dna edit: Pulling back the curtain

The inter-agency squabbling between the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Central Bureau of Investigation — and the resultant further politicisation of the already politicised Ishrat Jahan encounter case — must not be allowed to shift the focus from where it should lie.

The stark facts are these: In 2004, Jahan, Javed Pillai, Jeeshan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana were killed in Gujarat by officers of the Ahmedabad police crime branch in an encounter that multiple judicial inquiries have concluded was fake. And almost a decade on, justice — and the truth of the entire affair — remain elusive. IB Director SA Ibrahim has now complained to the PMO about CBI overreach in naming former IB special director Rajendra Kumar an accused in the case for his alleged involvement. In the face of the Indian state’s continued failure to conclusively address the encounter killing, his arguments hold little merit.

Certainly, the Gujarat police’s role in the entire affair is equally if not more problematic.
But the fact that the IB ostensibly has no enforcement powers and that its role is limited to intelligence inputs does not absolve it. What were the inputs it passed on in this case?
On what grounds? How did it come by that intelligence? These are questions that must be answered. Additionally, it would be foolish to ignore the reality about power dynamics between the IB and state and metropolitan police forces; the latter are often constrained by the former’s inputs with refusal to act on them not an option.

This stems directly from the IB’s legal status — or rather, lack of it. As a PIL filed by retired IB officer RN Kulkarni last year pointed out, the order passed by the British Secretary of State in 1887 creating the IB remains the only justification for its existence.

No statute has been passed to underpin its operations. As such, it exists in a constitutional limbo that allows it to function as it sees fit, without oversight, and deploying a range of ambiguous powers.

No organ of a democratic state — no matter how sensitive its work — can be allowed to operate without accountability. That way lies the degradation of citizens’ fundamental rights and the organisation’s capabilities both. Thus, we have the Gujarat encounter killing or the IB’s vast mandate with regard to internal political intelligence — and the widespread perception that it is routinely used by the government of the day to target political opposition. Holding the IB to account in the Jahan case is a small step in the direction of accountability, but an important one.