For weeks now, both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party have been awaiting the Central Bureau of Investigations’ first chargesheet in the Ishrat Jahan murder case with at least as much anxiety as the people who might end up on death row as a consequence. The political implications of the case are huge: it threatens to rock India’s intelligence services to their foundation and could lead to the indictment of high officials in both Gujarat and New Delhi. For both the BJP and the Congress, it’s almost certain to be a key national-security related election issue.
Now the chargesheet is in, my first take is this: for all the sound and fury on television, it’s a bit of a cold potato.
There’s none of the zingy stories which had spiced up some of the juicier reportage on the issue: no taped conversation where conspirators discussed how to save police officers being investigated for murder, and not even a hint of anyone with a white beard, whose name may or may not be Narendra Modi.
Full disclosure: I haven’t read the chargesheet, since the CBI isn’t giving out copies. Like others in the media, I’m relying on information from government sources and briefings CBI officials have privately given. Lawyers for the accused haven’t had time to read the charge-sheet either, to offer a response. Read what follows bearing these quite large caveats in mind.
In essence, the CBI chargesheet tells a simple story: Ishrat Jahan and her three associates were killed in cold blood by the Gujarat Police. The Intelligence Bureau, it says, led the Gujarat police to Lashkar-e-Taiba fidayeen Zeeshan Johar, presumably in the course of a covert operation. Later, the agency also held his associate, Amjad Ali Rana. Ishrat Jahan and her associate Javed Sheikh — earlier known as Pranesh Kumar Pillai — were kidnapped on 11 July.
Eight police officials have been charged with kidnapping and murder — key among them fugitive additional director-general of police Prathvipal Pandey, deputy inspector-general DG Vanzara, deputy superintendents of police Girish Singhal, Tarun Barot and Narhari Amin.
In addition, the CBI says Intelligence Bureau officials Rajendra Kumar, the agency’s then-station chief in Ahmedabad, and his subordinates MK Sinha and Rajiv Wankhede, participated in the kidnapping and custodial interrogation of the suspects. The weapons later claimed to have been found from the bodies of the four victims-and use to firm-up the police accusation they were terrorists-were actually sourced from the Intelligence Bureau, it says.
The chargesheet doesn’t, however, explain why these men haven’t been charged with any crime-although the CBI has said it does intend to investigate them further. For that to happen, though, the CBI will have to gather Intelligence Bureau documents and interrogate top officials-among them, then-Intelligence Bureau operations chief Nehchal Sandhu, who is now deputy national security advisor and then-Intelligence Bureau chief KP Singh, now Governor. The union government had filed an affidavit in 2007 saying the encounter was legitimate, and then backed out; it’ll have to explain on what basis it arrived at that first determination.
It isn’t clear if the CBI has managed to fill in some key gaps-for example, finding a pistol it says was used to kill the accused. It has, however, relied on some 22 statements from witnesses, a substantial body of evidence to compensate for the fact that forensic investigations by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and Central Forensic Sciences Laboratory didn’t establish the shootout was faked.
Perhaps as important, the CBI chargesheet doesn’t say why this massive conspiracy was constructed, choosing to elide over the question of Ishrat Jahan and the other three were terrorists or not.
The core elements of this story aren’t new. In September 2009, metropolitan magistrate SP Tamang concluded much the same in a report INN is putting online today. The Gujarat High Court later slammed Tamang for showing “undue haste in concluding the inquiry without taking assistance of the experts,” it did think he’d found enough to warrant an investigation by the special investigation team. That team, in turn, proved fractious, with members filing complaints against each other-but did find enough to persuade the court to order a CBI investigation.
It’s impossible to say how robust these charges will eventually prove to be in court: case after case, in the past, has drowned after witnesses who said one thing later changed their mind. The CBI has a record of getting controversial cases right, but an equally long one of botching major cases.
Nine years after that encounter, there’s still likely plenty of things waiting to be found out and told.
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