The Bombay High Court judgment in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts case is an absolute shocker. It was on 11 July that bombs were planted in the first-class compartments of seven Mumbai suburban trains. These exploded at different locations of the Western Railway line — between Khar Road and Santa Cruz, Bandra and Khar, Jogeshwari and Mahim junction, Mira Road and Bhayandar, Matunga and Mahim junction, and Borivili. A total of 187 people died and 824 sustained injuries. It was a devastating act of terror.
A special Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court in 2015 sentenced the five alleged bomb planters to death and handed life sentences to seven others.
Special judge Yatin Shinde recorded in his judgement: “These are not simple murders and this is not a simple murder case. It was mindless, cold blooded and wanton killing of innocent, defenceless and unsuspecting persons”. The judge agreed with the prosecution that the accused were “merchants of death”.
Mumbai train blasts: All 12 acquitted
Fast forward to 2025. The Bombay High Court quashed the conviction of all 12 accused in the synchronised train blasts case, stating that the prosecution had “utterly failed to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt.” The judges observed: “Creating a false appearance of having solved a case by presenting that the accused have been brought to justice gives a misleading sense of resolution. This deceptive closure undermines public trust and falsely reassures society, while in reality, the true threat remains at large.”
The judges found fault with the investigation and prosecution on five main counts: the accused were tortured, which made their confessions inadmissible; the witnesses were unreliable, as they had not approached the police for over 100 days; the identification parade was not conducted by a competent authority; and the recoveries held no evidentiary value, as the prosecution failed to prove proper custody and sealing of the exhibits until they reached the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL). Interestingly, the MCOCA court had earlier rejected the allegations of torture and ill-treatment.
Retired senior officers of Maharashtra, under whose tenure the incident occurred and who were involved in the investigation, have expressed dismay over the acquittals. The case was handled by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad, then staffed by officers known for their investigative skill. Anami Narayan Roy, who was Mumbai Police Commissioner at the time, maintains that they did “highly professional work, and there was very little scope for finding fault with our investigation.”
The Bombay High Court judgment may be theoretically sound, but it seems to have overlooked certain pragmatic considerations. That said, the state government has challenged the verdict by filing an appeal in the Supreme Court, which is expected to be taken up on 24 July.
Past acquittals, Malimath Committee
While we wait for the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Mumbai train blasts case, it is undoubtedly a matter of concern that several significant terror cases in the past have also ended in acquittals.
In the 2002 Akshardham temple attack, which claimed 33 lives, six people were convicted—three of them sentenced to death. But in 2014, the Supreme Court acquitted all the accused, ruling that the prosecution had relied on weak and fabricated evidence.
In the 2005 Delhi serial blasts, which killed 67 people just before Diwali, three people were arrested and tried for over a decade. Ultimately, two were acquitted of all charges, while the third was convicted by a Delhi court in 2017, which noted serious loopholes in the police investigation.
In the 2006 Malegaon blasts that claimed 37 lives, nine suspects were arrested but later acquitted by a Mumbai court in 2016 on grounds of wrongful implication.
These instances highlight the weaknesses in our criminal justice system. As far back as 2003, the Malimath Committee on criminal justice reforms had recommended that the current adversarial system be improved by incorporating some useful features of the inquisitorial system, such as the court’s duty to actively search for the truth. The ultimate aim of any criminal justice system is to deliver justice, and justice must ideally be rooted in truth. The committee therefore proposed that the ‘quest for truth’ should be the guiding star of the entire system. For this purpose, it recommended empowering courts to summon and examine any person as a witness, and to issue directions to investigating officers as needed to assist the court in its search for truth.
On the standard of proof in criminal cases, the Malimath Committee observed that the requirement of ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’ places an unreasonably heavy burden on the prosecution. In many continental legal systems, the standard of proof is much lower — it is only based on the ‘preponderance of probabilities’. The committee therefore recommended adopting a middle path: a standard higher than the ‘preponderance of probabilities’ but lower than ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’ — what it called a ‘clear and convincing’ standard of proof. Why, then, have we not implemented these reforms?
Also read: Pakistani accomplices, shootouts, sealed chargesheet—how the 7/11 blasts case fell apart
Police and the prosecution
Meanwhile, our prosecution system must be overhauled. The Malimath Committee had recommended that “all prosecutors should work in close cooperation with the police department.” Yet the prevailing trend is quite the opposite. At the state level, prosecution has been institutionally separated from the police. This separation has not yielded encouraging results. Conviction rates have fallen drastically, and the lack of synergy between the police and the prosecution has only worsened case outcomes. The United States follows an integrationist approach, with seamless coordination between the two arms. In the UK, the Criminal Justice Act of 2003 ensured that prosecutors now operate from police stations as part of the criminal justice unit.
Police investigations themselves also require substantial qualitative improvement. The separation of the investigating wing from the law-and-order wing was the least controversial directions issued by the Supreme Court in 2006. None of the states expressed any opposition to it, yet they are still dragging their feet on implementation. States claim that separation requires considerable augmentation of police manpower, which they neither have nor can afford. Finances are a constraint, they say. But this is an artificial constraint, because states are splurging funds on vote-catching schemes. The Centre could assist them in the matter, if necessary,
It is also a great pity that structural police reforms, as mandated by the Supreme Court in 2006, have not been implemented in letter and spirit. The political class and bureaucracy are not prepared to give up their stranglehold over the police. They are not prepared to shed their zamindari mindset. Disappointingly, even the judiciary appears to losing its zest for police reform. Over the past six years, there has been little judicial monitoring of its own historic directives. As a result, we remain saddled with a colonial-era police structure, which was carved out primarily to serve the executive, not the people.
The entire criminal justice system is crying out for reform. At stake is not just the rule of law, but also our success in the war against terror.
The author is a retired police chief who has spent the last three decades campaigning for police reforms. His X handle is @singh_prakash. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)