Ishrat Jahan stands tall and most enduring among India’s recent icons—Afzal Guru, Yakub Memon and Nathuram Godse. Little did she realise that in death, she would become a rallying point for human rights activists, a potent weapon to hound then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for over a decade, a subject of fierce debate in the media and in Parliament, and a mirror to show to unscrupulous politicians, scared bureaucrats and petty policemen scratching shamelessly each other’s back, their true faces. It is to her credit that MHA, CBI, SIT and NIA stand today thoroughly discredited.
Ishrat’s rise to ‘stardom’ is rather uncomplicated. In 2004, she was a 19-year-old girl, working part-time as seamstress to sustain her family. In due course, she became ‘friendly’ with one Javed Ghulam Sheikh. When Ehsaan Illahi, an LeT terrorist, was killed in Kashmir, his trail revealed that Javed, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were all part of his LeT module. IB’s technical surveillance further revealed Ishrat’s indoctrination by Javed, her recruitment as a suicide bomber, and the group’s imminent plan to assassinate Modi to avenge death of Muslims in the Godhra riots. SIB officers of Ahmedabad later shared this information with the crime branch of Gujarat Police which pursued Ishrat and her associates and gunned them down in an encounter on June 15, 2004.
Two days later, Jamaat-ud-Dawah, LeT’s mouthpiece in Pakistan, claimed that Ishrat died a ‘martyr’ along with her ‘husband’ Javed. Those who follow Dawah would know that it invariably acknowledges services of its volunteers who die fighting for the cause of Islam. David Headley’s testimony to a Mumbai court in 2016 about her LeT status only confirmed IB’s inputs. When Dawah retracted its claim ‘as a journalistic mistake’, her apologists were ecstatic. They conveniently ignored the fact that Dawah ‘clarified’ it after two years and that too when it realised that Ishrat was fast emerging as a catalyst to inflame jihadi passions of Indian Muslims.
But P Chidambaram, the then Union home minister, would have none of it. Such was Ishrat’s aura that he trashed IB’s covertly obtained inputs as inconclusive, removed stigma of LeT attached to Ishrat from the second affidavit, and forced Home Secretary Pillai to submit it to the Supreme Court. As a typical defence lawyer, he perhaps wanted IB to play a video tape that showed Ishrat in battle gear, armed with explosives with markings of LeT, and entering Modi’s security cordon with guns blazing. NIA, which worked under him, deleted two paragraphs in which her LeT connections were recorded, based on Headley’s statements on October 13, 2010. SIT chairman, his appointee with dubious background, dismissed findings of the forensic experts that contested claims that she died in a staged encounter. CBI did not even refer to her LeT background in its charge sheet.
Egged on by this ensemble, Ishrat’s cheerleaders have been insisting that her encounter was staged. If Ishrat was an LeT fidayeen and lurking around to kill an elected head of the state, the rest was actually a battle of nerves as to who got whom first—the police or Ishrat. Headley significantly termed her encounter a ‘botched up operation’, which meant that police executed it successfully. A terrorist can be pursued only up to a point and has to be finally dealt with before he or she causes extensive damage. In such situations, time and not the prognosis is critical.
It is time we stopped chasing Ishrat’s ghost. Whether Chidambaram wanted to turn her death into an unlawful murder to get Modi and Amit Shah implicated as conspirators or whether he represented a ‘cartel’ that did not want Modi to gatecrash onto the national political scene, you cannot prosecute him. The SIT, NIA, CBI and MHA officers, who toed his line either out of his fear or greed for better career, have long become irrelevant. The MHA’s ongoing inquiry into the missing drafts and notes that led to the change in the second affidavit to favour Ishrat is a frivolous exercise. It will be a pity if a few lower functionaries are eventually indicted while those who resurrected her, go on masquerading. At best, the BJP may gain some talking points to pin down the Congress, but nothing further. There are far more important issues affecting our lives that cry for attention. Ishrat deserves neither to be celebrated nor used for filibustering.
amarbhushan@hotmail.com
Bhushan is a former special secretary, R&AW