LAHORE - For the relatives of over 60 Pakistanis, charred to death in the two bogies of the Samjhota Express in Feb 2007, the news that after four years there is some headway in pin pointing the culprits who committed this wanton act is unbelievable. This is because the irrefutable evidence pointing to Hindu right wing activists who committed the crime was abundantly evident in the aftermath of the incident despite Indian media and governments efforts to pass on the buck to Laskar-e-Taiba. The terrorists could have been arrested much earlier and the Indian law enforcement agencies took notice of these clandestine activities of Hindu extremist organisations too late. The fact that it took so long to reach the criminals speaks of the influence that rabid Hindu Right Wing wields in the bipartisan political hierarchy in India as well as the law enforcing and intelligence agencies. Three incidents occurring within the state of Maharashtra; one at Nanded on April 6, 2006, second at Malegaon on September 8, 2006 and the third again at Nanded on Feb 10, 2007, only seven days before the Samjhota tragedy struck, adequately illuminate partiality of the Indian State to turn a Nelson's eye to the entrenched scourge of Hindu terrorism. On April 6, a bomb blast occurred at Nanded at the home of a retired executive engineer well known for his longstanding association with RSS. During the blast two bomb makers, who were fabricating the device as it went off, were killed whereas three of their accomplices got seriously injured. It was suspected that the bomb makers had by mistake set the timer to 1:50am instead of 1:50pm, when the Juma congregation at a local mosque was expected to have formed up the next day. The incident provided vital clues to pin down and break-up the Hindu terrorists' network that systematically had targeted innocent Muslims during religious gathering over a couple of years. However the entire Indian establishment joined hands in keeping the lid on this much known conspiracy of silence. Despite presence of overwhelming incriminating evidence, the culprits were meted out kid glove treatment. Ignoring their well established terrorist antecedents, the culprits were charged under those provisions of Indian law which ensured that they were let off easily. Initially the police even tried to cover the incident stating that the blasts had been caused by a cache of firecrackers rather than by a viciously assembled pipe bomb. Another blast occurred at a godown in Nanded on February 10 in which two well known Bajrang Dal activists were killed in an explosion while handling incendiary explosives. According to a report of Concerned Citizens (CCI) Inquiry compiled by Justice (R) Kulse Patil and the noted human rights activist Teesta Setalvad, the blast that killed the Hindu activists, had the same deadly combination of explosives and chemicals that were to be employed only a week later to set afire the two bogies of the Samjhota Express. The deadly mix was a cocktail of explosives and incendiary substances that was designed not to produce blast casualties but generate flames at such intense temperatures that a person could be incinerated alive in 5-10 seconds. The CCI Report was highly critical of the police and intelligence agencies saying that they didnt pursue vital leads provided by the Nanded blast in investigating the Samjhota Express case. The inquiry also focused upon the Indian governments inability to bring to justice earlier cases of Hindu terrorism targeting Muslim congregations at Juma prayers. All the leads were evident and the Samjhota Express case could have been cracked within days; if not months. Instead it became another episode for haranguing Pakistan and raised the spectre of Kashmir centric militant organisations. In this context one has to be mindful that India has shown a marked propensity to use the indigenously based acts of terrorism to calibrate the pace of its dialog with Pakistan. Samjhota tragedy provides an ideal opportunity to the Indian government, as a silver lining, to make a clean breast of the scourge of indigenous Hindu terrorism and make an admission that it had been wrong in accusing and arm twisting Pakistan over incidents of terrorism in India that were the outcome of its own contradictions. It is also an ideal case to put to work the Joint Counter Terror Mechanism that mainly through Indian intransigence, is gathering dust since long.