On July 18, 2025, the Bombay High Court acquitted 12 men falsely accused in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts. Nineteen years — that’s how long the system caged them, tortured them, destroyed their families, and branded them terrorists. And today, after stealing their youth and dignity, the courts quietly said — they were innocent all along.
This is no accident. This is a pattern. In every terror case, police pick up Muslim men, slap draconian charges, parade them as “masterminds” before the media, and let the courts sort it out decades later. By then, lives are ruined. Families shattered. Futures crushed.
Who pays for this? Certainly not the police who cooked up evidence, nor the agencies that manufactured confessions. Not the media that hounded them as terrorists. And never the political bosses who thrive on this narrative of fear.
For Muslims in India, mere suspicion is enough to be jailed for life. The system doesn’t seek justice — it seeks scapegoats. And Muslims have been the easy target. This is not justice delayed. This is justice butchered. Nineteen years of wrongful imprisonment is not a legal error — it is a state-sponsored crime.
Unless those responsible are held to account — the police, the agencies, the media, the politicians — this bloodstained cycle will repeat. The acquittal of these men is a verdict not just on their innocence, but on the guilt of a rotten system that thrives on ruining innocent lives.
