Our fight against terrorism is suffering from two counts: One, we can never fail to play politics with terrorism, more so the electoral variety of it. We don't gather the courage to stand up to terror if it costs us a few votes. Two, the so-called crusade for safeguarding human rights is no longer a service of the humanity. It has turned into a flourishing industry churning out lucrative business. Many people have floated NGOs and they are getting hefty finances, even from abroad. Our human rights activists and organizations, I have repeatedly been stressing, seem the least worried about the thousands - more than 80,000 in a decade - of precious innocent lives lost to the demon of terror in India. It appears as if, for these organizations, victims of terror are no human beings and that is why they have never bothered about the human rights of those killed and their bereaved families. They may have done anything else, but they have never helped, in any way, a person or family victim of terror. They hardly find time to visit the bereaved families even to shed crocodile tears and say a few empty words of sympathy.

Any report of an encounter with terrorists and other criminals makes these pious organizations to jump to conclude that these can be nothing else but fake. A report of an encounter - real or fake - is a ready-made raw material for their human rights industry otherwise their whole business would get doomed.

This is what is happening with the Ishrat Jahan encounter. Although the Gujarat police action followed the input provided by the Union Home Ministry of her and her accomplices being terrorists and their designs and the Union Home Ministry did file an affidavit in the court of their being linked with terrorist activities, yet the element of politics crept in because Gujarat is ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Centre by Congress-led UPA. Therefore UPA, too, seems to have jumped to conclude that it was a ‘fake' encounter. The Union Law Minister has announced that the Government will file an appeal in the Supreme Court of India against the stay granted by the Gujarat High Court against publication of the Tamang report which has characterized the encounter as ‘fake'.

That politics is involved in the whole matter is further proved by the fact that in an interaction with The Indian Express journalists on September 22 none other than Home Minister P Chidambaram himself  said the affidavit would have been ‘different' if he had got an opportunity to see it before it was filed last month. It clearly implies that there was no element of politics as long as a politician, like Mr. Chidambaram, did not have "an opportunity to see it before it was filed". The affidavit remained a factual account. Had Mr. Chidambaram seen it, he would certainly have tinged it with the vote bank politics, in spite the fact that the Congress-led Government does not deny the contents of the input it sent to the Gujarat Government. On the contrary, the Law Officer responsible for filing the affidavit has been removed for this ‘crime' of his. This conduct turns the UPA's fight against terrorism a real fake.

That there is pure politics in the case is also hinted by the timing of the publication of the report just on the eve of prestigious Gujarat assembly bye-elections. Interestingly, while staying the publication of the Tamang report, the High Court ordered a departmental inquiry against the magistrate Tamang "for coming up with this report". Justice Jhaveri said the magistrate should have consulted the high court as it had already instituted an inquiry into the case by forming a committee of three IPS officers the day the chief metropolitan magistrate asked magistrate Tamang to launch a probe. How then the report and for what purpose was it released remains a mystery.

Last update : 28-09-2009 12:11

Keywords : Fake Fight against Terror Pampered with Politics, Amba Charan Vashishtha

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