Former home minister P Chidambaram on Monday alleged that the affidavit controversy related to the Ishrat Jahan encounter case was only to an attempt to divert attention from the real issue.
“The affidavit controversy is only to divert attention from the real issue in the Ishrat Jahan case. The real issue is whether there was fake encounter and whether four people already in custody were killed in that fake encounter,” Chidambaram said in a tweet on Monday.
“Coming to the affidavits, the Home Minister does not sign affidavits. It is signed by an Under Secretary. Although I have no recollection of seeing the first affidavit, let us presume that I did. Then came the report of Magistrate SP Tamang. This report caused an uproar and there was demand mainly from Gujarat that Government of India should clarify or dispel misinterpretation being placed on the first affidavit. This is why a second, short affidavit was filed,” he added in a series of tweets.
Recently the BJP had dragged Congress chief Sonia Gandhi into the Ishrat Jahan controversy in the wake of new revelations and alleged that then Home Minister Chidambaram was acting on her directions when he filed a second affidavit in the case in an attempt to create roadblocks in the way of Narendra Modi’s becoming Prime Minister.
The first affidavit in the encounter case stated that Ishrat was a LeT operative, who was part of a plot to assassinate the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
“As minister, when it was brought to my notice that the first affidavit was ambiguous — which was filed without my approval — and it was being misinterpreted, it was my duty to correct the first affidavit. So we filed a supplementary affidavit after consulting the home secretary, the director of Intelligence Bureau and other officers,” he had said.
Chidambaram, however, completely altered his stance in the second affidavit, saying that intelligence inputs on Ishrat and the three others did not constitute conclusive proof and favoured a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe in the encounter.
