The Home Minister of Bharat is responsible for the nation’s internal security, and is the man that our security agencies like IB, NIA and RAW look up to for support in their onerous task of fighting several internal and external enemies. Palaniappan Chidambaram betrayed those agencies, under what appear to be direct orders from his party chief and boss Sonia Gandhi, during his stint as Home Minister from 29 Nov 2008 to 31 July 2012. Manmohan Singh, the nominal PM at the time, stayed mute while this shameful betrayal was happening.

The entire story revolves around Ishrat Jahan, an LeT ( Lashkar-e-Tayyeba , a Pakistani state supported terror group) operative who was shot dead along with 3 other terrorists – Javed Sheikh, and 2 Pakistani nationals: Zeeshan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana – on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on 15 June 2004, by the crime branch of the Gujarat Police on the basis of inputs provided by the Intelligence Bureau (IB). Incidentally, why this case became synonymous with Ishrat Jahan and not Javed Sheikh will reveal a lot about the socio-political milieu which the toxic mix of pseudo-secularism, liberalism and minority activism has produced in Bharat – but we digress, as that topic is worthy of an article of its own.

In 2009, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) filed an affidavit before the Gujarat High Court stating that Ishrat Jahan had links with terror outfits. However, a revised affidavit was filed within a month, in which all references to Ishrat’s terror links were missing.

How Chidambaram Undermined IB

Former home secretary GK Pillai has now revealed that Congress leader and former Home Minister in the UPA government P Chidambaram had bypassed him and got the affidavit on Ishrat Jehan changed. Pillai told a TV channel, “Chidambaram called a lower functionary in the Intelligence Bureau and totally rewrote the affidavit. The draft was dictated by him, so no one else could say anything. He shouldn’t say that the IB and the home secretary were on board.“

Former Under Secretary in Home Ministry, RVS Mani has also corroborated GK Pillai’s version. He says he was coerced to file the second affidavit in the Ishrat Jahan case. When he was asked whether he filed the second affidavit, Mani told Times Now, “No…I was given an order to file it. That was the order of the government. So, I went and signed it.” On being asked whether it was correct to believe that there political interference in the Ishrat Jahan case, Mani said it was “perfectly okay” to believe that.

An article in Sunday Guardian has exposed crucial details about this major conspiracy hatched by the Sonia Gandhi led UPA government to frame then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi and pre-empt his rise on the national stage. The article says (italicized text within [] added by this writer)-

“This conspiracy also included plans to arrest an Intelligence Bureau officer [Rajinder Kumar] and force him to implicate Modi and Shah in the case. In 2009, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) filed an affidavit before the Gujarat High Court stating that the slain woman had links with terror outfits. This angered a top Congress leader from a western state [Ahmed Patel?], who wrote a letter to the Prime Minister’s Office in the first week of September 2009, expressing dismay that because of the affidavit Modi could not be framed in Ishrat’s encounter.

At one point, the two-and-a-half page typed letter reads: “With this the last hope to grill the Gujarat CM and HM have (sic) diminished in despair since it was the last chance to have a strong SIT with capable people who could have really embarrassed and put Gujarat ministry in difficulty. Two of the accused are also in close contact and have shown willingness to reveal everything and to become approvers.” The Congress leader was unhappy that the MHA’s affidavit had placed on record that Ishrat was a terrorist.

One of the meetings to discuss how to implicate Modi in the Ishrat case was held in the residence of a Cabinet minister in the first week of October 2013 in New Delhi. At least three Union ministers, the political leader who had written the letter to the PMO, and a very senior officer of the CBI were present there, say sources. In that meeting, one of the Union ministers, who is also a well-known legal mind [Kapil Sibal?], asked the CBI officer to torture Intelligence Bureau officer Rajendra Kumar and make him confess that the inputs that Ishrat Jahan was a Lashkar member, were fake and were generated on Modi’s orders.

