Of late we have been witnessing a gruesome drama played by the UPA and NDA on the extrajudicial killing of Ishrat Jahan and some others in Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004 by Gujarat Police. The killing was done by Gujarat Police, on the watch of minister of state for home, Amit Shah.

The BJP is trying to involve the Congress Party and then Union home minister P. Chidambram on flimsy technical grounds, but the fact remains that the Centre had nothing to do with the killings and it was carried out by Gujarat Police during Narendra Modi’s chief ministership.

The police said the victims of the fake encounter, Ishrat Jahan, Javed Shaikh, Amjad Ali and Zishan Johar were Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists out to kill Narendra Modi. In 2009 the Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate ruled that the encounter was fake. In 2010, the Gujarat High Court formed an SIT to investigate it.

A year later, on December 17, 2011, the SIT said the encounter was fake and there was no plot to kill chief minister Narendra Modi. In 2013 the CBI arrested DG Vanzara of the IPs for having headed the team of conspiratorial policemen who killed the victims. The CBI also wrote that the encounter was fake, but did not include Modi in the charge sheet.

In 2014 CBI gave a clean chit to Amit Shah. The latest on this came on February 11, 2016 when it was officially announced that David Headley had said Ishrat was a Lashkar member. This information, whose veracity is known only to the government, effectively denies justice to the slain people.

The point is that even if the claim is true the extrajudicial killing of people is not justified.

Before the ruthless murder of Ishrat and the others the Gujarat Police claimed that Sameer Khan was Jaish terrorist who had gone to Pakistan for training and kept in touch with Jaish after returning to India. They also claimed that Jaish had ordered him to move to Ahmedbad and kill Modi.

However, the Gujarat High Court ruled that Khan had never gone to Pakistan. It said, “there is no evidence that Sameer Khan went to Pakistan as alleged by the investigating officer, and so an adverse inference is required to be drawn against the investigating agency…”

To top it all, the Gujarat government has accepted in the Supreme Court that it was involved in extrajudicial killings. Just imagine when the state itself becomes the predator and law keepers become lawless where can the little citizen find succor? Soon after the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat many people were killed in a series of fake encounters.