Ishrat Jahan case

Plots and blots

By Meenakashi Lekhi | March 13, 2016


Early on the morning of June 15, 2004, four Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists—Ishrat Jahan, Javed Sheikh, Zeeshan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana—were gunned down by the Gujarat Police in an encounter on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. According to the Intelligence Bureau, they had been on a mission to assassinate then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.

The irony, however, lies in the fact that one of India’s most successful preemptive counter-terror operations did not get the due accolades. Instead, the Gujarat government and the officers involved in the operation were hounded by critics.

For more than a decade, the anti-Modi and anti-BJP brigade—cutting across political parties, NGOs, government machinery and sections of the media—orchestrated a fierce propaganda to dub the operation as a 'fake encounter' ordered by Modi and then Gujarat home minister Amit Shah, who is now the BJP president.

However, all efforts of the Congress-led UPA to frame Modi and Shah failed miserably. Even the attempts to suppress Pakistani-American terrorist David Headley's deposition before the National Investigation Agency team in 2010 that Ishrat Jahan was an LeT operative and the attempts to threaten intelligence officers with CBI probes against them did not help.

The IB’s operation had its genesis in February 2004, when the Jammu and Kashmir Police shot dead Poonch-based Lashkar operative Ehsan Illahi. Letters found on his body led the sleuths to an Ahmedabad-based lawyer. From there, the operation rolled on.

There are legitimate reasons to believe that the IB was successful in breaching the Lashkar plot and had precise inputs about when and where the terrorists would strike.

The FIR of 2004, filed by the Ahmedabad crime branch after the encounter, records that the officers knew of the imminent arrival of the suspects in a blue Tata Indica with the registration number MH02 JA4786.

In that case, would it be far-fetched to presume that the IB director, the national security adviser, the Union home minister and even the prime minister back then were aware of the threat to Modi? Would it then be unreasonable to question why these terrorists were allowed to drive into Gujarat from Maharashtra? Why were they not neutralised in Maharashtra?

It is clear now that Ishrat Jahan had not been killed in a fake encounter, as it was alleged for more than a decade by those who are still sulking at their 2014 electoral drubbing. The special investigation team, which probed the case, did not find any substantial evidence to prove the allegation.

One may also raise serious questions about the rationale behind the appointment of Justice Abhilasha Kumari in the Ishrat Jahan case. Justice Kumari is the daughter of Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, a Congress veteran. One cannot be faulted for asking whether the UPA had appointed her with an ulterior motive.

Now, as Headley's deposition that Ishrat Jahan was indeed a Lashkar operative has struck the final nail in the case, one wonders who funded and fuelled the toxic propaganda campaign against Modi for a decade.

It is time to unravel the real conspiracies. It is time to put the record straight on why the UPA regime had gone to the extent of initiating a CBI probe against the IB officers involved in the Ishrat Jahan encounter. Intelligence officers put their lives at risk on a daily basis, and nothing can be more obnoxious than humiliating them to settle political scores or to destroy a rising political force.

The Ishrat Jahan case should not be allowed to fade away from public memory. It should stand as an example of the extent to which some parties can compromise even national security for political gains. What is happening at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and the manner in which some national parties have been backing anti-national sloganeers, is yet another example of that.