“Usko arrest kijiye aur chaar jutey mariye, sab kabool karega (arrest him and beat him with shoes; he will confess everything)”, were the instructions that were issued by the minister to the CBI officer present in the meeting.”

NIA does a U-turn on Headley’s Statement

The Pakistani American terrorist, David Headley (nee Daood Gilani), who was arrested in US for his role in the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai, told  interrogators from Bharat’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) in 2010 that Ishrat Jahan, a resident of Mumbra in Thane, was recruited by top Lashkar commander Muzammil who was in charge of LeT’s operations in Bharat till 2007. He confirmed that she was indeed a LeT fidayeen (suicide bomber). However, an year later NIA was singing a different tune and claimed that Headley had never talked about Ishrat Jahan! NIA too falls under the Home Ministry & no prizes for guessing who the Home Minister was at the time when NIA made this U-turn.

IB later released the extracts from the original NIA report which showed that Headley had indeed spoken about Ishrat Jahan, but those 2 paragraphs were deleted in the ‘abridged’ version later released by NIA, ostensibly at Chidambaram’s prodding. And to put the matter beyond any doubt, 3 weeks back David Headley told a Mumbai court via video-link from a US prison exactly what he had told NIA in 2010 regarding Ishrat Jahan being an LeT terrorist.

Bureaucrat Tortured to toe UPA line on Ishrat case

RVS Mani has also claimed that he was tortured by Satish Verma, the controversial Indian Police Service officer who served as lead investigator in the Ishrat Jahan case. “What Satish Verma did to me was unprecedented…On 21 June 2013, Satish Verma burnt me with cigarettes,” he told Times Now. ” He was not collecting evidence, but engineering evidence,” he further said.

It is pertinent to note that even LeT had claimed responsibility for Ishrat immediately after her death, with its Lahore-based mouthpiece ‘Ghazwa Times’ describing her as an LeT activist.

Questionable backgrounds of investigators /judges appointed by UPA

This detailed piece exposes the several twists and turns in this whole sorry ‘investigation’, where crores of taxpayer money was used to target political opponents of UPA..national security be damned. This is what an ex-IPS officer, who served as SIT chief on the Ishrat case for 1 month, reveals-

Examiner proved that it is hand writing of same person,bt he was pressurized to give negative report- Satyapal Singh pic.twitter.com/wwDI3cuurl

— ANI (@ANI_news) March 2, 2016

“Isharat Jahan and Pranesh Pillai visited a number of places in Gujarat and Maharashtra and stayed in hotels. When their hand writings were analysed in Central Forensic Science Laboratory, the examiner proved that the handwritings was theirs,” Singh told ANI here. “He was pressurized a lot to give a negative report, saying that the handwritings do not match. Then, later, this report was not included in the chargesheet,” he added.

Conspiracy of Silence by National Media

Despite all these details being available to any common citizen with an internet connection, none of the big guns in national media, including those who profess to practice ‘Journalism of Courage’, dared to question Sonia Gandhi, P Chidambaram, or Manmohan Singh over this blatant subversion of Bharat’s national security apparatus. This episode is bound to impact the ability of intelligence officers to work without fear to safeguard our country. For this reason alone, it is important that the current Government prosecutes the politicians behind this sordid conspiracy to ensure a strong message is sent across the political class that the nation is above any one party or dynasty.

But such was PC’s clout with media owners and such the fear of Nehru Dynasty, few questioned motive behind revised draft in Ishrat case.

— কাঞ্চন গুপ্ত (@KanchanGupta) March 1, 2016

The documentary “The Ishrat Jahan Conspiracy” produced by Saraswati Films, lays bare the entire conspiracy. What should actually have been the job of an alert national media was done by an independent documentary film maker, Manish Pandit, on his own cost. None of the mainstream media channels agreed to screen this documentary in April 2014 due to the palpable fear of Sonia Gandhi and her smooth talking Harvard graduate henchman P Chidambaram. You can watch the entire 40 minute documentary below-

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