The findings of the Union ministry of home affairs’ (MHA) internal inquiry to find out how documents related to the Ishrat Jahan encounter case went missing and who was responsible could embarrass the
The findings of the Union ministry of home affairs’ (MHA) internal inquiry to find out how documents related to the Ishrat Jahan encounter case went missing and who was responsible could embarrass the Congress as they reveal that the papers were “removed knowingly or unknowingly, or misplaced” between September 18-28, 2009, when P. Chidambaram was Union home minister.
The one-man probe, conducted by B.K. Prasad, an additional secretary in the MHA, however, has failed to prove conclusively how the documents went missing and who was responsible. In his report to Union home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, Mr Prasad said he could trace only one of the five missing documents. “It is evident that the documents were removed knowingly or unknowingly, or misplaced,” the report states. But the 52-page report does not mention Mr Chidambaram or whether the then home minister had any role in the disappearance of the papers.
The one-man committee examined as many as 11 serving and retired MHA officers, including former home secretary G.K. Pillai and three joint secretaries who had handled the sensitive Internal Security Division.
The five crucial documents that are missing include an office copy of the letter and enclosure sent by the then home secretary to the attorney general on September 18, 2009; an office copy of the letter sent by the then home secretary to the AG on September 23, 2009; a draft affidavit as vetted by the AG; a draft affidavit amended by the then home minister on September 24, 2009; and an office copy of a further affidavit filed with the Gujarat high court on September 29, 2009.
The controversy began when the second affidavit, filed before the Gujarat high court on September 29, 2009, said there was no conclusive evidence to suggest that Ishrat Jahan was a Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) operative. This was contrary to the first affidavit which had said that according to intelligence inputs Ishrat was part of an LeT module.
The inquiry panel had managed to retrieve one document — the letter sent by the then home secretary to the AG on September 18, 2009 — from a computer hard disk.
Ishrat Jahan, Javed Shaikh, alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in an “encounter” with the Gujarat police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004. The Gujarat police had said at the time that those killed in the encounter were LeT terrorists who had come to Gujarat to kill the then chief minister, Narendra Modi.
The report also mentions that the fact that the documents were missing was not flagged in September 2009 by the then joint secretary (internal security), D. Diptivilasa, and that the matter came to light only in 2013 when his successor, Rakesh Singh, raised the issue, but apparently no follow-up action was initiated.
Sources claimed that the report mentions how four of the five documents went missing after the file came back to the concerned division from the home minister’s office in 2009. They claimed that Mr Diptivilasa told the panel that the documents were part of the file which he had sent to “seniors” during discussions before the second affidavit was filed, but the documents were not found in the file when it returned.
The one-member panel was constituted after Union home minister Rajnath Singh had disclosed in Parliament on March 10 that the files were missing. Following an uproar in Parliament, the ministry had asked Mr Prasad to inquire into the circumstances in which the files related to the case of Ishrat Jahan went missing.
The Congress however, dismissed the inquiry panel’s finding that the files went missing in September 2009, when party leader P. Chidambaram was home minister. “I do not think that is correct. I do not think any important file could go missing when Chidambaram was the home minister. He was a very hands-on minister,” Congress spokesman Ajay Maken told reporters on Wednesday.
