Ishrat Jahan encounter case continues to haunt Congress and now the then Home Minister P. Chidambaram is on the dock for rewriting a second affidavit in the 2004 case and tried to pass on the buck on Narendra Modi and Amit Shah in the staged encounter. It was reliably learnt that Ishrat, a Mumbai girl, was a LeT operative. This despite evidence collected to the contrary by the IB RAW and NIA. The entire controversy gained momentum and ignited with a home ministry official RVS Mani, who opened up the Pandora Box and admitted that he did not draft the second affidavit but he was forced to sign. He was chased and tortured by various agencies under the guidance of the then Home Minister. Thus HM official was forced to sign a draft which was not prepared by him. The home secretary is the senior most bureaucrat in the MHA and ascertain the seriousness of the case. The pity is that the SIT chief burnt him with live cigarette buds and the damaged pant is in his possession as evidence. He was coerced and even suffered injuries as the SIT chief was engineering the evidence. It is a pathetic case of bureaucrats and IAS officers during the Congress regime and everything is coming in open now. With a main aim of trapping Modi and Shah, the then UPA Government was ready to go to any extent. Thus the bureaucrat was forced to sign on dotted line and the rest is history now. Ishrat issue is yet another case of Congress going hammer and tong to demolish the image of opposition.
C.K. Ramani
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
