Stay positive, Papa would've said: Daughter of late ATS chief ...

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10 hours ago - A painting in Jui Karkare Navare’s Matunga apartment shows a woman holding a candle, a palm cupped around its flame to shield it from the wind. ... Deeply hurt by recent attempts, by people like Pragya Thakur, to discredit him, Jui has no desire to lash out at them. “My father would ...

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8 hours ago - Stay positive, Papa would've said: Jui Karkare Navare, daughter of late ATS chief Hemant Karkare speaks about him,vs Pragya Thakur's ...

Stay positive, Papa would’ve said: Daughter of late ATS chief Hemant Karkare speaks about him, Pragya Thakur's remark

By Anjana Vaswani, Mumbai Mirror | Updated: Dec 1, 2019, 08:32 IST

(PIC: SACHIN HARALKAR)

A painting in Jui Karkare Navare’s Matunga apartment shows a woman holding a candle, a palm cupped around its flame to shield it from the wind. A dark shadow looms behind her, but the woman sees only the glow of the candle. The image reflects Jui’s attitude. Seated beside a photograph of her late father Hemant Karkare — the former chief of the anti-terrorism squad (ATS) who was killed in the November 2008 attacks — Boston-based Jui was in the city last week for the launch of her memoirs on her father. She hopes her book will protect the memory of the 26/11 hero, and ensure that he’s remembered for his integrity, work ethic and commitment to his job and country. Deeply hurt by recent attempts, by people like Pragya Thakur, to discredit him, Jui has no desire to lash out at them. “My father would’ve wanted me to focus on the positive things,” she says. “That’s what he taught me.”

On Tuesday, Jui, 38, placed a wreath at the police memorial site in Marine Lines during a service to mark the 11th anniversary of the terror strike. “My heart swelled with pride,” she says, referring to the fact that her father was posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra in 2009. “My father was a hero and an upstanding police officer. I can see the respect that people have for him. He was deeply loved,” says the computer engineer and a mother of two.

Karkare’s philosophy also appears in a letter he wrote to his sister in 1983, Jui says, and has used it in her book, titled Hemant Karkare — A Daughter’s Memoir (The Write Place). “Life is full of pluses and minuses,” Karkare wrote, “If you only look at the minuses, it depresses you and cuts down your desire to put in your best…” That’s what Jui reminds herself of, she says, “though the pain, anguish and questions linger”. Questions about whether her father might still be alive if he’d been wearing a quality bulletproof jacket, for instance.

News footage from that night show Karkare wearing a helmet and a bulletproof jacket before he enters a police vehicle. But later reports said he had bullet wounds on his chest. The jacket that should have shielded him went missing before Karkare reached the hospital — and the official file, with details about the purchase of the protective garment, went missing subsequently. It’s a mystery that remains unsolved.

We knew how strongly Papa felt about his work, so there was never any question of asking him to take a step back

Jui Karkare Navare

“I used to think about it a lot, but I have accepted it now,” says Jui, adding that the idea behind the book was to deal with the pain she felt yet couldn’t bring herself to talk about. Vitriolic assertions made by Thakur — who is currently under fire for calling Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse a patriot — where she called Karkare a ‘traitor to the nation’ and boasted that his death was brought on by his karma, keep the pain alive. It’s clear that Thakur’s ‘comeuppance’ quotes are a result of the ATS chief’s investigation into the September 2008 Malegaon blasts, where Karkare had found evidence of Thakur’s involvement in the incident that claimed 40 lives and left 125 injured in the Muslim-dominated town. Karkare was also the first to flag the idea that a Hindutva organisation was behind the attack. The 1982-batch IPS officer even wrote to the state government proposing a ban on the right wing group. This made Karkare the target of attacks from Thakur, and even then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, and he started receiving anonymous death threats.

Karkare never discussed the pressures of work with his family though, says Jui, who had moved to Boston by then, having married in 2007. “We would read about these things in the newspapers, but we all knew how strongly Papa felt about his work so there was never any question of asking him to take a step back,” she says. In her book, she writes about a steel cupboard at home where her father kept his official files. As children, Jui and her siblings were tempted to peek inside on the rare occasion when the door was left ajar, “but we knew he’d find out even if we ensured that everything was kept exactly as we had found it,” she says. The family joke was that Karkare’s sharp eyes could even pick up on their fingerprints.

The memory makes her laugh, and Jui says she’d like people to remember her father as she does — “the family man, the artist…” she says, pointing to a coffee table lamp beside her that Karkare crafted himself. He was also an avid reader, and the family had a wellstocked library. “Papa wasn’t always conversant in English, so he developed his own process to improve his vocabulary. He would write down the names of friends against words in the dictionary that best described them, and that helped him remember what those words meant,” she adds.

Even at work, his approach to challenges was far from prosaic. “Papa didn’t believe that bullets were the answer to the Naxal uprising or any movement that had an ideological basis. He would go and meet students at schools in Chandrapur to understand their mindset,” says Jui. “When he learned that many of them idolised Naxal leader ‘Shekhar anna’ and saw the police as the enemy, Papa was very hurt,” says Jui. “He started visiting the villages regularly to win the trust and cooperation of the locals.”

Jui hopes these anecdotes will encourage young policemen to be as determined, unwavering and thorough as her father. But she also wrote this book for her children, she says. “To introduce them to the loving grandfather they will never know.”