Last year's terror attack on Mumbai left a clutch of innocent Jews dead, besides a large number of Muslims and Hindus. Neturei Karta - Guardians of the City - is a Haredi Jewish group formally created in 1935. It opposes Zionism and calls for a dismantling of the State of Israel, in the belief that Jews are forbidden to have their own state until the coming of the Messiah. The group is mainly concentrated in Jerusalem.

Neturei Karta is believed to have published a leaflet, after the terror attack on November 26, in which it brazenly expressed support for the murder of the Jews inside the Nariman house Chabad. According to one account, the leaflet stated that Chabad was rightfully punished for its relations with 'the filthy, deplorable traitors - the cursed Zionists that are your friends'.

It went on to slam the invitation of Israeli state officials to the funerals of the victims, claiming that they 'uttered words of heresy and blasphemy'. The leaflet went on to attack the Chabad movement itself, claiming that it was imbued with 'false national sentiment'. It criticised the organisation for allowing all Jews to stay in its centres, without differentiating 'between good and evil, right and wrong, pure and impure, a Jew and a convert, a believer and a heretic'.

The leaflet concluded that 'the road you (Chabad) have taken is the road of death and it leads to doom, assimilation and the uprooting of the Torah'.

Senior police officer Hemant Karkare, whose death in the attack has spawned legitimate questions as well as dubious conspiracy theories, was a secular Maharashtrian Brahmin. He too had alienated powerful men and women from within his own caste who, like the Neturei Karta, comprised obscurantist cult-like groups, with a mission to target secular activists from within their flock.

In other words, it seems a strange coincidence that right-wingers from their communities loathed Karkare and the victims of Nariman House, including a young rabbi and his pregnant wife. The deaths of both are shrouded in mystery. According to groups of social activists in Mumbai, the mobile phone and bulletproof jacket of Karkare have gone missing. In the case of the Nariman House attack, the most vital material witness - the Indian nanny of the rabbi's baby boy - was spirited out of the country with virtually no explanation.

Last Thursday, on the anniversary of the terror attack, the following individuals and representatives of leading groups met in Mumbai to ask questions and raise doubts. There were about 300 who attended. They included Kishore Jagtap, Feroze Mithiborwala, Dinu Randive, Arun Velaskar, Mukta Srivastava, Mulniwasi Mala, Sudhir Dhawale, Major Barve, Bhagwan Kesbhat, Aslam Ghazi, S.S. Yadav, Uttam Gade, Simpreet Singh, Shyam Sonar, Varsha V.V., Sanjay Shinde, Shridhar Shirsagar, Reshma Jagtap, Jagdish Nagarkar, Madhav Wagh, Baba Dalvi, Shravan Devre, Asif Khan, Valji Bhai, Abid Zaidi, Chetna Birje, Vilas Gaikwad, Avinash Kamble, Jyoti Badekar, Arif Kapadia, A.H. Faruqi, Yavar Qazi, Aarti Bonkar, Ravi Joshi, Pooja Badekar, Munawwar Azad, Ghaza Azad, Manohar Rajguru, Munawwar Khan, Farid Batatawala, Mark Anthony, Tito Eapen, Harshavardhan Vartak, Rahul Gupta, Shadab Sheikh, Dr Ashwin Bhosle, Farrouk Mapkar, Dr Rizwan Sheikh, Santoash Khangaonkar and Sainath Shinde.

The groups that were represented included Awami Bharat , National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), Trade Union Centre of India (TUCI), Indian Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), Safai Kaamgar Mazdoor Union, BAMCEF, Republican Panther, Phule-Ambedkari Vichar Manch, Jamaat-i-Islami-i-Hind, Aapli Mumbai, Marathi Bharati, All India Milli Council, National Minorities Federation, OBC Parishad, Republican People of India, Marathi Bharti, NEEDS, Vidyarthi Bharti, Muslim Intellectual Forum, Gujarati Intellectual Forum, Hindu Vikasini, Christian Panther, Yuva Sarkar, Ganai Sanskrutik Utthan. What did they want? For starters, they demanded very radical though not necessarily impossible measures to defend India's secular Constitution.

The 'Save India Campaign' as the collective group calls itself has asked the Government of India to constitute a National Judicial Commission of Inquiry to investigate the Mumbai attack. It has also asked for the Ram Prahdhan Committee Report, which probed the death of Karkare and other police officers, to be made public.

'The Mumbai 26/11 terror episode was undoubtedly an attack on the nation and thus there is a need for a far more extensive, transparent and honest investigation,' the campaign Save India Campaign committee said in its resolution. 'In the past few months, a number of questions and doubts have been raised in the media as well as other public fora and there is a growing discontent and sentiment amongst the people to demand a thorough investigation into all the aspects of the terror attack.'

The group believes - whether the rest of us believe it or not - that the choice of November 26 for the attack was as significant as December 6 was for the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. It smells a rightwing Brahminist conspiracy but does not exclude the terror outfit of Muslim groups operating from Pakistan, as playing a lead role in the two-pronged attack.

'We also need to understand as to why the nation was attacked on precisely the 26th of November. Communal riots and terror attacks have been planned and orchestrated around specific times of political, economic or social crisis. Thus the Babri Masjid was demolished on the 6th of December, which is the day of Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar's death anniversary. The primary agenda of the Brahmanical forces was to counter the upsurge and growing unity of the OBC, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims as well as other oppressed minorities in the wake of the Mandal Commission.'

Similarly, the group claimed, 26th of November 1949 was a very special day for the people of India. It was on this day that the President of the Constituent Assembly of India accepted and signed the final draft of the Constitution, whose main author and architect was Dr Ambedkar. 'On the insistence of the Bahujan and progressive movements, the Government of Maharashtra has accepted and announced the 26th of November as 'Constitution Day'. The intention is that the Government of India too would soon adopt and declare the same. This announcement came as a major blow to the Brahmanical forces centred in Maharashtra and thus 26/11 was marked out as the day of the terror attack that was in any case underway and being planned.'

Some of the arguments to investigate 'Brahminists' as opposed to 'Brahmins' in the attack have been documented in former police officer S.M. Mushrif's book 'Who killed Karkare'. Some of the arguments presented by citizens such as this group from Mumbai may appear not convincing enough to warrant our attention. And yet even the Liberhan Commission, set up by the government to probe the demolition of the Babri mosque points to very nearly similar problems as the ones raised by the Save India Campaign.

In its conclusion of the 1000 plus page report, the Liberhan Commission says 'The problem of a politically and religiously biased civil service and police service is particularly vexatious. The civil servant or police officer who professes or practices closeness to a political or religious leader and who thereby allows it to colour his objective discharge of duties is an anathema to good governance.' The government's response to Liberhan's observation in the 'action taken report' says 'Agreed.'

Two other recommendations by Justice Liberhan come approximately close to the fears expressed by the Mumbai citizens who smell a rat in the way the probe has ignored their questions.

'The extraneous interference in democratic affairs for acquiring political power through criminalisation of political office or mixing of political and religious affairs has become the order of the day,' says Liberhan.

And, he adds 'The enforcement of law and the maintenance of order in the society depend upon a responsive, efficient and upright police force and bureaucracy. In present times, the police and the bureaucracy face a crisis of confidence. The general public rightly or wrongly does not trust either as a protector or as an honest enforcer of the laws.'