The uniform was his skin, the tricolor his soul. For Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit, a serving officer in the Indian Army's Military Intelligence corps, life was a straight line of duty, discipline, and devotion to the nation.His world was one of quiet vigilance, of gathering intelligence to protect the country from its enemies.
He was a guardian, a man who operated in the shadows so that others could live in the light. He never imagined that the deepest shadow would one day fall upon him, cast not by a foreign adversary, but by the very system he had sworn to serve.
In November 2008, that world shattered. The crisp uniform was stripped away, replaced by the label of a terrorist. The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) arrested him, accusing him of being a master conspirator in the Malegaon blast, the founder of a radical organization called Abhinav Bharat, and the man who procured the very RDX used in the attack.
For a soldier whose entire identity was built on protecting India, the accusation was a fate worse than death. It was a betrayal that cut deeper than any enemy's blade.
What followed was a descent into a nightmare that would last for nearly a decade. In a detailed, 23-page statement he would later submit to the court, Purohit recounted an ordeal that seemed ripped from the pages of a spy thriller, only he was the one being broken.
He alleged he was taken not to a police station, but to a secluded location in Khandala. There, in the quiet hills, the men who were supposed to be his comrades in the fight against terror allegedly became his tormentors. He claimed he was physically assaulted by senior ATS officials, including its then-chief Hemant Karkare and then-Joint Commissioner Param Bir Singh.
But the physical pain, he alleged, was secondary to the psychological warfare. They didn't just want him to confess to a crime he insisted he didn't commit. They wanted him to become a tool for a larger political narrative. He alleged they insisted he falsely name senior right-wing leaders, including the then-Member of Parliament from Gorakhpur, Yogi Adityanath, as part of the conspiracy.
The irony was agonizing. Purohit maintained that his presence at the alleged conspiracy meetings was not an act of complicity, but of duty. He was a Military Intelligence officer, gathering intelligence on extremist groups, creating sources, doing the very job he was trained to do.
Now, that duty was being twisted into a weapon against him. The lines he had drawn to protect his country were being used to draw a noose around his neck.
For nine long years, he remained behind bars, a soldier in a prison of his own country. Bail was denied time and again. The world moved on, but his life was frozen in a cell, trapped between the four walls of an accusation. The uniform gathered dust, but the soldier's spirit, though battered, refused to break.
Then, slowly, the tide began to turn. In 2016, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which had taken over the case, filed a supplementary chargesheet that sent shockwaves through the legal system. The NIA alleged that the ATS may have planted traces of RDX to falsely frame him.
It gave credence to the claims of torture, calling the confessions unreliable. It was the first official crack in the wall of his confinement. In September 2017, the Supreme Court granted him bail, and after nine years, Lt. Col. Purohit walked out of prison, not yet a free man, but no longer a captive.
The final vindication came on a July day in 2025. The special NIA court acquitted him of all charges.The court found no evidence that he had sourced RDX, no proof that he had assembled a bomb, no link between his organization and any terror funds. After 17 years, the legal battle was over. The label of "terrorist" was formally, finally, erased.
As he stood in the courtroom, a free man, his words were not of anger or retribution. They were the words of a soldier whose compass had never wavered. He thanked the court, not for his freedom, but for something more profound. "Thanking you," he said, his voice steady, "for giving me an opportunity to serve my organisation again with the same conviction, as I was serving before my arrest".
In that single sentence lay the heart of his story. It was the statement of a man who had lost 17 years of his life, whose honor had been questioned, and whose body and spirit had been tested to their limits. Yet, his first thought was to return to his duty, to the uniform, to the nation. The ordeal had taken his years, but it could not take his loyalty. Lt. Col. Prasad Purohit had fought his longest war, not on a foreign battlefield, but within the heart of his own country, and had emerged, scarred but unbroken, still a soldier.
Context: Malegaon Blast Case
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