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Analysis | Share This Page | |||||||||||||||
Ishrat Jahan and BJP! |
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by Dr. Rajinder Puri |
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Once again this writer is taking a line of argument that will displease all the anti-Congress elements in the opposition. As one who has been for the past many decades the most consistent and unflinching critic of the Congress in media as well as in politics it will be doubly unpleasant to invite brickbats from readers generally tolerant. But it must be done because this writer does not seek cosmetic improvement in governance but a radical change to create a new India. Nothing less will be satisfying. And in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case the reaction of the opposition to the event reveals a pathetic state of mind that must be criticized. What is that case?
Following a court direction the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probing a Gujarat police encounter in which four individuals, including a nineteen year old student Ishrat Jahan, were killed, concluded that it was a fake encounter and the four were killed in cold blood. Earlier in 2009 an inquiry into the same case by a Gujarat Metropolitan Magistrate had reached a similar conclusion. The only difference in the findings of the Metropolitan Magistrate’s report from the CBI was that it stated that the four were killed elsewhere and their bodies dumped at the spot later. The CBI stated that the four were killed on the same spot where the bodies were found. The Magistrate attributed the motive for the fake encounter to the desire of the guilty police officers to gain promotion. It implied that seniors were aware of the proposed fake encounter and were pleased by it.
On information provided by the IB the Gujarat police apprehended the four victims traveling together in a car. The police detained the two who were from Pakistan and had later confessed that they belonged to a Kashmiri separatist outfit. The police allowed the other two to go. The other two were one Javed and Ishrat Jahan who was employed by him. Javed was a Hindu converted to Islam. He was a petty criminal in Pune and was recruited by the IB to act as an informer and keep watch on the two Pakistanis. Later the police decided to eliminate the Pakistani terrorists. But possibly they thought that by then the IB informer had done his job and was expendable. His knowledge of a fake encounter by the cops could be exploited by him later. Therefore they decided to eliminate him too. There was a dispute among the cops about the fate of Ishrat. But since she had witnessed the others being taken into custody by the police she would know that they would have been killed in cold blood. Therefore the cops decided to eliminate her too. That the four were killed in a fake encounter was determined first by a Metropolitan Magistrate’s probe, later by a Special Investigative Team (SIT) appointed by the Gujarat government, and eventually by the CBI. The veracity of the encounter was all that the CBI had the brief to probe under the court’s orders at this stage.
In Para 169 of that report it was stated that “apart from this, he (Headley) had no other information/knowledge about Ishrat Jahan”. Forget evidentiary value of this text, does it by even the understanding of ordinary English suggest that Ishrat was necessarily a terrorist or a suicide bomber? Headley’s vague allusion, like Goswamy’s evidence, was pure hearsay. Not surprisingly the NIA in a subsequent appearance in the court echoed the views of this writer by informing the court that it had not described Ishrat as a terrorist because Headley’s statement was “only hearsay”. |
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09-Jul-2013 | ||||||||||||||||
More by : Dr. Rajinder Puri | ||||||||||||||||
Views: 1255 Comments: 5 | ||||||||||||||||
Comments on this Article
arvindar singh 07/14/2013 01:57 AM
farhat farooqui 07/11/2013 01:44 AM
P V Rajeev 07/10/2013 19:01 PM
shiv 07/10/2013 04:56 AM
Taraprasad Mishra 07/10/2013 03:26 AM |
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