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Journalism of Courage
The father of Pranesh Pillai alias Javed Shaikh,who was killed along with Ishrat Jahan in an alleged fake encounter by the Gujarat Police in June 2004,has said that he believes his son worked as a police informer. Gopinath Pillai,73,also says Pranesh had told him about a girl whom he was helping out because of a promise made to her late father,and that the girl may have been Ishrat.
On a visit to Ahmedabad,his 15th visit since the encounter and soon after the CBI filed the first chargesheet in the case Gopinath says he has had nine years to try and piece together how his son got branded a terrorist.
Kumar was then joint director of the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau SIB in Gujarat,and the CBI believes that he played a crucial role in the alleged fake encounter along with Gujarat IPS officers P P Pandey and D G Vanzara. While the first CBI chargesheet didnt name him as an accused,Kumars name is expected to be added in supplementary chargesheets.
Gopinath had filed a petition in the Gujarat High Court in 2009 seeking a CBI probe into the killing of Pranesh and Ishrat along with Zeeshan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana.
Asked how Pranesh could have become an informer for the Gujarat Police,Gopinath says: Maybe on his Gujarat visits in connection with his garment business.
Gopinath is now also sure that a girl Pranesh had told him he was supporting was Ishrat. I never met Ishrat or her mother or her family,but he Pranesh used to talk about a girl whose father he had worked with in Mumbra and who,while dying in hospital,had told him This is my daughter,she wants to become a doctor,please support her. Ishrat must have been eight years old then, says Gopinath.
This was in 1993 when Pranesh was 22 and working on an apartment project in Mumbra. While he was employed by the contractor doing the electrification,Ishrats father Mohammad Shamim Raza was reportedly a building contractor in the project. Pranesh even paid her last fees of Rs 2,500 at Khalsa College, he says.
A few days before his death in the shootout,the father recalls,Pranesh had come to visit him in Alleppey with wife Sajida and his children. Gopinath says they left on May 28,2004,for Pune,by the blue Indica car in which he was killed. He called me every day,June 5 from Coimbatore,June 6 from Bangalore,June 8 from Latur. Then I did not hear from him,so I called him around 9 am on June 9 and his voice was shaking. He said he had to rush to Ahmedabad. I asked him what was the matter,and he dismissed it saying he had just woken up8230; His phone was switched off after that, he says.
The father claims that Pranesh took along six-seven tender coconuts,a vegetable knife,bags of black pepper powder and some dry coconuts from home. Among the seized articles shown after the Ahmedabad encounter were 30 dry coconuts and 17 kg of explosive powder,which Gopinath says was the black pepper powder.
Pranesh reportedly got cut off from his family after he converted to Islam before marrying Sajida,a neighbour from his childhood,in Pune. Gopinath believes the marriage took place around 1994-1995. Her brother was also Javed and Pranesh used to play cricket with him. Probably she convinced him to convert to get married to her, says Gopinath.
The Pillai family stayed in Pune from 1983-91,while Gopinath worked on a Military Engineering Service contract there. Pranesh,who started out working with his father,met Sajida around this time. After Gopinath went back to Kerala,Pranesh took up the Mumbra project,living in Mumbai and spending weekends at Sajidas house in Pune.
Pranesh first told his family about his marriage at the wedding of his elder brother,in 1997. The family accepted Sajida after Praneshs mother Saraswathy Bai caught cancer and lay dying in Kerala. Pranesh came to see her with a photo of his eldest son. Saraswathy expressed a wish to see her sons family and Sajida came with her son and spent a whole month looking after her in hospital,Gopinath says.
Pranesh got a job in Dubai and shifted with his family. They returned to Pune in 2003.
Gopinath calls magistrate S P Tamang,whose inquiry report first termed the encounter fake in 2009,as khuda god. According to him,the CBI probe was going well in the beginning,but now seemed to be under some pressure .
Gopinath sold off his 2.5 acres of rubber plantation,partly in 2007 and then 2009,to buy three flats in Pune,each in the name of Praneshs children. Ask him why he did not collect Praneshs body immediately after the encounter,he says,Vanzara asked me if I wanted to cremate or bury. I told him he was born a Hindu and died a Muslim so the first rights on his body were of his wife and kids.
