At a public rally in Uttar Pradesh's Gonda district, near the Indo-Nepal border, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that the train accident in Kanpur on November 20, 2016, was a terror attack. He said hundreds were killed in the accident and the "conspiracy" was hatched from across the border. The PM appealed that people shouldn't cast their vote for those who were likely to help terrorists from across the border and make Gonda, and India, unsafe.
On November 20, several coaches of the Patna bound Indore-Rajendranagar Express had derailed in Pukhrayan, near Kanpur Dehat. With 148 people killed, it was the deadliest train accident in India since 1999. Initially, the cause of these accidents was attributed to track fractures and wagon defects.
In its preliminary report, the Commissioner of Railway Safety (CRS) found no evidence of sabotage in the November 20 accident. The report identified overaged coaches, carriage and wagon defects, and wheel alignment issues, as the primary reasons behind the derailment.
But there was a twist to the tale when in January Bihar police arrested Moti Paswan, Uma Shankar and Mukesh Yadav for allegedly planting an IED, or Improved Explosive Device, on a track in Ghorasahan, East Champaran district of Bihar on October 1. The police claimed that Paswan confessed to the role of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, in several recent train accidents. These included the Ajmer-Sealdah Express, which derailed near Kanpur on December 28. Nobody was killed in that accident, and also the Jagdalpur-Bhubaneshwar Hirakhand Express derailment in Andhra Pradesh's Vizianagaram district on January 22, in which 40 people were killed.
According to the police, the three men led them to the alleged mastermind of these attacks. After the terror angle cropped up, the Commissioner of Railway Safety, which comes under the jurisdiction of the Civil Aviation Ministry, didn't submit its final report. Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu wrote to Home Minister Rajnath Singh to order a National Investigation Agency (NIA) probe into six recent train accidents, including the Indore-Rajendranagar train accident.
Currently, an NIA team is in Nepal to interrogate Shamsul Hoda, alleged to be the mastermind behind half dozen train accidents. The Nepalese citizen, deported from Dubai, was arrested on a murder charge and is allegedly working for the ISI.
However, the Uttar Pradesh Police has gone on record to state that there was no evidence on the ground to corroborate the sabotage charge. The UP police has said it didn't find any craters associated with a bomb blast near the two accidents sites, which rules out any bomb blast that could have led to the accident. The UP police says the two accidents near Kanpur were because of breaches in the tracks.
The PM's statement on Friday is the first that a senior government functionary has gone on record to claim that the train accidents were indeed terror attacks. Modi said in Gonda that the police has found that the Indore-Rajendranagar Express wasn't "sudden", but part of a conspiracy hatched across the border. He asked people not to vote for those who were likely to help terrorists. BJP's two principal rivals in Uttar Pradesh, Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party, have fielded candidates in the assembly constituencies of Gonda who hail from a cross section of society, including upper caste and OBC Hindus, as well as Muslims.
Earlier in his UP campaign, the PM had accused the Samajwadi Party government of discriminating against Hindu cremation grounds by helping construct Muslim graveyards, and supplying more electricity during Ramzan than Diwali. BJP chief Amit Shah has alleged that the SP government distributed laptops to students of particular religion and castes. Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on Friday said BJP was spreading lies, and that all meritorious students were distributed laptops. The BJP chief has also asked people to bring an end to 'Kasab', or Congress, SP and BSP, likening the three parties to Ajmal Kasab, the terrorist from Pakistan caught alive during the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
In Gonda, the PM said: "There should not be any mistake in these elections? be it the SP or the BSP, not a single seat should go to them? 100 per cent seats should be won by the BJP." In the four phases, polling has taken place for 262 of the 403 assembly seats. In the next three phases, polling will be held for the remaining 141-seats.