Ishrat Jahan encounter not fake: Gujarat govt

Updated on Tuesday, September 08, 2009, 18:35 IST Zeenews Bureau
Ahmedabad: Refusing to subscribe to the observations made in the Tamang Report about the alleged ‘fake’ encounter of four persons including teenaged Ishrat Jahan in 2004, the Gujarat Government has decided to challenge the report. Addressing a press conference, state government spokesperson Jay Narayan Vyas said, “Justice Tamang report is invalid and the Gujarat government will challenge it,” adding that the “encounter was not fake.” He also claimed that the report was prepared in a “hurry”, without giving Gujarat government a chance to express its views. Questioning the report’s findings, Vyas termed it as “bad in law” saying that the accused were not given an opportunity to explain their stand. “Normally, in the process of tenet justice an opportunity will be given to the accused to present their stand. But in this case, a judicial magistrate has not given any chance to the accused,” Vyas said. “The Committee was asked to give the report around November 2009 but the committee submitted it within a month of its constitution.” “The report quoted the Cr PC 176 of the IPC to probe this incident. But the 176 allows only the custodial deaths and it was not a custodial death. How can they probe under this clause? None of the sub clauses mention about probing for the encounters, so we will challenge the whole report. Hence, it is not valid for us,” said Vyas.
He also dragged the Centre into the whole issue by revealing that the Home Ministry in its report had accepted that Ishrat Jahan and her partners were involved in plans to carry out terror strikes in Gujarat and Maharashtra, he added. A few days after the incident, a section of media carried out a news report stating that Ishrat and the others killed belonged to their organisation, added Vyas. As per the Tamang report, four persons-- Ishrat, Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani--killed in an encounter on the outskirts of the city on June 15, 2004, were not linked with Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashker-e-Toiba, as claimed by the police.BJP defends ModiBJP today defended Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, saying he cannot be held responsible for everything that happens in the state. "Why should Modi take a call?....Do you think anything that happens in any state, the Chief Minister is responsible? If anything happens in the national capital, is the Prime Minister responsible?" senior BJP leader M Venkaiah Naidu said in reply to a question on whether Modi should be held accountable for the Ishrat Jahan encounter. Naidu accused the media of suffering from "Modi-mania". "How is the Chief Minister concerned with this (Ishrat Jahan case)? Let law take its own course," he said. BJP’s national spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad referred to the affidavit filed by the Centre which had accepted that Ishrat Jahan and her partners were involved in plans to carry out terror strikes in Gujarat. ”No one can deny that this country is not under terror threat. LeT operatives are active in India,” he said.


While the civil rights of citizens must never be curbed and India must not become a police state, we must not become naive and forget that India has many enemies, not just in the form of our Islamist neighbors but also among those who share the same anti Hindu ideology within India and their fellow travelers in hating India and Hinduism - the communists, whether in China, Nepal or Kerala. Therefore in the name of civil rights India must not become a soft state. The police and men in uniform must be seen as a force to protect India from its enemies and they must be empowered to take the law in their hands if this is necessary to curb the power of anti-Indian forces. Merely being a force that seeks to arrest culprits is calling them to act only after a crime has been committed. They must have pro-active powers and be empowered to act even on a hunch, even if at times they are proved erroneous - as long as they are by and large spot on is enough to ensure that anti-Indian forces would not have a free run in India. Specific cases of police indiscretion must be gone into but this should not result in the powers of the police to act arbitrarily if necessary being curtailed. This will only be at the cost of the nation's integrity.

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