Ex-MHA official, R.V.S. Mani says he was under pressure to name Modi and Shah as the masterminds in the Ishrat Jahan case.
NEW DELHI: Efforts by members of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) and top officials of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to implicate the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister of Gujarat, Amit Shah, in the encounter of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) operative Ishrat Jahan continued up to December 2013, claims R.V.S. Mani, a former official with the Ministry of HomeAffairs (MHA).
Mani was the signing authority on two contradicting affidavits filed by the MHA in the Gujarat High Court in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case. The first affidavit was filed on 6 August 2009, while the second one on 29 September 2009. Mani was Under Secretary in the MHA and was questioned by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) led by former IPS officer Satish Verma in Gandhinagar on 22 June 2013 where he was apparently asked to name Safed Daadhi (white beard, while referring to Narendra Modi) and Kaali Daadi (black beard, referring to Shah) as the masterminds who had plotted the killing of Jahan and three others.
Earlier last week, both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, speaking at separate occasions, narrated how Central agencies were used against them during the time of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government from April 2004 onwards. According to Shah, the CBI would ask him to name Modi as the mastermind of these police encounters, which as per the CBI were fake. Shah was questioned by the CBI in October 2013 for what the agency called his involvement in the Ishrat Jahan case.
Mani, while speaking to The Sunday Guardian, recalled that the pressure on him to name Shah and Modi as the masterminds in the Ishrat Jahan case continued till December 2013. After working in the MHA, Mani was later transferred to the Ministry of Urban Development.
“Even after I moved out of the MHA, people-politicians from a particular political party and a CBI official would visit my office every week and request me to consider the offer from his ‘boss’ in lieu of money and say in court that both Modi and Shah were involved in the encounter. In the last of such visits by this particular DSP rank CBI officer, he offered me Rs 55 crore. He never came again after I decided to call the local police station to get him arrested. This was in December 2013,” Mani, who is retired now, told The Sunday Guardian.
The said DSP, who was transferred to Chennai in 2017 after spending nine years in CBI in Delhi, is now retired and stays in Delhi. The CBI at the time was headed by Ranjit Sinha, a 1974 batch IPS officer who passed away in April 2021. Verma, an IPS of 1986 batch, was dismissed from service in August last year.
Satish Verma has maintained that he did a fair investigation as a member of the SIT and was terminated from the services as retribution by the people he had probed in the SIT.
The said SIT was formed by the Gujarat High Court in August 2010 to probe the encounter killing of Ishrat Jahan and three others who were gunned down in a police encounter on Ahmedabad’s outskirts on 14 June 2004. Later, the CBI was asked to investigate the case in December 2011.
Mani got involved in the case after the MHA, whose minister was Congress leader P. Chidambaram, decided to file a second affidavit in the Ishrat Jahan case, in which it dropped the reference to Ishrat being a part of the Lashkar module. In the first affidavit filed in the case, the MHA had stated that Ishrat was a part of the Lashkar module.
Apart from state police officers, the CBI had named top officials of the Intelligence Bureau in its charge-sheet in the case, while accusing them of creating a fake story, participating in a fake encounter, all of which, as per the CBI and the SIT, was done in order to create a positive environment for Modi among the electorate. This was the first case in which the top officials of two Central agencies—CBI and the IB—along with its allied agencies, started a fight against each other.