Twin narratives

Clarity needed on political intervention in terror cases

Two long-running controversies that are likely to disrupt the Budget session of Parliament, which convened on Monday after a recess, highlight a troubling element about the ethics of governance in India, irrespective of the party in power. These concern the killing of three men and a woman by security forces in Gujarat in 2004, and the 2008 bomb blasts in Malegaon allegedly organised by Hindu terrorists, which killed 37 people and injured 125. There are murky claims and counter-claims being made in both cases involving interference by government functionaries in a manner that scarcely raises confidence about the veracity and integrity of the investigative and legal processes.

The first concerns a case filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) against the Ahmedabad police crime branch for allegedly conducting a staged killing of four supposedly Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) operatives, who it was believed were planning to assassinate then chief minister Narendra Modi. There are two parts to this controversy: first, whether the encounter was staged and, second, whether the lone woman involved, Ishrat Jahan, was an LeT operative or not. On the first point, a lower court ruled in favour of a fake encounter, a decision the state government challenged in the Gujarat High Court, where it is being heard. It is on Ishrat Jahan's innocence, a point on which her family insists, that the current controversy revolves (though it is not a legal issue). Those who claim she was an LeT operative place credence on the testimony by David Headley, an accused in the 26/11 Mumbai massacre, to the effect that he had heard references to her from other LeT operatives. The fact that Mr Headley is on a plea bargain was not ignored; the National Investigation Agency (NIA) dismissed it as hearsay. Then earlier this year, former Home Secretary Gopal Pillai told a news channel that then Home Minister P Chidambaram had altered a government affidavit to say that Ishrat Jahan was not an LeT operative (just three years ago, Mr Pillai had supported this position, saying there was no evidence to prove she had LeT links). Mr Chidambaram's explanation is that the original affidavit had been released without his approval, and that the Gujarat government itself had drawn attention to inconsistencies between it and a magistrate's report on the encounter. Now, the file with the affidavits has mysteriously disappeared. Meanwhile, the police officers accused in the case are all scot-free - one is even considering standing for elections.

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The blasts in Malegaon were traced to a Hindu right-wing group. Last year, the special public prosecutor in the case, Rohini Salian, told The Indian Express that she had been asked by a senior NIA officer to go "soft" on the case in 2014, and was later replaced. Now comes yet another "discovery" by the NIA of a "secret letter" from one of the key accused, Srikant Purohit, apparently warning the army of right-wing terror groups in which he implicates all of the accused. Mr Purohit has long claimed he was an army intelligence operative who had infiltrated Hindu and Islamic terrorist groups as part of his job. The problem with these bizarre developments, which look like political interventions, is that they compromise the legitimacy of investigations by agencies that are meant to be independent. Such irregularities sustain lingering doubts on similar investigations of other cases and underline the importance of people in power maintaining an arm's-length distance from the judicial and investigative processes.