Centre may revise Ishrat affidavit

After having consistently maintained that there was nothing wrong with its affidavit on the Ishrat Jehan encounter case and...

After having consistently maintained that there was nothing wrong with its affidavit on the Ishrat Jehan encounter case and that it could not be used by the Gujarat government to justify the killing of four alleged terrorists in a fake encounter in 2004,the Centre is now planning to revise that affidavit in which it had admitted to having passed on information to the state police on the terror links of the four victims.

The indication came from none other than Home Minister P Chidambaram who,in an interaction with The Indian Express journalists on Tuesday,said the affidavit would have been different if he had got an opportunity to see it before it was filed last month. A senior government official later confirmed to this newspaper that a fresh affidavit from the Centre was quite possible. The official,however,added that a final decision in this regard was still to be taken.

The killing of Ishrat Jehan and three others by Gujarat Police in 2004 became controversial after a judicial inquiry concluded last month that the police had faked the encounter. The Gujarat government justified the killings on the grounds that police had only acted on information that had been given by the Intelligence Bureau about the terror links of the victims.

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The Home Ministry had till now taken the line that information about suspected terror links of the four victims was not a license to kill them. In fact,the state police had no rights to gun them down in a fake encounter even if they were proven to be terrorists,it had maintained.

On Tuesday,Chidambaram reiterated this point,but also seemed to admit that the contents of the affidavit had indeed given some elbow room to the state police to justify its action. I would have ensured that there was no room in the affidavit for the state government to use it as a shield to cover up its own mistake, Chidambaram said.

The Home Minister said the affidavit,which should have been filed at least three years ago,was actually filed at the end of the deadline last month and therefore neither he,nor officials in the Law Ministry,was able to have a look at it. Chidambaram said it would have been better if the state government was also taken into confidence before the affidavit was filed. The affidavit could have been shared with the state government as well. That would have ensured that there was no attempt to shift the blame on the Centre, he said.