BJP seeks Congress' reply on Ishrat 'fake encounter' case

 The BJP on Monday sought an explanation from Sonia Gandhi on why she “worked actively” on a suspected Congress plot to politically eliminate Narendra Modi by fixing him in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case.

This comes after news reports appeared that P Chidambaram as a home minister in the UPA regime had signed the first affidavit describing Ishrat Jahan as a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative.

The new revelation adds another dimension to the controversy since Chidambaram had allegedly given nod to the second affidavit, saying that there was no conclusive evidence to prove Jahan was a terrorist which led to suspicion that the encounter killing by state police in Ahemdabad when Modi was Gujarat chief minister was fake. 

The Congress launched a counter-attack and said that the BJP was trying to dilute charges. “The issue was whether it was a fake or genuine encounter. The court has held that it was a fake encounter... Now reports are being planted to dilute the main issue,” Congress spokesman Shakeel Ahmed said.

Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, reacting to the reports, told reporters that Chidambaram altered the government stand before the court at the behest of the Congress which was not in position to politically take on Modi and for that Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul should take responsibility. Hinting that a conspiracy must have been hatched at the highest level, the commerce minister said “Sonia Gandhi worked actively on this theory. That is why she went to town saying an encounter has happened as though there was no intelligence information stating that there was terror plot,” she said.

Sitharaman added, “They wanted to quietly watch the terror plot bloom to eliminate a political opponent...a very serious fallout is the way this country’s intelligence and counter intelligence have been weakened.”

Past haunts Cong

The then home secretary G K Pillai had earlier claimed that Chidambaram had recalled the encounter file a month after the first affidavit was filed insisting about Jahan’s terror past and that he was not in the loop.

Chidambaram, however, had shot back at him saying that Pillai too was  part of the process.

One-man inquiry panel probing crucial papers missing from the Jahan file will take into cognizance of the fresh details emerging in the case and may also examine Pillai who was crucial to decision making in that period of previous UPA government.