Ishrat Jahan: The UPA Crossed All Limits To Hurt Modi

The latest revelations in the Ishrat Jahan case have shocked the nation. It should shame us that we elected a government that used every illegal, unethical, immoral means for pure political reasons to tarnish the reputation of the one man it feared: Narendra Modi.

In the process, it demoralised honest intelligence agency personnel, lied to the public and the media, and even went to the extent of torturing (with cigarette burns) an upright bureaucrat who would not stray from the facts. Look at the revelations about the Ishrat Jahan case. If true, it could imply that the government was indeed anti-national.

The Background

Ishrat and three men were shot dead near the Kotarpur waterworks in Ahmedabad on 15 June 2004 by the Gujarat police. Her family held press conferences saying that she was not a terrorist. Soon, reports began to surface that it was a “fake encounter”. The activists jumped in. So loud was the breast-beating that a Special Investigation Team (SIT) monitored by the Supreme Court was set up to find the truth. The UPA government wanted to make sure that Modi was shown to be behind the killing of an innocent young Muslim woman.

The SIT gave Modi a clean chit. But that did not prevent a now-discredited magazine called Tehelka from going to the extent of quoting and non-existent pages of the SIT report. In fact, according to this discourse, Ishrat Jahan was not the only “victim”. There was also Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a marble and arms smuggler, who died in another encounter — and the deaths of equally questionable characters linked to him.

In 2013, Asif Ibrahim was appointed as chief of the intelligence bureau (IB). He was the first Muslim to hold this position, but he refused to pander to the Congress/UPA for this and did not let them use his appointment as a mark of social justice for his community. When the Central Bureau of Investigation and National Investigating Agency charged IPS officer Rajendra Kumar in the Ishrat ‘fake’ encounter case, Ibrahim told both then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and then Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde that the IB had credible evidence to link the 19-year-old girl to the Pakistani terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba.

The IB chief also warned the politicians that the indictment of IPS Rajendra Kumar would be harmful to the nation’s security apparatus as officers like him do not hesitate to put their lives in jeopardy to bust terror modules. Several IB sleuths indeed hold that their colleague Rajendra Kumar’s work — and that of Ashok Prashant and DP Sinha — in exposing the Muzammil Bhat-Ishrat Jahan terror module was exemplary and that these cops should have been rewarded, rather than indicted.

They say the CBI was being used to target Modi and drag him into the Ishrat encounter case. But the UPA was desperate to hold on to power and indict Modi, its biggest threat, on something—anything, even if that meant helping Jihadists. Unfortunately for the UPA, the members of the Lashkar-e-Toiba chose to admit in their mouthpiece Ghazwa Times that Ishrat was their operative.

If that was not enough, double agent David Coleman Headley alias Dawood Geelani told his FBI interrogators that Ishrat was a suicide bomber of the LeT gang under the command of Muzammil Bhat and LeT women’s wing in-charge Abu Aiman Mazhar. Headley said that he had got this information from Hafiz Saeed, Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi and Abu Khalifa, the second-in-command in LeT, during a meeting they had in Muridke near Lahore, Pakistan.

In fact, Ishrat’s name did not come up as a passing mention in Headley’s confession; neither was her name an answer to a leading question by a lawyer. To both the FBI and the Mumbai court where the 26/11 trial is being held, Headley detailed the entire sequence. He said a certain Abu Dujata led him to Muzammil Bhat who confided in him that the LeT had plans to strike different parts of India — in particular Gujarat, Maharashtra and Jammu & Kashmir. Out of three names of women suicide bombers of the LeT that Mumbai Police had, which public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam shared with Headley, the double agent identified Ishrat Jahan.

So What Happened Then?

Not only did the NIA botch up the investigation by refusing to believe in Headley’s confession to the FBI in 2010, the agency and the SIT that was probing the Ishrat case tortured the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Under Secretary for Internal Security, RVS Mani to get him to remove Ishrat’s link with the LeT from his 2013 report. Mani had drafted an affidavit dated 6 August 2009 that linked Ishrat along with Javed Ghulam Sheikh neé Praneshkumar Gopinath Pillai (Indian), Amjad Ali Rana Akbarali Rana alias Salim and Pakistani Zeeshan Johar alias Abdul Ghani (both Pakistani) to the LeT. It was based on information supplied by the IB.

