P Chidambaram called out in Ishrat Jahan case, Congress on the back foot

8 years ago

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Congress has landed in murkier waters with former union home secretary G K Pillai called out former Congress minister P Chidambaram for his involvement in the dropping Ishrat Jahan’s LeT links from the central government affidavit that was filed in Gujarat high court in 2009.

In the latest addition to the series of revelations by the former Congress functionary, Chidambaram played pivotal role in dropping Ishrat’s LeT links in the second affidavit. According to a report by Times of India (TOI), Chidambaram recalled the file from joint secretary, a month after filing the first affidavit.

“Mr Chidambaram, who was then the home minister, had asked for the file from the joint secretary, saying that the affidavit needed to be reworked. Only after the affidavit was revised, as directed by the minister, did the file come to me,” Pillai told TOI.

According to Pillai, the first affidavit cited a Intelligence Bureau (IB) report which accounted Ishrat as the part of a sleeper cell module. However, the second affidavit filed by the Congress led UPA government in 2009 said that IB inputs failed to constitute ‘conclusive evidence’ regarding her links with the terror outfit.

Since the killings of four alleged’ LeT operatives including the 19-year-old Ishrat in 2004, Congress has been vying to put BJP on the back foot by terming it ‘fake encounter’. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), however, has maintained that those killed were terrorists.

Earlier last week, Pillai in an interview to Times Now had called out Congress for dropping Ishrat’s terror links in the affidavit. Though he said that the correction in the affidavit was politically ‘motivated’, he had not revealed the name of the person behind it. He had also claimed that the killings were a result of trap laid by IB.

Also Read; Congress in a fix; former home secretary blows whistle over Ishrat Jahan case

“The political regime in Delhi saw an opportunity in the alleged encounter in which this LeT module was liquidated. The government of India decided to change its’ affidavit before the Gujarat High Court. The new affidavit almost disowned the intelligence inputs,” Union Finance minister Arun Jaitley said in one his Facebook posts in 2013.

“I say that it should be clear to all that such inputs do not constitute conclusive proof and it is for the government and the state police to act on such inputs. The central government is in no way concerned with such action nor does it condone or endorse any unjustified or excessive action,” Jaitley quoted the deponent of the affidavit.

While Chidambaram’s alleged interference in the matter may have been the part of a ploy to indict Gujarat’s then chief minister Narendra Modi in the case and subsequently to put BJP on the defensive, LeT’s withdrawal of Ishrat’s name from the list of martyrs, which Jaitley in the post observes -’acting in tandem with the government’, raises several news questions.

Why was that done?

Who pulled the strings?

However, Chidambaram has not yet come up with a rebuttal to the allegations made by G K Pillai. Embarrassment in Congress circles are also quite evident with overwhelming silence from all quarters.