by the prosecution.

The book with lot of references and evidence can make a good reading stuff for those who want to keep close eyes on India's socio-religious politics and security systems.#