Encounter was genuine, accused are terrorists
A Delhi court's verdict on the Batla House encounter case is a slap on the face of terror apologists, including some politicians and human rights activists. On Thursday, the court convicted Shahzad Ahmed, a suspected Indian Mujahideen operative, for the murder of Delhi Police Special Cell Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma in the September 19, 2008, shootout. This in effect rubbishes the claims of bleeding hearts that the encounter was fake. leading that list has been the Congress's loose cannon and general secretary, Mr Digvijaya Singh, who has repeatedly denounced the encounter as fake, even when the Government his party leads said otherwise. But that did not prevent him from using the encounter to manufacture a false sense of victimisation of the Muslim community. This was most evident in the manner in which he and his colleagues campaigned in Azamgarh, the hometown of the accused, during the 2011 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election. Congress leaders left no stone unturned to express their sympathies for the so-called ‘victims' of the Batla House encounter, no matter that the accused were being tried for terror activities. Few can forget how Congressman Salman Khurshid catered to the lowest common denominator when he claimed that his party president Sonia Gandhi had wept bitterly after she was shown gruesome photographs from the encounter. These comments were, in fact, just one element of the larger minority appeasement package that UPA regime had prepared, that included a 4.5 per cent reservation for Muslims within the 27 per cent reservation for OBCs. Finally there was Congress scion Rahul Gandhi's visit to Azamgarh around the same time. But the angry protesters that he met with and the rout that his party suffered at the hustings proved that the voters had seen through the Congress's ploy and refused to play along. However, the likes of Mr Singh never got the message, and even even now stick to the stand that the Batla House encounter was fake.
Mr Singh and others are free to live in denial but the fact remains that Thursday's judgement is only the latest addition to mounting evidence that the encounter was a genuine police raid on what has now proven to be a terrorist safe house. As far back as July 2009, for instance, the National Human Rights Commission had opined that neither the Batla House encounter was staged nor was there any human rights violation during the operation. Its decision was later endorsed by the Supreme Court. Of course, none of this will deter rights activists who remain convinced that Ahmed and his gang were victims of police excess; no, they will continue to peddle discredited conspiracy theories — such as how the newspaper photograph that showed Inspector Sharma's shirt was not covered in blood is proof that he was shot in the back. Forensic experts will tell you that bleeding from firearms injuries happens through exit wounds, not at the point of entry. The photograph shows Sharma's shirt ripped on his left shoulder where one of two bullets hit him; the profuse bleeding on the back is from the other bullet that entered the right side of his abdomen and exited through the hip, proving without doubt that he was fired at from two directions.