By V. VENKATESAN
The Ishrat Jahan case exposes how the Gujarat Police developed “encounter killings” as a strategy for career development in a communalised atmosphere.
photo:RANJEET KUMAR
In Patna on September 11, members of the Muslim United Front protest against the June 2004 “encounter” killing of Ishrat Jahan and three others in Ahmedabad after the Tamang inquiry report on the case was made public.
THE conflict between civil liberties and the pursuit of an effective counter-terrorism strategy has never been easy to resolve. State authorities, in their eagerness to deliver results on the counter-terrorism front, make serious inroads into personal liberties, often by compromising the fundamental values of our Constitution. On September 7, Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate S.P. Tamang made public his inquiry report into the killing of four people by the Gujarat Police in 2004 in what it claimed was an encounter. The report described the encounter as fake.
The report led to a huge controversy over whether in its fight against terrorism, the state is authorised to use unjustified force against terror suspects. Although the Gujarat High Court subsequently stayed the report on the grounds that Tamang exceeded his jurisdiction, the questions posed in the report were embarrassing to both the State government and civil society.
The Gujarat government cited the Union Home Ministry’s affidavit in the Gujarat High Court to suggest that the four slain persons were terror suspects. The Union Home Ministry responded by saying that its intelligence inputs passed on to States could not be taken as a licence to kill terror suspects with impunity.
In his report, Tamang gave detailed reasons, citing the principles of medical jurisprudence, and also pointed to the flaws in the police version to conclude that the encounter was fake (story on page 10). In the incident, a 19-year-old girl, Ishrat Jahan, and her employer were allegedly abducted by the Gujarat Police in Mumbai and brought to Ahmedabad where they were killed in a so-called encounter along with two others, described as Pakistani nationals who were suspected terrorists on an alleged mission to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.