Former Minister must explain lies in Ishrat case
The tale of two affidavits in the Ishrat Jahan case, the second contradicting the first, is getting murkier by the day, and P Chidambaram cannot escape responsibility for the mess he created during his tenure as Union Minister for Home Affairs. The senior Congress leader has little defence left since his lie has been exposed. The response to a Right to Information application filed by a leading television news channel has demonstrated that Chidambaram had not only approved but also signed the first affidavit in 2009, in which Ishrat Jahan was identified as being part of a lashkar-e-Tayyeba terror module that had planned to assassinate the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. This flies in the face of the former Union Minister's claim that the first affidavit had been filed without his approval and that it had certain deficiencies which were rectified in the second, ‘supplementary' affidavit which came some two months after the first. The ‘rectification' was that the mention of Ishrat Jahan's leT link was deleted. The obvious questions are: Why did he resort to blatant falsehood when he asserted he had nothing to do with the original affidavitIJ And, why did he make changes that went contrary to intelligence inputs received from professionalsIJ Only he can give an honest answer. The more he evades the more it becomes evident that a hand was at play from behind the curtains. Since Chidambaram was no bumbling Minister who had no grip on his subject, it is difficult to believe that he would have played such brazen politics on an issue of national security without firm prompting from his master(s). Given the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's status as a remote-controlled head of Government, his role in the matter, besides being a rubber stamp, can be ruled out. Chidambaram owes an explanation at the very least, if not an unqualified apology.
The latest revelation confirms the various insinuations that senior bureaucrats and intelligence officials have made over the past few months on the politics that superseded national interest in the case. Former Home Secretary GK Pillai and certain senior officers of the Intelligence Bureau connected with the Ishrat Jahan encounter issue are on record, saying political decisions trumped intelligence material gathered. Their contentions add up now, if they didn't earlier. Apologists of the Congress and of Ishrat Jahan should be reconsidering their position with the latest exposé. It is clear as daylight that the Congress-led UPA Government in 2009 had decided to frame Narendra Modi over what they publicised as a ‘fake encounter'. But this plan could succeed only if Ishrat Jahan's terror links were to be denied. If the Government's stand was that she was part of a group of fidayeen attackers, then the fake-encounter charge would fall flat because no sensible person will accept that suicide-attackers should be allowed the first move before neutralising them. Therefore, the leT link had to go.
The Congress also saw a bonus advantage in the move to virtually absolve Ishrat Jahan: Project the Gujarat Government led by Modi as one targeting innocent Muslims. The strategy worked to an extent, if one goes by the reactions that came from 'secularists'. All these elements stand exposed today.