Cold Tangled Trail

• Why two probes—one by a magistrate and one on HC orders?
• Did some law officers, backed by IB, file the affidavit that Ishrat and others were LeT operatives?
• If Ishrat, Javed were going from Mumbra to Nashik, where and how did the Gujarat cops catch them?
• Why were Ishrat and Javed with Jishan Johar and Amjadali?
• Was Ishrat a cover for the others?
• Why did the Mumbra-Thane cops first give Ishrat a clean chit, then say she’d been “under watch”?
• Why should Ishrat have kept a diary of a plot to kill Modi?

***

“We felt our honour had been returned, but there’s an undercurrent of sadness about Ishrat’s absence,” said Mussarat, the slain girl’s younger sister. They had their lawyer read out the relevant portions from the magistrate’s findings to anyone who cared to listen. For the family, magistrate S.P. Tamang’s report was nothing less than an official character certificate for Ishrat.

Two days later, as Justice K.P. Jhaveri of the Gujarat High Court stayed the Tamang report, called for action against the magistrate and preferred to wait for the report by a three-member committee of ips officers set up last month under additional director-general Pramod Kumar, the Reza family found itself in familiar territory. Once again, as in the last five years, it was face-to-face with questions—old ones, which they thought had been answered, and new ones they had not even imagined. “What exactly does the high court order mean?” asks the unlettered Kausar. As lawyers and social activists who have guided the family in the last five years explained the nuances and told her to wait till November 30 for the HC-appointed panel’s report, Kausar fell silent. “Some more waiting, but I’m sure my daughter’s name will be cleared,” she says, as if to reassure herself.

Incidentally, the HC-appointed panel came after Kausar’s application last year to expedite proceedings in her petition of August 2004. As it turned out, Justice Jhaveri appointed the panel on August 12 this year, the same day the chief metropolitan magistrate directed Tamang to undertake the statutory inquiry. For almost a month, no one in the Gujarat government or the BJP questioned the validity of two parallel probes, one conducted at a lower judicial level than the other. “Only after the Tamang report became public did the government start rubbishing it,” pointed out Ahmed Rauf Lala, a social activist who has been the Rezas’ sounding board. The Gujarat government has challenged the Tamang report in the high court and got it stayed.

Shaikh Anwar Reza shrugs. The youngest of six siblings, he is now 19 years old and employed in a software firm. “I have my own memories of Ishrataapa. She too was 19 when this happened,” he says. “I was just entering my teens, but I can recall every bit of suffering we went through.” They had to move to another residence from their home in Rashid Compound, Mumbra, about 50 km from Mumbai. Their former landlady did not want “a terrorist’s family”. Ishrat, while still a second-year undergraduate, solicited accounting work, taught at a local coaching class and gave tuitions to support her family after her father’s death in 2002. Kausar took orders for embroidery to supplement the income. Their dream, Kausar recalls, was to put all the younger children through college and place them in “good jobs”. That dream, Mussarat says, lies shattered because the siblings could not get admission into local colleges or were turned away from petty jobs. “We were Ishrat’s family, fit to be suspected and cast away,” she says. They moved, with help from activists, to a one-bedroom apartment in Kausa, a neighbourhood known for its plethora of police informers and the like. “We somehow made do; we knew Ishrat was innocent but our intention was to clear the blot on her name,” says Kausar. “It was like dying every day.”

Tamang’s 243-page report, handwritten in Gujarati, confirmed that the June 15, 2004, encounter was fake. The Congress was quick to call it yet another indictment of Modi. To get back at the Congress, the BJP’s Jay Narayan Vyas, a minister in the Modi cabinet, dubbed the Tamang report “bad in law” and pulled out an affidavit first prepared by the Union home ministry in 2006 and filed in August 2009 in the Supreme Court, stating that Ishrat and the three men in that blue Indica car were, indeed, Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives.

The guilty never accept their guilt, remarked P.A. Sebastian of the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights. Tamang, irrespective of whether he overstepped his brief or completed work before deadline as alleged by Vyas, has laid bare the fact that the so-called encounter was a “cold-blooded” killing “planned and executed mercilessly” by officers who wanted “to get promotion” and “impress the chief minister and receive his praise”. The report alleged that Ahmedabad police commissioner K.R. Kaushik, then joint commissioner (crime branch) P.P. Pande, suspended DIG D.G. Vanzara, then ACP G.L. Singhal and ACP N.K. Amin had planned the “encounter” for selfish motives. The report relied on contradictions between the forensic evidence and what was written in the panchnama to rubbish the encounter theory. It pointed out that not a single cop was hurt although they claimed the alleged terrorists fired multiple rounds at them. Also, not a single tree or vehicle in the vicinity was bullet-hit. And the alleged terrorists’ pistol was rusted and seemed as if it hadn’t been used for quite some time.

As for the Reza family, all it knows is that Ishrat had gone with Javed Shaikh, a family acquaintance for whom she worked part-time, to Nashik on June 11 that year. For fear of being pulled up by her mother, she said she was going to an aunt’s house. Her sister received a call from her late that night. “She was very scared,” recalled Mussarat. “She said she was being followed by some strange men, but that Javed was with her and they would be OK.”

The Dubai-returned Javed, said to be holding two passports, was a local dada in Mumbra, where he lived before moving to Pune. Immediately after the so-called encounter, the Pune police stated he had no links with any terror organisations. But within a week, it sent a report to the Gujarat police on his alleged links with the Lashkar-e-Toiba. The Gujarat police, on information from Mumbra police, spoke of recovering a diary from Ishrat that contained incriminating notes on a plot to kill Modi and details of Rs 4.8 lakh they had received. But cops from both places were unable to say why a possible assassin would maintain such a diary.

The Tamang report ascertained that the encounter was a staged and pre-planned killing. But the jury is still out why Ishrat and Pillai were with Jishan Johar and Amjadali Rana—who the Gujarat police allege were Pakistani operatives, but the magisterial report says are Indian—on June 11-12, 2004, and what their motives might have been. The Rezas, meanwhile, are awaiting the “final character certificate”.