UPA would’ve been happy had we charged Amit Shah: CBI Director Ranjit Sinha

NEW DELHI: CBI Director Ranjit Sinha has said the UPA government would “have been very happy” if Narendra Modi confidant and former Gujarat home minister Amit Shah had been nailed in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case as he sought to underline the fairness of his agency’s investigation into the politically sensitive matter.

“There were political expectations… The UPA government would have been very happy if we had charged Amit Shah…But we went strictly by evidence and found there was no prosecutable evidence against Shah,” Sinha told ETon Friday.

Just a day earlier, the agency had charged former Intelligence Bureau (IB) special director Rajinder Kumar and three others for being part of the conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of Jahan — a 19-yearold Mumbai college student — and three others in Gujarat in 2004, and has for long been decried as a case of extra-judicial or encounter killing.

Asked why Shah could not be nailed for politically sanctioning the fake encounter, as has been alleged by some witnesses, Sinha said: “There were some doubts, but that was not enough to amount to evidence. Clearing Shah is testimony to the fact that it is a fair and thorough investigation.”

Sinha’s comments, coming at a politically surcharged time, could potentially stir up a controversy by providing BJP, which has long alleged the encounter investigation was a Congress conspiracy, a stick to beat the UPA government with.

BJP had charged CBI with trying to target Shah and Gujarat CM and its prime ministerial candidate Modi. Senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley even wrote to the PM last year accusing the Centre of deliberately misusing CBI to implicate Modi and Shah in the case. But in its final chargesheet submitted before a court in Ahmedabad on Thursday, the agency only charged Kumar and three of his subordinates in IB, and not Shah.

CBI has previously questioned Shah in the case. The CBI director is already under fire from the internal security establishment for deciding to press charges against the IB officials. But Sinha countered the criticism and argued the agency had been more than considerate towards the IB officials. “We could well have arrested Kumar, but we have not done so. We allowed him to retire with full pension. Hence, we have been more than considerate to the IB officers.”

Accountable to Courts, not Home Ministry: Sinha

“Our entire team said there was no need to seek sanction to prosecute Kumar. But I overruled them, and asked the law ministry whether we needed sanction or not. Let the home ministry deny prosecution sanction for Kumar and the three other IB officers if it wants to. We are accountable to the courts, not to the home ministry,” the CBI director said.

Sinha also said that the IB officers had only themselves to blame for facing prosecution in the case, as he accused them of carrying out a “slip-shod” operation and rejected charges that CBI’s actions harmed the cause of national security. “The whole operation, carried out jointly by Gujarat Police and IB, was botched up and the IB officers did it in a slip-shod manner and never covered their tracks.

By raising this bogey of CBI harming national interest, the said IB officials are only diverting the issue,” he said. To the argument advanced in some quarters that two of the four persons killed in the encounter were Pakistani terrorists, he said: “It is an immaterial argument that those killed were Pakistanis or terrorists or not…the law says fake encounters are illegal.”

The “encounter killing” of Jahan and the others was explained as the elimination of a Lashkar-e-Taiba module that was in Gujarat to assassinate Modi. Human rights activists and others have said Jahan was innocent and had been executed in cold blood. Sinha noted that when the encounter happened, Gujarat Police was under the BJP government in the state while IB officers were under the UPA government at the Centre. “Since it was a joint police-IB operation, it would be unfair on our part to charge one set of officers and discharge the others. These police and IB officers were staging one encounter after the other in the state.

We put both parties to the encounters on equal footing of culpability,” Sinha said, when asked to respond to arguments that the IB officers had only passed on information to Gujarat Police and had no direct role in the encounter. Sinha added that se nior officials in the union home ministry at that time may also have been aware of the IB operation in the Ishrat Jahan case, but CBI did not go higher so as to not “breach the glass ceiling”.

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