It was vetted by both the Home Ministry and the Law Ministry. The IB story began four months before the gang’s encounter with the Gujarat Police. In February 2004, Jammu & Kashmir Police had gunned down Ehsan Illahi, a Poonch-based Lashkar operative. Letters recovered from his hideout led the Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch to zero in on a blue Tata Indica (MH 02 JA 4786) would enter the state, carrying this gang. The gang’s objective was to strike the Akshardham Temple and kill political leaders including Modi, the then Gujarat Chief Minister.

The gang, in fact, did attempt these operations but had failed in their attempts — first on 20 April and then on 13 May 2004. Strangely, on 30 September 2009, another affidavit in the same case was filed and that said these people were not associated with the LeT. Mani says neither he nor his two immediate seniors including the then Home Secretary had drafted the second affidavit. However, they were “ordered” to sign on this changed affidavit that offered no argument about why the first affidavit was not based on facts. The second affidavit just said that the intelligence inputs from IB and RAW that helped in drafting the 6 August affidavit were merely indicative and not of “evidential” value.

Mani disagreed with this changed government stand. However, as the code of conduct (Rule 3 of the Central Civil Services, 1964) dictates, he and his seniors had no choice but to sign the second affidavit. It is obvious that, if even the highest ranking IAS officer in the Home Ministry, the Home Secretary, did not remove Ishrat and gang’s association with the LeT from the affidavit, there is only one person above him who could do that: the then Home Minister P Chidambaram. In fact, the then Home Secretary GK Pillai has clearly said that Chidambaram bypassed him to strike off Ishrat’s link to the LeT from the affidavit. Curiously, Chidambaram does not deny the charge; his only objection is to the fact that Pillai is now dissociating himself from the decision.

The Sordid Plot

The August 2009 affidavit was not the only government statement that the September 2009 affidavit contradicted. Earlier, a 2004 affidavit by the previous UPA government had indicted Pranesh Pillai-turned-Javed Sheikh, saying he was in regular touch with LeT operatives, particularly Muzammil Bhat. The Congress-NCP coalition was in power in Maharashtra, and their police said Pranesh/Javed had met with Ishrat and her mother in Mumbra on 1 May 2004, as he was looking for a salesgirl for his perfume business. He did not have such a business. The questions that arose were what was a salesgirl doing in a car, with occupants who were terrorists?

Why would someone supposed to sell perfumes check into the Tulsi Guest House in Bardoli on National Highway 6 on the outskirts of Surat at 2 am on 12 June 2004 along with the terrorists? Further, if the CBI was convinced that police officers JG Parmar, Bharat Patel, Girish Singhal, Tarun Barot and Anaju Chaudhary had kidnapped Javed, Ishrat and their two accomplices to stage an encounter, why couldn’t it file a charge sheet against these cops within 90 days?

The next year (2005) when Delhi Police apprehended Muhammad Abdul Razzaq, another terrorist, who told the cops that he had sent Javed to a terror training camp in Pakistan, why did the CBI not contact Razzaq for further details? Why did the CBI spare Faizabad residents Muhammad Mehrajuddin and Muhammad Wasi? Mehrajuddin had introduced Javed to Wasi in February 2004, and Wasi deposed before an Ahmedabad magistrate that Javed bought pistols and a sten-gun in Uttar Pradesh after the introduction. The SIT was not ready to accept even the report of the special forensic board that was formed by the Gujarat High Court on its insistence.

The board comprised experts from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). The then head of the SIT, the ADGP of CISF R.R. Verma, ADGP of Gujarat police Mohan Jha and IG of Gujarat Police Satish Verma said the report by medical stalwarts like Head of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology of AIIMS Dr TD Dogra, chairman of CFSL Dr Rajinder Singh et al. lacked scientific application. Since when have policemen started understanding science better than experts?

