The bald truth: No party protected Ishrat Jahan, not even the Congress

The sudden turn of events in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case has convinced anyone who needed convincing that the 19-year-old Mumbra girl was a terrorist that the Muslim-loving Congress government tried to protect. This is a theory that fits both stereotypes – of Muslims and the Congress.

The reality is that no party protected Ishrat Jahan, who was gunned down in a so-called encounter in Gujarat along with three other men in June 2004. The Gujarat police had said all four were on a mission to kill the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Ishrat Jahan’s funeral was like that of 1993 bomb blasts accused Yakub Memon’s – thousands turned out for it. No Muslim believed she was a terrorist. As with Memon, many Hindus too thought she was innocent.

But no political party took up her cause. Individual politicians did.

Batting for Ishrat

The Congress’s Husain Dalwai attended Ishrat’s funeral. Muslims from the Nationalist Congress Party and Samajwadi Party helped bring her body back from Gujarat, and the Nationalist Congress Party’s Vasant Davkhare gave her family a cheque of Rs 1 lakh, which they returned. Samajwadi Party chief Abu Azmi visited her home along with party colleague Azam Khan.

However, if there’s one politician who stood by her family all through, it’s the Nationalist Congress Party’s Jitendra Awhad. He was a member of the state’s Legislative Council when she was killed. His support to her family has helped him win Mumbra’s Muslim votes in every election since. He’s a member of the Legislative Assembly now, and while Mumbra’s Muslims mutter angrily about his alleged links with fly-by-night builders in the township notorious for illegal constructions, Awhad is still seen as their man. He remains a favourite of secularists too.

Ishrat Jahan had another backer – the judiciary. Her mother approached the Gujarat courts asking that her daughter’s death be investigated. Her faith was vindicated. Senior lawyers fought her case, magistrate SP Tamang in 2009 held her daughter innocent in his inquiry, and judges of the Gujarat High Court successfully fended off interference by the Gujarat government into the Special Investigation Team set up by the court to inquire into the encounter.

After the Special Investigation Team in November 2011 also held that Ishrat Jahan was innocent and the encounter fake, the Gujarat High Court handed over the inquiry to the Central Bureau of Investigation. The investigative agency confirmed the findings of Tamang and the Special Investigation Team, but went further. It didn’t just indict the Gujarat police, it also indicted the joint director of the Intelligence Bureau who had sent the information to Gujarat about the four terrorists coming their way.

The Central Bureau of Investigation’s chargesheet (against the Gujarat police) filed in 2013, and supplementary chargesheet (against the IB officials) filed in 2014, is now pending at an Ahmedabad court. The trial has not begun. The accused police personnel are out on bail and have been reinstated.

Congress vs Ishrat

Had the Congress really wanted to stand by Ishrat Jahan, it had many opportunities to do so. When magistrate Tamang submitted his inquiry report into her death in 2009, the Congress was in power at the Centre. But much earlier, in 2007, it had become clear that most of the encounters that had taken place in Gujarat between 2002 and 2005, in which nine Muslims had been killed, had been fake. All those killed had been alleged to be terrorists who had entered Gujarat to eliminate Modi. In two cases, the Intelligence Bureau had given this input.

These encounters had made headlines, and gave Modi the image of a Hindutva warrior whose life was in danger by Pakistan-backed Muslim terrorists. Did the Congress counter his lie by using the vast machinery at its disposal at the Centre? Did it blow apart the myth of Narendra Modi under siege? Did it inform people that innocent Muslims had been killed only to enhance Modi’s image and to demonise Muslims? No.

On the contrary.

First, it filed an affidavit in the Gujarat High Court opposing Ishrat’s mother’s demand for an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation. According to an interview given by Vrinda Grover, the lawyer for Ishrat Jahan’s mother, this affidavit stated that as per newspaper reports, Ghazwa Times, a mouthpiece of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, had described Ishrat as a member of the Pakistan-based terrorist group.

Key moment

The timing of the affidavit was significant. It was August 2009, by which time the Gujarat encounters had been exposed as fake. But the Congress was still branding Ishrat a terrorist, even if indirectly.

Tamang’s inquiry report was submitted in September 2009, and challenged by the Gujarat government. The Congress then filed a fresh affidavit. Again, according to Grover, all that the fresh affidavit said was that the paragraphs in its earlier affidavit relating to newspaper reports, did “not constitute intelligence inputs”.

So the Congress never came out and said in clear terms that Ishrat Jahan was innocent. The maximum that was said by former home secretary GK Pillai after the Central Bureau of Investigation filed its chargesheet in JUly 2013 was that he would give Ishrat Jahan the benefit of doubt. He had retired by then.

In fact, when the Central Bureau of Investigation sought to question Rajendra Kumar, the joint director of the Intelligence Bureau, this was opposed by Asif Ibrahim, who was then the chief of the internal intelligence agency. He said that the intelligence inputs given by his colleague about Ishrat Jahan were true. The Congress could have shut him up. It didn’t.

Ironically, the United Progressive Alliance government had appointed Ibrahim as the first Muslim director of the Intelligence Bureau in 2012, bypassing others, with an eye on the Muslim vote in the 2014 general elections.

There is another aspect to the general scepticism about Ishrat Jahan. The Central Bureau of Investigation has been proven to be a caged parrot of whoever is in power at the Centre. So, if under a Congress-ruled Centre, it says Ishrat Jahan was innocent and murdered, everyone thinks it is following the Congress line.

The Intelligence Bureau has not yet acquired such a reputation among the general public. But over the last five years, enough evidence has come to the fore in court about its inputs in terror cases. In Delhi itself, most Muslims arrested on terror charges by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police over the last decade have been acquitted honourably. In at least four cases, the cell claimed to have acted on a tip-off by a central intelligence agency. The judgments in these cases found the charges unacceptable, and pointed to frame-up.

In another case of 2007, two Kashmiris held in Tihar Jail told court that they had been framed by the Special Cell only because they had refused to do the bidding of an Intelligence Bureau official. The court asked the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the allegation. It was found to be true.

Terrorist or not?

So how can one believe the Intelligence Bureau when it says Ishrat Jahan was a terrorist?

One may well ask, how can one believe the Central Bureau of Investigation when it says she wasn’t? One reason is that two other investigations – a magisterial inquiry and a Special Investigation Team inquiry set up by a court also said she was innocent.

However, the question is not whether Ishrat Jahan was innocent. The Bharatiya Janata Party may hope to stir up the collective conscience of the country by focusing on this aspect. But the words of the Gujarat High Court bench admonishing the Central Bureau of Investigation for its delay in filing its chargesheet are worth recalling. “The court is not concerned whether they were terrorists or normal human beings. In any case they should not have been liquidated.”