NEW DELHI: The Modi government took the UPA, particularly former home minister P Chidambaram, head-on over the Ishrat Jahan affidavit issue in Parliament on Thursday. Speaking in the Lok Sabha, Home Minister Rajnath Singh confirmed that two letters from the then home secretary to the attorney general in 2009 have gone missing. “The then attorney general had vetted two affidavits ... those are also not available,” Singh said, adding many questions were needed to be investigated. “An internal inquiry is being conducted within the ministry,” he revealed.
Accusing the previous UPA regime of flip-flop on Ishrat’s terror links, he charged it also with hatching a conspiracy to fix the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in the alleged fake encounter case. He said the UPA had played politics on terrorism by even giving it a colour. He alleged that the term “saffron terror” was coined by the UPA in an attempt to dilute the fight against terrorism. He told the House that an internal inquiry was being conducted to find out the manner in which the case was sought to be influenced by filing a second affidavit.
“The entire world is affected by terrorism. There should be no politics on this. There should be no flip-flop. But there was flip-flop by the previous UPA government on this,” Rajnath said. He was replying to a calling attention motion on the Ishrat Jahan case. Congress MPs tried to disrupt his speech and did not participate in the discussion. Amid protests from the Congress, he recalled that Ishrat was first named as an LeT operative, but then another affidavit was filed erasing her terror links. “This was unfortunate. There was an effort to dilute the previous report,” he added. The previous government made a bid to tarnish Narendra Modi and the Gujarat government and implicate some people, he said and stressed, “This was a conspiracy.” Even as the Home Minister was speaking, the Congress MPs trooped into the well of the House and raised slogans.