The Curious Case Of Satish Verma

Of the three SIT heads of the time, Satish Verma comes across as the most dubious. Just a month before the BJP-led NDA formed the government at the Centre, he accepted a posting that he had been resisting for years. Since 2012, the Gujarat government had sought to transfer him from the post of Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic), Ahmedabad, to that of Principal of the Police Training College, Junagadh. He resisted it till April 2014 on two grounds: that he was being moved for his stand in the Ishrat case and then that he had suffered a hip injury. But what role do the traffic police have in an encounter of the type that killed Ishrat?

Doctors of the civil hospital who examined Verma did not find his injury’ serious and declared him fit enough to join office. There are other charges that are far more serious. Satish Verma faces the charge of faking an encounter to kill Jasu Gagan Shial in 1996-97 in Porbandar. There are three cases of custodial deaths that took place under the supervision of Verma when he was the Superintendent of Police in Porbandar. Other than Jasu, Verma is alleged to have eliminated Aher Ranmal Ram and Aher Narayan Jesti Bandhiya in cold blood in police custody. Verma is also allegedly involved in a ring that smuggles explosives.

A departmental inquiry was instituted to probe why he let off a key accused in the Gosabara RDX landing case of 1993, which was later used in the Mumbai serial bombings. A division bench of the Gujarat High Court comprising Chief Justice SJ. Mukhopadhyaya and Justice J.B. Pardiwala refused to entertain his plea that the state government was going after him for his disagreement with it in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case. Former Under Secretary Mani has said that Verma was “not collecting evidence but engineering evidence”.

On 21 June 2013, when a team led by Satish Verma including CBI officers met Mani at the SIT office in Gandhinagar and forced himto to debunk IB reports that said Ishrat was a LeT operative, and he refused to do so, Verma burnt him with cigarettes to get his consent to the CBI theory. By June 2013, Modi’s rise to the office of the prime minister had begun looking inevitable.

At this time, Mani was moved to the Urban Development Ministry, but he claims the Congress government still hounded him. Frustrated, he applied for voluntary retirement. On the advice of some well-wishers, however, he continued in service. But the continuous harassment took a toll on his aged mother whose degenerative disease aggravated; she passed away in January 2014.

Are You Surprised?

The reference section of the Wikipedia article on the 2002 riots in Gujarat has a dozen odd journalists, who for more than a decade have quoted each other to hold Narendra Modi guilty either of instigating the riots or of telling the police to go soft on rioters. They defamed Justice Nanavati for his commission’s report and then they tried to punch holes in the SIT report that gave Modi a clean chit. The Gujarat 2002 cases and the Ishrat case of 2004 have one similarity. Indira Jaisingh’s Lawyers Collective is a beneficiary of the Ford Foundation. Vrinda Grover, the attorney for Ishrat’s mother, is related to Suresh Grover whose Awaaz Network held protest demonstrations against Modi’s UK visit (awaaz.org) last year.

The owners of awaaz.org, a radical leftist website are part of PROXSA, an umbrella organisation for 300 extremist leftists who are members of more than 20 outfits sporting different fanciful names — based in the US- Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, Alliance for South Asians Taking Action, ASHA for Education, Association of South Asian Progressives, Coalition for a Secular and Democratic India, Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, Centre for Study and Research in South Asia, Coalition against Communalism, EKTA, Forum of Inquilabi Leftists, Foundation for Pluralism, Friends of South Asia, Indian Progressive Study Group of Los Angeles, NRIS for Secular and Harmonious India, International South Asia Forum, Organising Youth, South Asian Collective, South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection, South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy, South Asian Progressive Action Collective, Supporters of Human Rights in India, Voices for Freedom, Youth Solidarity Summer and the Association for India’s Development. Non-Resident Indians affiliated to these outfits, work as promoters of the Aam Aadmi Party in social media

. It’s complicated. It’s also simple. There is a huge network stretching across the world—with political and financial connections, to finish off Modi, hook or by crook. Some members of the UPA government seemed to have added their efforts to this and in the process caused our nation much harm. We should feel ashamed of them.