The Gujarat police shot dead three men and a 19 year old girl, 12 years ago, alleging they were headed to Ahmedabad on a Lashkar mission to assassinate then Chief Minister Narendra Modi. The case soon took dramatic turn after investigation into the encounter revealed that was a 'fake' case. The High Court-appointed Special Investigation Team and the CBI implicated the Gujarat police and the IB in the alleged murders. While the case remained pending over the years with the accused free to live the lives they wished, a Home Ministry official's recent claims has again brought back the incident into the light of day.
The case dictates that Amjad Ali Rana, Zeeshan Johar, Javed Sheikh (Pranesh Pillai) and Ishrat Jahan were tasked with a terror mission for which they came to Ahmedabad where their car was intercepted by the police, following which they started firing at the police and got killed in retaliatory firing.
Former home secretary claims affidavit was changed suo motu by Chidambaram
In latest updates, then Home Secretary G K Pillai has claimed that former Home Minister P Chidambaram himself dictated the Centre's revised affidavit in the Ishrat Jahan case in 2009, in which, references to her alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba links were removed. He also alleged that he had been tortured by an officer who was part of the HC-appointed SIT. Pillai said there was never any discussion among officials in the Home Ministry about altering the Centre's earlier affidavit. “It was done by the minister himself. You will have to ask the minister why he changed it, because none of us changed it. It was done suo motu by the minister.” He elaborated, “My understanding is that the minister himself called the junior officers from the IB and so on, and in his office he dictated the revised affidavit. He gave it to them and told them to get it issued. To be on the safe side, the officers placed it on file and put it up. When the revised affidavit came to me, I remember asking the joint secretary where did this come from? He said this came from the minister himself. Once dictated by the minister himself, nobody looks into it because he's the boss. Then everybody just signed.”
In response to the home secretary's claims, Chidambaram replied, “The affidavit speaks for itself. And the UPA government has not disowned the affidavit.” While the affidavit from September 2009 said IB inputs were not conclusive proof that those killed in the encounter had terror links, the fresh affidavit read, “The Central Government in the said affidavit did not address any issue relating to the merits or otherwise of the police action. It was essentially concerned with the dealing of allegations relating to the intelligence inputs which were available in the Central Government and which are shared on a regular basis by the State Governments.”
While the Bharatiya Janta Party has jumped into the centre of the issue, asking for a probe into the UPA's 'flip-flop', the Congress expressed their disappointments to “see bureaucrats like Pillai changing their view depending on the government”. “Problem with people like Pillai and thousands of government officials of India is while they are in service, they do exactly what the government says and perhaps what is right and once they retire, they change their view depending upon the government. It shows that how spineless and characterless the bureaucracy has become,” Congress leader Sandeep Dikshit said.
