Feb 9: A 10 Second Long Stare
February 9, 2015
http://www.outlookindia.com/article/A-10-Second-Long-Stare/293303
A 10 Second Long Stare
Rana Ayyub
In a scathing editorial on press freedom in India, the July 27, 2014,
edition of the New York Times talked of the Indian press being under
siege, calling the situation worse than the Emergency imposed on the
country in 1975. “Press censorship seems to be back with a vengeance
in India, this time imposed not by direct government fiat but by
powerful private owners and politicians,” the editorial read.
One of the immediate provocations for theNYT editorial was the
censorship of my sharp and incriminating profile of Amit Shah, the man
who is now political second-in-command to Narendra Modi. The column,
titled ‘A new low in Indian politics’, was written in response to
Shah’s appointment as president of the ruling party. The newspaper
website I wrote it for pulled off the piece, allegedly to please the
political dispensation.
It has been five months since the episode, and Shah is back in the
news. The lower courts have discharged the case against him, giving
him a clean chit and absolving him of all crime. If appointing Shah as
BJP president was a new low in Indian politics, the dismissal of his
case on most frivolous grounds deals another blow to the criminal
justice system in India.
To understand the seriousness of the charges against Shah, it is
pertinent to look back at the criminal cases against him and try to
grasp their exact significance in the present-day context.
In 2010, Shah became the first serving minister of state for home
affairs in the history of independent India to be sent behind bars on
charges of murder, conspiracy and running a criminal syndicate. He was
indicted for the extra-judicial encounters of three
individuals—Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife Kauserbi and, a year later,
Tulsiram Prajapati, a Hindu, who was to be a key witness in the case.
Sohrabuddin’s brother had filed a complaint against the Gujarat police
over the killing of his brother and sister-in-law (see box). Rajnish
Rai, the police officer working on the case, arrested three top cops
from the state in 2007 after being convinced of their complicity.
Later, the encounters were proved to be fake by the CBI too.
That very year, Modi was running for a second term as the chief
minister of Gujarat. He had won the 2002 election in the backdrop of
the bloody Gujarat riots, one that had etched deep polarising lines
across the state on the basis of religion. Five years later,
campaigning for his second term, the CM made the encounter killings
his election plank.
Around this time, Modi was being projected as a Hindu leader under
constant threat from jehadi forces. The spate of fake encounters from
2002-2007 did the needful to consolidate that impression. Top police
officials under Shah’s leadership would hold press conferences with
the bodies of alleged terrorists on display. They were shown as men
out to assassinate Modi to avenge the massacre of Muslims during the
Gujarat riots.
Modi made much of it in his election campaign in 2007, doing what the
hardliners expected of him. Addressing his first election campaign in
Gujarat, he stepped on the dais and screamed “What do you want me to
do with men like Sohrabuddin?” The crowd screamed, “Kill him, kill
him.”
I was part of that crowd. That was when I first came face-to-face with
the man who has since become one of the most powerful prime ministers
of India in recent times. Wading my way through the crowd with the
cameraperson, I approached Modi and asked him if his men and his
minister should be shielded despite cold-blooded murder. The response
was a 10-second-long cold stare which has stayed with me till this
day.
Truth, they say, eventually finds a way out, and it did. In 2010, the
CBI made its first arrest of Abhay Chudasama, an ips officer known to
have been close to Shah and declared the Sohrabuddin encounter as
fake. Post a persistent month-long investigation, I ran into what was
the most incriminating evidence that the investigating agencies later
used—the call records of Shah who was communicating with the officers
charged with the murder of the three victims on the same days and time
as they were killed.
I also managed to find my way to an internal note which was the result
of an investigation by an intelligence official under the Official
Secrets Act of the state. The note was incriminating. It observed,
“The calls made by the minister are not part of official decorum.
Their frequency is unnatural and uncommon in nature—Gujarat CID report
on Amit Shah’s calls to encounter cops.” The calls were monitored by
no less than P.C. Pande, the then police commissioner of Gujarat.
The case, which was earlier being investigated by state investigating
agency CID, was handed over to the CBI under the direct supervision of
the Supreme Court. The apex court came down heavily on the
investigating officers of the Modi government, especially officer in
charge Geeta Johri, and asked her to look into the larger conspiracy
surrounding the encounters.
It was at this stage that my investigation became public, forcing the
CBI to hasten its investigation. Within weeks of my expose, the CBI
arrested Shah for being the mastermind of the encounters.
In its submission to the SC bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and B.S.
