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Journalism of Courage
Tuesday’s pre-dawn encounter that ended in the death of four people police say were out to kill Narendra Modi was the third time the Gujarat Chief Minister and his men had smelled a conspiracy theory against him in the last two years. There is more than one similarity in the three incidents: all ended in the shooting down of at least some of the ‘‘conspirators’’, in all three cases the ‘‘operatives’’ belonged to terrorist outfits like Laskhar or Jaish, and all ‘‘encounters’’ now remain shrouded in a cloud of doubt:
SEPTEMBER 27, 2002: Some six months after the post-Godhra riots subsided, police arrested Samirkhan Pathan (30) on the charge of being a Jaish-e-Mohammed operative assigned to kill Modi. Till then, Pathan was known as a chain-snatcher and bicycle thief who in 1996 had stabbed a constable to death when challenged. Thirteen others were arrested for helping him.
On October 23, 2002, Pathan was gunned down near the Usmanpura garden in Ahmedabad around 2 am in an ‘‘encounter’’. This was the same spot where he had stabbed the constable six years earlier, and police claimed they had taken Pathan there to ‘‘recreate’’ the event when he snatched an officers’ revolver and fired two rounds, forcing them to shoot back. While Pathan died, none of the seven policemen with him at the time received even a scratch. Not only was police zealousness to solve the old crime that late in the night surprising, experts said there is no law that requires taking an accused to the crime spot, that too for an incident that happened six years ago.
On January 2, 2004, a local court discharged all the 13 others accused in the case, saying the DCB’s conspiracy theory had ‘‘no logic’’ and appeared to be a ‘‘fancy’’. On April 2, the Gujarat High Court upheld that order. No weapon or explosive was recovered from Pathan during or after his arrest.
JANUARY 13, 2003: Again, the DCB. This time the bureau said it had unearthed and swiftly snuffed out a Lashkar-e-Toiba conspiracy to not only target Modi but also deputy prime minister L K Advani and VHP leader Pravin Togadia. In the ‘‘encounter’’ on January 13, Sadique Jamal Mehtar, barely 25, was shot down in Naroda, apparently when he opened fire on cops. Till then, the worst Mehtar, a resident of Bhavnagar, had been accused of was cycle theft and chain-snatching. However, police sources in Mumbai said Mehtar was linked to Dawood Ibrahim.
JUNE 15, 2004: Gujarat police—specifically, yes, the DCB—intercepted a car and gunned down four occupants, including a woman in her teens, claiming they were Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives who had driven to Ahmedabad from Mumbai to kill Modi. The DCB team again claimed to have come under fire and said the ‘‘encounter’’ lasted almost 30 minutes, ending in four bodies (none that of a policeman) and the recovery of an AK-56, two pistols, three Kalashnikov magazines, 81 rounds of ammunition, a satellite phone, Rs 2.06 lakh in cash and over 10 kg of chemicals for making low-intensity bombs.
While two of the ‘‘terrorists’’, police claim, were Pakistani nationals, at the homes of the two others now dead—19-year-old college student Ishrat Jahan Shamim Raza and 30-year-old, father of three Javed Gulam Mohammed Shaikh—there is complete shock.
Till now nothing has been found to link Mumbai-based Ishrat with the Lashkar, and neither do friends or family believe the charge to be true. Javed, a Pune resident, incidentally used to be Pranesh Kumar Gopinath Pillai of Kochi till he fell in love with a Muslim and converted.
