Congress kick starts its campaign for Maharashtra Assembly Elections

The family of Ishrat Jahan celebrates the release of a "probe" report

Almost every major election in the past few years was preceded by some "sting" or "probe", usually just a few weeks prior. The Maharashtra assembly elections, due in just about a month, did not buck the trend. We call this a major coincidence, although the collectively ululating seculars are calling it a "fake" encounter.

Fake Encounter or Fake Report?

On June 15, 2004, Ishrat Jahan and three males were killed in a police encounter in Ahmedabad (as claimed by the police).

In May 2008, the central Government approved the 2006 amendment to the CrPC code 176. This law specifically deals with custodial deaths, witness interrogation etc. and a description of amendment can be found here (pdf).

On Aug 13, 2009, the Gujarat high court formed a committee to probe the Ishrat Jahan encounter killing. The deadline for this committee was set for Nov 30.

An article in The Hindu claims that on Aug 12, the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate of Ahmedabab forwarded a letter to [Additional] Metropolitan Magistrate SP Tamang to conduct an enquiry in the case and submit a report ASAP. Tamang completes the report in a record 25 days. It is funny that the Hindu article was intially titled: Modi government caught on the wrong foot. It was then changed to Ahmedabad Crime branch police caught on the wrong foot.

The article tries to establish that the aforesaid amendment enables a magistrate to take suo motu cognizance of encounter killings. It is funny it took so long and just before a major election and while another high level committee was about to be formed by none other than the HC for this suo motu thing to occur in Tamang's head.

Mr. Tamang's report said the Crime Branch police "kidnapped" Ishrat and the others from Mumbai on June 12 and brought them to Ahmedabad. The four were killed on the night of June 14 in police custody, but the police claimed that an "encounter" took place the next morning on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. That rigor mortis set in between 11 p.m. and midnight the previous night clearly pointed to the fact that the police pumped bullets into Ishrat's lifeless body to substantiate the encounter theory. [link]

Mr. Tamang's so called enquiry consisted of reviewing the case documents and contains a bunch of wild speculations. It does not appear he conducted any major interviews or extended investigations. It is not clear what makes Mr. Tamang qualified to analyze forensic reports, which he apparently did on his own, with the help of a medico-legal book.

Since the actual report does not seem to be available, we have to go by the second hand bits and pieces. If the Tamang report really says that Ishrat and the others were "kidnapped" from Mumbai, the needle of suspicion unfortunately points to the report rather than the encounter.

More in the next post.