The story is shocking
but it is true. It is sordid, but then it is the grisly truth. In Gujarat
— in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, to be precise — it can
get worse than Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Kausar Bi. A swift, two-week Tehelka
investigation conclusively proves that the cold-blooded killing of Sohrabuddin
and his wife was no aberration and that, in fact, there are more Sohrabuddins.
The investigation also proves that the infamous encounter cop DG Vanzara
was no loose cannon — in the business of fake kills for the lure
of money — but had a powerful lobby of backers. Backers who Tehelka
discovered went right up to the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO).
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Political
terror:
the body of Sameer Khan with the gunshot wound on his temple
Janak Patel |
Yes, in Modi’s
official chamber, fake encounters are called desh bhakti. In the CMO,
confidential, official letters marked ‘Top Secret’ —
issued from the desk of the officiating Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad
— are manipulated. Original letters are replaced and pressure
is brought to bear on top cops. The subversion is masterminded not by
some low-level clerk but at the level of the CM’s principal secretary.
Simply put, it means this: fake encounters have official sanction.
For those horrified
by Modi’s infamous vocabulary — hum paanch hamare pachchees
— and by his behaviour during the 2002 pogrom, when witnesses
were threatened and bought, here is a well-documented, hair-raising
story. Here also is food for thought for Modi’s own partymen,
senior partymen who have often jumped to his defence and been staunch
in their support. Even after the Gujarat government was exposed in the
Supreme Court and was forced to concede that Sohrabuddin and Kausar
Bi had been killed in fake encounters, Modi was not short on supporters.
“There were
attempts to tarnish the image of the BJP government in the state,”
is how LK Advani tried to explain the fake encounter killings at a BJP-organised
function. Senior BJP leader and former party president Venkaiah Naidu
went a step further when he asked, “The Congress party has asked
for his resignation… Did Modi do the encounter?” The answer
is no, Modi did not carry out the encounters himself. He did not need
to. For, even when a senior police officer tried to draw attention to
a suspicious killing in police custody, there were men in his own office
ever willing to protect Vanzara and his firing squad; and to craft a
cover-up as sinister as the fake killing itself.
Sacrificed
at the Political altar?
Tehelka’s
investigation has unearthed another fake encounter killing. Faked by
Vanzara and company, and its cover-up orchestrated right at the top
— in the Chief Minister’s Office itself. This story is about
Sameer Khan, a small-time criminal like Sohrabuddin, who was arrested
on September 27, 2002, and killed in police firing on October 22 the
same year. According to the Gujarat police, however, he was a dreaded
Pakistan-trained Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist and had been arrested for
conspiring to kill Narendra Modi, the then Deputy Prime Minister LK
Advani and VHP leader Praveen Togadia.
Sameer
Khan’s encounter was faked by Vanzara and its cover-up supervised
by Modi’s principal secretary who got top secret documents changed
and manipulated in the name of ‘desh bhakti’ |
On the eve of the
2002 Assembly elections, when Modi was touring the state in his motorised
chariot spewing venom against “baby-producing relief camps”
and mobilising the Hindu vote bank, the killing of Sameer Khan came
in very handy. Modi told voters that he was being targeted by “Muslim
jehadis” for protecting “the pride of Gujarat”. He
made political capital out of the killing of a Muslim youth who was
at best a petty criminal. In the Assembly elections held in December
2002, Modi led the BJP back to power with two-thirds majority.
The then principal
secretary to the CM, PK Mishra, in collusion with the then DGP K. Chakravarthy
and then Ahmedabad Joint CP (Crime) PP Pandey fabricated documents,
bulldozed officers into submission and hushed up inquiries into the
Sameer Khan fake encounter. This damning admission has come from the
then ig, Human Rights, Tirth Raj, and he knows the entire cover-up backwards
because he conducted an inquiry into the suspicious killing of Sameer
Khan. This is what he reveals on the Tehelka spycam, “There was
one Mishra, secretary to the Chief Minister, who called up Chittaranjananjan
Singh and pressured him to burn the papers he had written to JCP, Crime,
PP Pandey and replace them with fake ones... Everybody was involved
in the cover-up from the DGP’s office to the CMO.” (see
box) The IG also said that he had made a 15-20 page report indicting
everybody from the DGP to people in the CMO.
Sameer’s was
the first in a series of encounter killings of “terrorists”
in Gujarat. Nine more “terrorists” were eliminated by DG
Vanzara over the next four years. If Kausar Bi and Tulsidas Prajapati,
Sohrabuddin’s friend, are added to the list, Vanzara’s tally
will rise to 11 kills. On each occasion, the police said that the slain
“terrorist” was about to kill Modi. The pertinent question
is: who gave the trigger-happy cops the licence to kill and how did
they do so with such impunity? The sting operation reveals that Vanzara
and his men were sheltered by the CMO.
The execution
squad draws blood
On October 1, 2002,
incidentally observed as anti-terrorist day by the BJP, the Crime Branch
of the Ahmedabad Police announced that they had arrested a Jaish-e-Mohammed
terrorist called Sameer Khan. Khan was a small-time criminal wanted
for the alleged murder of a police constable and had been absconding
since 1996. Vanzara, who was then DCP Crime, said that they had arrested
Khan from outside ST bus stand on the afternoon of September 27. For
the next four days, however, the police kept him in unlawful custody,
violating the legal provision of producing an accused in court within
24 hours of arrest. On the night of September 30, the Crime Branch finally
showed Khan as arrested under a newly-registered FIR. What is shocking
is that the police chose not to arrest him under the already existing
FIR, filed for the constable’s murder, but waited four days before
they registered a new FIR spun around a conspiracy alleged to have been
hatched by the ISI and Jaish-e-Mohammed to assassinate Modi, Togadia
and Advani.
The police also
claimed to have recovered some e-mails received by Sameer from Pakistan,
instructing him to assassinate BJP leaders. They claimed that there
were seven more old cases against Sameer but never gave the details
as to what these cases were. The fact is that the police could reveal
details of just one case of a constable’s murder, and in that
too Sameer could never be tried. After spending 14 days in police remand,
Sameer was sent to judicial custody on October 14. On October 21, the
Crime Branch moved an application for a transfer warrant in court. The
police said they wanted to interrogate Sameer in the constable murder
case. Sahrista Khan, Sameer’s cousin who was also made a co-accused
in the Modi conspiracy, told Tehelka that Sameer had told him during
judicial custody that Crime Branch officers were threatening to kill
him.
Curiously, at around
1.30am on the intervening night of October 21 and 22, Crime Branch sleuths
took Sameer to Usmanpura Garden in the city. Later, the police said
that Sameer had murdered a police constable at the same spot in 1996.
They wanted to recreate the crime scene and since Sameer was a “dreaded
terrorist”, they had to take him there in the dead of night. According
to police records, 22 policemen had escorted Sameer.
