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Commentary
To blame everything on the establishment is counterproductive.
In June last year, the Ahmedabad police shot dead four LeT terrorists on their way to kill Narendra Modi. One of those gunned down was Ishrat Jahan Sheikh, a college student, and sole breadwinner of a poor Mumbai Muslim family.
Because Ishrat was so young, seventeen or eighteen, and since she had no crime record, the first response was that the Gujarat police had killed an innocent girl in a fake encounter. There was a background to this, the post-Godhra riots, and there was Modi's image as a minority-baiter, so this response was natural.
Still, a few had their doubts, including this magazine. The UPA had just come to power, it had given notice to practise muscular secularism, in other words, votebank politics, and there was a clear impression that Modi's political days were numbered. In the circumstances, Modi would not do something as foolish as gun down an innocent Muslim girl. Muslim or not, a girl always invites sympathy, and Ishrat was doing the best for her family.
Modi's own detractors in the Gujarat BJP were worsening it for him. Their story was that this was a false encounter to shore up support for him, build him up sympathy, strike a sympathy chord with Gujarat's Hindus, so that the UPA would think twice before dismissing his government. A fetching theory, and one that cannot be put past our politicians, but somehow, it didn't jell. Not in this encounter.
But everyone was not waiting and watching the situation, to make their response after the dust had settled, and some hard evidence had arrived, either to disprove the Gujarat police's case, or to prove it. The two principal Left parties were the first to condemn the Gujarat police action and Modi, sticking their necks out to say all the four killed were innocent, although two of them turned out to be Pakistani. The so-called secularists were quickly behind the senseless Left parties, branding Modi as a killer.
Now Modi has to answer for the post-Godhra riots, but the Ahmedabad encounter was intelligence-backed police action. In regard to anti-terrorist action, especially if it involves Pakistan, Jammu and Kashmir, and so on, it is wise to check back with the Intelligence Bureau, which has a very very good pulse on these things. Supporting the UPA government from the outside, the Left should have been prudent to check with home minister Shivraj Patil if the encounter was real or false, since the IB should have or would have updated him.
As it later transpired, Ishrat and the other Indian in the group, Javed Sheikh, had been on the IB watchlist for over six months, and one day before the encounter, the IB tipped off the Gujarat police about their Modi assassination plan. Subsequently, the police released more incriminating evidence, and the LeT in Pakistan finally let the cat out of the bag, by commemorating all four of them as LeT "martyrs". As for the Left and "secular" support groups, their shrill protests terminated as suddenly as they had begun. Not one of them had the courage or decency to admit they were wrong, or that they were genuinely mislead.
Like the Ishrat case, the attempted murder of one of the Parliament attack suspects, since exonerated by the courts, S.A.R.Geelani, smells wrong. For once, the Left has not been in the forefront of shouting slogans against the Delhi Police, and the UPA has scrupulously avoided any comment, but the secularists were at their raucous worst in the immediate aftermath of the attempted murder. They have accused Delhi Police's special branch/ special cell of targeting Geelani because they could not get his conviction in the Parliament attack case.
Why it smells wrong is because Geelani would not be alive if the special branch/ special cell got after him. They would not have tried to get him near his lawyer's home, and one day before the police petition against his release was coming up before the Supreme Court. Nor do most people know that Delhi Police's special branch/ special cell work under the functional supervision of the Intelligence Bureau. If a high-value target like Geelani had to be taken out, the IB would have authorised the action, after clearance from the top, very likely the home minister, Patil, and both Patil and prime minister Manmohan Singh were shocked by the attack. Whatever else they may be, Manmohan Singh and Patil are not actors, nor men without spine who would disown their orders.
Geelani was under surveillance, no question, because the agencies and Delhi Police are convinced of his complicity in the Parliament attack. They were waiting for him to slip and show his hand, but to assume therefore that they also tried to kill him is farfetched. The IB and Delhi Police suspect that Geelani fell out with maybe his associates or contacts over money matters, but it is Geelani's non-cooperation that is stumping them. As the papers have reported, his bloodstained clothes had be forcibly retrieved from his family, and a worn top sweater shows five bullet holes while he had three gunshot wounds. From the defensive, the police have gone on the offensive, and suddenly, Geelani's "secular" supporters have evaporated.
This is not to suggest guilt on
Geelani's part, either in the present case, or in the Parliament attack,
but there is certainly more than meets the eye. Delhi Police is not the
most benign force - which police force anywhere in the world is - and its
special cell is known for its ruthlessness, but it is irresponsible and
ultimately counterproductive to blame it for everything, including the
Geelani shootout, without evidence. It is fashionable now for a set to
turn anti-establishment to milk publicity from it, but that won't either
reform the establishment or make it more responsive. Ultimately, Geelani's
so-called friends have become his worst enemies.
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