Gujrat CM Narendra Modi
Gujrat CM Narendra Modi
Gujarat strongman Narendra Modi works like the Mafiosi: Know your enemy. Eliminate them. The enemy here is a senior police officer who could become the next state police chief. But instead Modi has decided to teach this cop a lesson for having dared to point a finger at his men in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case.
By RK Misra
The Empire strikes back. With his man Friday, former minister of state for home Amit Shah behind bars and the CBI closing in on many others, a cornered Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi is striking back, the only way he knows best – hitting hard with a vengeance.
His prime target at the moment is additional director general of police Kuldip Sharma the man who first dared to point a finger at Shah, when most others in the bureaucracy and the top brass of the police were crawling when asked to bend. Sharma is on the hit list of the present dispensation as it suspects him of being the unseen hand guiding the CBI in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case.
On August 10, the Gujarat CID(crime), a department he once headed, booked Sharma for the encounter killing of four gangsters, 26 years ago. Fakir Mamad Budha and Umarwali Mamad were shot in a police encounter on May 10, 1984 and Juma Wali Mamad and his son Ibrahim went missing. Sharma was then the district superintendent of police in Kutch at a time when smugglers ruled the roost and were a law unto themselves.
The Gujarat police which did not move its little finger in the case for 26 years woke up last week to record the statement of Jusab Juma alleging that his father had been killed by Sharma. Immediately Sharma and sub-inspector Bisnoi who has since retired, among others, were booked for murder and kidnapping. The state government has ordered a special investigation team to be set up. The Gujarat police have put over 30 officers and men on the job in Kutch with a clear brief to search for evidence to arraign Sharma.
There are ample reasons for the Modi government to be miffed with Sharma. As in charge of the state CID(crime) it was he who had directed submission of the first interim report in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case before the Supreme Court which triggered off a chain of events that culminated in the arrest of his onetime boss Amit Shah and now threatens to engulf Modi. Again it was during his tenure in the state CID(crime) that Ketan Parekh was booked for defaulting on borrowings of Rs 1300 crores from the Madhavpura Mercantile Cooperative Bank (MMCB) which went bust. Sharma had also sought approval from the then chief secretary for investigating his boss, Amit Shah on charges of taking a bribe of Rs 2.5 crores for helping Parekh. He had attached prima facie evidence of telephone calls alongside. Sharma was abruptly moved out and GC Raigar replaced him. There was a public furore over the issue when Arun Jaitley, a Rajya Sabha representative from Gujarat chose to represent Parekh in the Supreme Court overlooking the interests of lakhs of MMCB bank depositors who suffered at Parekh’s hands.
Interestingly GC Raigar who has since retired was summoned by the CBI on July 26 and during questioning recounted in detail how Shah tried to pressurize him into subverting the investigations into the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case and when he failed to give in, got him summarily transferred and stripped of his charge at dead of night.
Sharma has moved the high court seeking quashing of the FIR. He has pointed out that an FIR was filed in 1984 in the case in which sub-inspector Bishnoi was shown as an accused but his name did not figure in it. In 2004 the Bhuj sessions court had acquitted Bishnoi. In his petition filed in the High Court Sharma has stated that the FIR in a 26 year case was tantamount to a desperate attempt by the state government for vengeance following media reports that he was helping the CBI in the Sohrabuddin case.
He has also alleged that a miffed government was going hammer and tongs at him because in a petition before CAT he has accused chief minister Modi and the then MoS Shah of downgrading his ACRs between 2003 to 2008 to get back at him. Sharma was superseded recently to cut him out from the race for the post of director general of the Gujarat police that will fall vacant soon
on retirement of the present occupant SSKhandwawala.
Interestingly the move to arraign Sharma has created resentment among old time BJP leaders of Kutch who credit him with cleaning up pro-Pak elements who had a free run in the district during those days. This correspondent who was posted in the region doing duty for a national daily then was witness to the meteoric rise of the cop in Kutch during the period.
Kuldeep is not the only person at the receiving end of the present dispensation. Earlier in January this year Kuldeep Sharma’s younger brother Pradeep Sharma, a Gujarat cadre IAS officer last serving as municipal commissioner of Bhavnagar was arrested for alleged corruption in the allotment of land for rebuilding a wholesale market in Bhuj, which was destroyed in the 2001 earthquake. Sharma was the district collector of Kutch in the period after the earthquake. Over seven months to this day, Pradeep Sharma continues to languish with a vengeful ‘administration’ working in overdrive to keep him behind bars.
The Sharmas are on record stating that they are victims of a conspiracy for not succumbing to political pressure.
The 26 year old Kutch encounter is not the only one pulled out of cold storage. The Modi government cops are already clearing the dust of another 1997 killing in a bid to equal accounts and make ‘political’ capital. The Ahmedabad crime branch which earned notoriety for its suspected fake encounter killing of Mumbai college girl Ishrat Jahan had on August 2 arrested Abdul Wahab, a former Latif associate in connection with the murder of Sagir Ahmed, a general secretary of Shankersinh Vaghela’s now defunct regional outfit, Rashtriya Janata Party (RJP). Wahab was arrested after an absconding Mohammed Sidiq alias ghanti confessed to the cops that he had killed Sagir at the behest of Wahab, who was in jail when the killing occurred. Five days after Sagir was killed on November 23,1997, the cops gunned down underworld don Latif on November 29 claiming that he had tried to escape.
Latif ‘s death was seen as an eye for an eye killing by the Shankersinh Vaghela led RJP which was in power in the state with Congress support. In fact Latif was arrested by Sharma in Delhi when the BJP government headed by Keshubhai Patel was in power. The Modi government’s move to rake up the issue is to make political capital by attempting to bring the “Latif’ case at par with the Sohrabuddin case in public profile and haul Shankersinh Vaghela and the Congress over the coals on the issue.
Earlier DIG Rajnish Rai, who during his stint in the state CID(crime) arrested the three IPS officers including DIG DG Vanzara and SP Rajkumar Pandian in the Sohrabuddin case was immediately sidelined to the police records centre and subsequently to the State Reserve Police training school at Chowki near Junagadh. Not content, under direct orders of Shah, Rai was sought to be implicated in a case of cheating in the LLB examinations with the university vice-chancellor going out of his way to harass him. Relief for Rai came from the High Court which took the university to task for its witch-hunt. It was the judiciary again which vindicated another IPS officer, additional director general of police RB Sreekumar who had stood up to be counted against the Modi government
and was victimised through superssession.
The state intelligence chief during the 2002 communal riots, the highly decorated police officer fell foul of Modi and his government when he exposed their role in it and deposed against the government before the Nanavati-Shah judicial enquiry commission probing the Godhra train carnage and the communal riots thereafter. Denied promotion, he approached CAT which ruled in his favour in 2006 but the state government went in appeal before the vice-chairman of CAT and subsequently to the High Court only to lose face. Sreekumar’s was a lone battle but he emerged victorious in the end.