Chauhan, the CBI stated that Shah headed a syndicate of senior cops,
politicians, underworld thugs and businessmen—essentially an extortion
racket—and that he was in cahoots with the seniormost police
officials from Gujarat, including Vanzara and Chudasama. Shah was also
held a co-accused in the murder of Sohrabuddin’s innocent wife, who
was allegedly sedated, raped, killed and her body burnt.
In a rather unexpected and damning ‘admission’ of his crime, Vanzara,
Shah’s top cop who headed the anti-terror squad and was jailed for his
role in encounter killings, wrote a letter in 2013 to the government,
resigning from his services. His letter was revelatory of the
criminal-political advantage the Gujarat government had taken of the
fake encounters. In his letter, Vanzara wrote, “I realised that this
government was not only not interested in protecting us but it also
has been clandestinely making all efforts to keep me and my officers
in the jail so as to save its own skin from CBI on one hand and gain
political benefits on the other. It is everybody’s knowledge that this
government has been reaping very rich political dividends, since last
12 years, by keeping the glow of encounter cases alive in the sky of
Gujarat (sic).”
***
Reinstatement of Policemen, 2014
The Gujarat police claimed later that fake encounters took place
because policemen wanted “name, fame and promotion”. But the manner in
which the state went out of its way to provide legal assistance to the
accused policemen and reinstated many of them, including Abhay
Chudasama, IPS (left) raised eyebrows. Why reinstate policemen accused
of fake encounters?
***
He further wrote, “Apprehending the arrest of political leaders of
Gujarat by CBI, all efforts, legal and political, were made by this
government to ensure that none of us was released on bail so as to
prevent the investigation going from the hands of Gujarat CID to Union
CBI.”
And continued, “I therefore, would like to categorically state in the
most unequivocal words that the officers and men of Crime Branch, ATS,
and Border Range, during the period of years between 2002 to 2007,
simply acted and performed their duties in compliance of the conscious
policy of this government….”
In an ideal world and in ideal circumstances, state home minister Shah
would have been facing the consequences most criminals would for such
heinous crimes but for political power and judicial misreading. In a
rather contrived and flawed discharge order, a special judge from a
Mumbai court on December 30 negated the statements of the most crucial
witnesses in the case, casting aspersions on their motives. He has
sought to dismiss the case even before the trial was yet to begin and
witnesses who had given their statement against the minister to the
magistrate are yet to be cross-examined.
In his judgement, the judge has decided to negate the statement of
G.C. Raigarh, the man who headed state intelligence during the riots
and who had stated that he was being influenced and pressurised to
spare the top cops and leaders. The judgment chose instead to focus on
the statements of two other top cops which favoured the minister. For
their services, they have famously been rewarded post-retirement
honorary jobs and rewards by the government.
The judge further dismisses the CBI’s submission of the phone calls
Shah made to the cops. His order states, “If a home minister of a
particular state enters in a direct dialogue with officers like the
Superintendent of Police working at the ground level is not a matter
of surprise, unusual or unnatural as the CBI proposes.”
What the judge conveniently forgets is that it wasn’t the CBI’s
finding but of Modi and Shah’s own CID which monitored an OSA case
that was later furnished by this journalist in an investigative
report. Till this day, the CBI’s website lists this journalist’s work
as evidence to indict the minister.
So arbitrary is the CBI court’s judgement that it castigates every
witness who has deposed against the minister with illogical
comments—one being that the statements look rehearsed and verbatim.
The judgement even insinuates that Sohrabuddin was a man with a crime
record, as though killing a man with a criminal record in a fake
encounter is perfectly justified. Here again, the judge conveniently
forgets a crucial fact: that Sohrabuddin was a henchman for the top
cops in Gujarat, as the CBI itself proved. And at no point in the
judgement does the judge spare a thought for the unintended victim of
the encounter—Kauserbi. At no point does he shame the cops for
murdering a woman who was returning after offering special prayers for
a child of her own.
Nor does the judge talk of the sting operation by one of the accused
officers which suggests police officer N.V. Chauhan, a co-accused, had
spoken of Vanzara getting calls from Shah. This while both were
keeping a watch on Kauserbi who had been kidnapped and confined in a
bungalow. She was allegedly administered a powerful dose of
anaesthetic after which she was raped, her body burnt and thrown in a
river.
Today, as the fake encounter cases against Shah stand discharged, the
man who is now the president of the ruling party and who takes
important strategic decisions for the country along with the prime
minister, the judgement seems to have proved the hegemony of power
over justice.
Two weeks ago, as I paced around at the Mumbai airport for my flight
to Delhi, I found myself staring at Abhay Chudasama lounging at the
bar with a friend. Vanzara is out on bail too. Granted bail for the
Sohrabuddin case in December, for Ishrat Jahan in February. Yes, the
promised acchhe din seem to have arrived!
