Barking up the wrong tree

The loud protests by the Bharatiya Janata Party leadership and Chief Minister Narendra Modi over the charge sheet against former Gujarat Minister of State for Home Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh-Kausar Bi murder case carry little conviction. Allegations that the charge sheet is fabricated and that Mr. Shah is a victim of political conspiracy won't wash. That the Gujarat administration had a hand in the 2005 killings of Sohrabuddin, who allegedly ran an extortion racket and had been convicted in 1994 for transporting assault rifles and grenades, and his innocent wife, Kausar Bi, is not contested. In early 2007, the State government admitted before the Supreme Court that Sohrabuddin was killed by the State police in a fake encounter and Kasur Bi murdered and her body burnt to eliminate evidence of the crime. It was around that time that a slew of policemen, including two senior Gujarat IPS officers, were arrested in the case. There has been suspicion that the murders were masterminded at the political level and Mr. Shah's name has been dragged into the controversy more than once. While his innocence must be presumed unless and until he is found guilty, he has behaved most inappropriately. As Minister of State for Home, Mr. Shah should have been upholding the law rather than dodging summons and delaying the inevitable arrest.

It is common knowledge that the CBI has often been pressured and put to political uses, especially by the Congress or Congress-led regimes at the Centre. But in this case, the agency was directed to take up the investigation by the Supreme Court, which has been closely monitoring the progress. Under these circumstances, the BJP's allegation that Mr. Modi and his government are being politically targeted lacks credibility. More importantly, such allegations deflect attention from the central issue: the need to unravel the full truth about these extra-constitutional killings. To cover up the atrocity, some Gujarat police officers falsely claimed at one point that Sohrabuddin was a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative. What is germane here is not what he was but the fact that he as well as his wife were murdered in cold blood by those entrusted with the duty of enforcing the law. Fake encounters — which have been strongly alleged in the case of the killings of 19-year-old student Ishrat Jahan and three others and more recently of CPI (Maoist) leader Cherukuri Rajkumar (alias Azad) in Andhra Pradesh — controvert the very principles on which the criminal justice system rests. The idea that the security forces can liquidate people so as to sidestep the demanding legal process is abhorrent and has absolutely no place in a civilised society.

Keywords: BJP, Narendra Modi, CBI, Amit Shah, fake encounter case

Word Meanings from this paragraph:

1-Germane: relevant to subject,important

2-Atrocity: cruelness, offensiveness

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