BJP West Bengal President Dilip Ghosh (R) with triple talaq petitioner and party leader Ishrat Jahan welcomes the newly joined party members at the state party office in Kolkata.
A vigil organised for Ishrat Jahan in Delhi
Fake encounter The Ishrat case
G.L. Singhal, suspended IPS officer
File photo of Gujarat IPS officer D G Vanzara being taken to a court in Ahmedabad in Aug 2010. Vanzara, suspended and behind the bars in a string of fake encounter cases, has resig...
Members of Karnataka Youth Congress protest against the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case in Bangalore.
Ishrat Jahan's mother Shamima Kauser (L) and sister Nusrat during a press conference after CBI filed the charge sheet in Mumbai.
Combo/ File: Suspended police officers DG Vanzara (top left), GL Singhal (top right), Tarun Bhanot (bottom left) and NK Amin who have been chargesheeted along with absconding polic...
A combo shows - Two police officers, Bharat Patel and Tarun Barot produced by CBI in a court. CBI arrested them in connection of alleged fake encounter of teenage girl Ishrat Jahan...
Family members of Ishrat Jahan at the CBI Belapur office in Navi Mumbai to collect the FIR copy which the CBI has registered against police officers of Gujarat police in Ishrat Jah...
Officer of Central Forensic Science Laboratory New Delhi and CBI re-construct the Ishrat Jahan encounter case on the outskirts of Ahmedabad.
Shamima Kausar, mother of Ishrat Jahan (inset), holds a group photo of the family while standing with her daughter and son in Thane, Mumbai. Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S.P. ...
Tuesday 15 JuneThe bodies of four alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist - including of 19 year old Mumbai based student Ishrat Jahan Shamim Raza , lie at the site of shootout in Ahmeda...
Road to dusty death Ishrat Jahan, 19, falls to cop’s bullets with her 'associates’, off Ahmedabad. An assassination plot, a highway blowout, a dead college girl. What was she d...
Vir Sanghvi in his latest counterpoint:
There is something annoying and frustrating about the way in which the Congress and the BJP are playing politics with the encounter that resulted in the death of 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan and two of her companions in Gujarat
...Ideally, we should have the guts to look our encounter policy in the eye and to confront the issues head-on so that everybody – policemen, terrorists, lawyers and media – knows exactly where we stand.
But of course, we do no such thing. We lose ourselves in hypocrisy and doublespeak.
And when the politicians get involved, they only make matters worse by trivializing the issues so that they can win votes.
I think his point one and two are unexceptionable and everyone would agree with them. And of course, it is helpful that he is being provocative, so that the problem can be thought through. It's from his point three onwards that things start getting grey. Most thinking people, to my mind would not approve of just bumping off people on the mere charge of being terrorists -- and even if they do, there is a problem with that point of view, as his point four brings out.
People may find it easy to be in denial when they "know" that the people concerned are terrorists -- and that is where VS's own caveat to point one -- and the headline Can we allow a policeman to be prosecutor, judge and executioner? addresses the dilemma quite well.
The real need is for police and legal reforms so that the genuine concerns against actual terrorists not being able to be brought to justice can be addressed.
It should be obvious, but perhaps it is a sign of the times that Mukul Kesavan has to point out that the moral of Ishrat’s tragic story has little to do with her antecedents and everything to do with the impunity with which governments in India kill their own citizens in the name of summary ‘justice’:
Unless we learn to monitor and protest the impunity with which the State and the police resort to extra-judicial murder and custodial killing, outrage at specific instances of these becomes ineffective, even counter-productive. So if you rage and grieve when a middle-class Muslim girl who could have been your daughter is killed but ignore the recent and mysterious death of a murderous hoodlum called R. Rajan in police custody in Chennai, you aren’t protesting the violation of due process or taking a stand against extra-judicial murder: you are merely riding a private hobby horse: the welfare of minorities or the wickedness of the Gujarat government...
Read the full piece: Ishrat Jahan's Death
