The Home Minister said a few key documents including two letters written by the then Home Secretary (G K Pillai) to then Attorney General late G E Vahanvati and the copy of the draft affidavit have so far been untracable.
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It also wanted initiation of suo motu perjury/contempt proceedings against the then Home Minister and CBI Director for concealing true facts before the Supreme Court and the Gujarat High Court and for filing a false affidavit pertaining to facts about the case. “Those are also not available”, Rajnath Singh told the Lok Sabha replying to a brief debate on the controversial June 15, 2004 shootout. “But there has been a flip-flop by the previous government with regard to the Ishrat Jahan’s case”, Singh said in parliament. Be it the Ishrat Jahan case, or any other such case, there shouldn’t be flip-flop by any government.
He said that the government has launched an “internal inquiry” to find the missing documents “which will bring all the facts out” in the open.
He also claimed that the SIT had conducted a partial investigation and influenced witnesses to prove that it was a fake encounter by the Gujarat Police while asserting that their penultimate target was the then Gujarat chief minister.
Terrorist David Coleman Headley’s statement to a Mumbai court that Ishrat was linked to the terror group Lashkar e Taiba revived the political row over the case.
“The affidavit was changed to malign the Gujarat government, the then chief minister”.
In his deposition last month, Headley had claimed that Mumbra resident Ishrat Jahan was a suicide bomber for Pakistan-based terror outfit LeT. The Pakistani-American terrorist said he had heard his LeT handlers talk about a girl in India named Ishrat.
Without naming Congress’s P. Chidambaram, Rajnath Singh alleged that affidavits were corrected on the intervention of the then home minister.
Ishrat was killed in an alleged fake encounter in Gujarat in 2004.
Amid protests and slogan shouting by Congress members who had trooped into the Well of the House, Singh charged Chidambaram of coining the term “saffron terror” and “Hindu terror ” . He said that after a decision was taken in the business advisory committee that the issue would be taken up, it was for Congress members to give notice for participation, which was not done by them. “This is opportunistic secularism”.
Stating that “not only India but the entire World is facing menace of terrorism today”, Singh said, “Any issue related to terrorism should not be politicized”.
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