Who should we trust in Ishrat Jahan case, IB or CBI?

In the Ishrat Jahan case, who does one believe – the IB or the CBI?

The CBI investigation into whether the 19-year-old and her three companions were killed in a fake encounter has now touched upon the question of whether she was a terrorist at all. That begs the question – if she was not, why did the IB convey incorrect information to the Gujarat Police about four Pakistani-backed terrorists sneaking in to kill Narendra Modi? Is no one, not even the CBI, supposed to ask that question? It would seem so, given the furore reported within the IB after the CBI announced its intention to question the IB joint director.

But this won’t be the first time the CBI will be questioning an IB input. In 2007, the Delhi High Court ordered the CBI to investigate allegations made by two Kashmiri terror accused that they had been framed by the Delhi Police Special Cell, only because they had refused to carry out the orders of the IB, whose informers they were. The CBI found the allegation to be true.

One of the accused, Irshad Ali, also wrote a letter from Tihar Jail to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh detailing the manner in which the IB sent maulvis into Muslim mohallas to trap youngsters into jihadi conspiracies. Once trapped, these boys were arrested as terrorists.

This letter was reported in sections of the press, but for reasons unknown, didn’t create the sensation it should have. While this case remains the most shocking revelation about the IB so far, the agency’s overall conduct with regard to terror cases hasn’t been above suspicion. The Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association has studied 16 acquittals of alleged terrorists arrested by the Delhi Police Special Cell.

Mostly Kashmiris, these young men were acquitted honourably, because the charges against them just couldn’t stand in court. In four cases, the Special Cell claimed to have acted on a tip-off by a “central intelligence agency’’. The judgments in these four cases described the charges as “unacceptable’’, with one case, against a Manipuri, being described as a frame-up.

The Ishrat Jahan case also isn’t unique. After the 2002 post-Godhra massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, headlines would frequently declare that terrorists had slunk into Gujarat to kill Chief Minister Modi.

Nine of these potential assassins, allegedly backed by Pakistan, were killed in four “encounters’’ by the Gujarat Police between 2002 and 2005. But by 2007, these “encounters’’ began to be challenged in court, which found merit in the petitioners’ allegation that the young men killed were neither terrorists, nor out to kill Narendra Modi. Some of the policemen involved in these “encounters’’ are now in jail. But what about those who fed them the information on which they acted? In two cases, it was the IB that gave the crucial input.

Interestingly, most of these so-called threats to Narendra Modi, and the killings and arrests of Muslims allegedly involved in them, took place when the BJP-led NDA was in power and L K Advani the Home Minister. The IB reports directly to the Home Minister. And Advani, then Modi’s most powerful supporter, went to town over these threats.

By the time they were exposed as fake, the Congress had taken over.

One would have thought the Congress would have gone to town over these revelations. Why did no Congress home minister, or any other leader tell voters that all those threats to the Hindutva hero were just hot air? Could it be because under the Congress’ regime too, the IB continued to give wrong tip-offs about Kashmiri terrorists having sneaked into Delhi, which were then acted upon by the Special Cell?

The tragedy is that if the IB’s credibility is zero, the CBI’s isn’t much higher. Today, the BJP accusation that the country’s premier investigative agency is now the Congress Bureau of Investigation doesn’t sound like another opposition rant.
For one thing, Mayawati and Mulayam Singh make the same accusation, and we believe them seeing the CBI’s fluctuating investigations into their alleged wrongdoings.

But more worrying have been the CBI’s investigations into the killing of minorities by the powerful  – be it Sajjan Kumar in 1984 Sikh massacre, or Sub-Inspector Nikhil Kapse in Mumbai’s 1993 riots.

Both were indicted by judicial commissions, both exonerated by the CBI in questionable investigations. The CBI didn’t come out tops in the 2006 Malegaon bomb blast case either, holding the same set of Muslims arrested by the Maharashtra ATS responsible for the blasts. Swami Aseemanand (ironically, arrested by the CBI) confessed in front of two different magistrates to the crime, and the NIA found his confession, later retracted, to be correct.

So, depending on your ideological leanings, you can choose to believe either one discredited agency or the other in the Ishrat Jahan case.

Politics, not professionalism, rules both. But don’t miss the delicious irony of the situation. The CBI was all set to fix the ‘communal’ Modi. Who came along to spoil the party for the ‘secular’ Congress’ but its other handmaiden, the IB! And this when for the first time in its history, the IB is headed by a Muslim, an officer promoted by the Congress over other claimants a year before the general elections!

The author is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist