Out of the Woods

How Modi survived the 5/9 conspiracy

It was just past 6 pm on 5 September last year. The Thursday evening traffic in this part of Lutyens’ Delhi was hellish but not enough to slow down the three men, three important totems of the Capital, who drove towards the historic Teen Murti Bhawan. They travelled separately from the Parliament House that had passed the Land Acquisition Bill a few minutes ago, and their destination was a modest building near what was once the residence of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. They were three determined men.

Two of them were senior Cabinet members in the UPA Government. The third man was a reclusive Congressman whose closeness to the House of Gandhis is legendary. They would soon be joined by two officials from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the agency’s director Ranjit Sinha and special director Saleem Ali. The agenda on the table: how to contain Narendra Modi by getting him irredeemably entangled in the infamous nine-year-old Ishrat Jahan encounter case. It was for the CBI to carry out the dirty job.

After all, the UPA coalition was hoping that Gujarat’s Chief Minister, whose singular campaign had already energised the saffron base and the middle-class in equal measure, would somehow be waylaid by the killing of Ishrat Jahan, an ‘innocent’ 19-year-old girl who had died along with her friend Javed Sheikh and two Pakistani terrorists Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar in a police encounter while allegedly in custody of the Gujarat Police.

At the meeting, the dark artists of the Congress desperately wanted to strike Modi’s most trusted lieutenant Amit Shah. In his mentor’s scheme of things, Shah plays a key role—strategising his political journey, tackling hurdles in his way, and now managing his affairs in Delhi. The conspirators knew that a blow to Shah would paralyse his master. They argued over whether a statement of one of the accused police officers—DH Goswami, deputy superintendent of police in Gujarat’s Crime Branch— before an additional judicial magistrate was enough to target Shah and Modi. In his testimony, Goswami had said that he and another police official GL Singhal went to the Shahibaug office of the Crime Branch in Ahmedabad on 12 June 2004, two days before the encounter in which Ishrat and three other alleged LeT operatives were killed. According to his account, Additional Director General of Police PP Pandey, DG Vanzara and IB official Rajinder Singh were present in that office. Goswami also made a sensational revelation: he had heard the three talking about an LeT operation and Kumar asking Vanzara to speak to the Chief Minister about it. Vanzara said that he would talk to Safed Dadhi (white beard) and Kaali Dhadi (black beard), alleged code names for Modi and Shah.

The BJP and sections of the country’s security establishment have been contesting the view that Ishrat Jahan was an ‘innocent victim’. The arguments made to buttress this have been many. For one, why did her family in Mumbai’s Mumbra area not file a missing person’s FIR when she did not come home for days (during which her mother alleged she was in illegal custody)? If she was indeed innocent, why did the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) website and its mouthpiece Ghazwa Times hail her as a martyr? Why did David Headley, who surveyed the 26/11 targets of the LeT, flag her jihadi links during his interrogation?

But details did not distract the vulpine Congressmen huddled together in the Lutyens bungalow on that balmy September evening. They were not even bothered by the possibility that their plan could bring the CBI into direct conflict with the IB, the agency that was part of the alleged counter-terror operation in Gujarat. Their strategy seemed taken from the fable in which the parrot that holds the demon’s heart must be captured first in order to decimate him.

The plotters at the meeting even prepared a roadmap to proceed against Gujarat’s top political leadership: phone call data records had shown that IB official Rajinder Kumar was in constant touch with political heads, particularly Shah. The counter argument that Kumar needed to be in touch with the state government for seamless coordination and timely intelligence sharing, voiced by officials in the home ministry, had no takers. “Get Shah!” was the message the politicians conveyed to top officials of the CBI.

According to people in the know, Ali seemed inclined to go along with the Congress plot. He felt the CBI had sufficient evidence to proceed against Modi and Shah on the basis of Goswami’s statement that the encounter was green-signalled by Kaali Dadhi and Safed Dadhi.

Much to the politicians’ discomfort, Sinha was quiet. He had reasons to doubt the feasibility of the plot. One, it would be legally untenable to move against an accused in the Ishrat Jahan case on the basis of a statement by a co-accused in the same case. Second, it would be exceedingly flimsy to reach conclusions on the basis of references to facial hair. With no firm assurance forthcoming from the CBI chief, the Congress leaders decided to meet again.

Around this time, Modi was facing stiff opposition from within his party over his prime ministerial candidacy. LK Advani concealed his own ambition in the argument that making Gujarat’s Chief Minister the BJP campaign’s face would give the UPA Government an opportunity to deflect attention from inflation and corruption by targeting Modi. Advani’s argument was that Modi was too controversial to be projected as the party’s man to occupy 7 Race Course Road. His protégés, particularly Sushma Swaraj, joined the internal opposition to Modi’s candidacy. According to BJP insiders, Swaraj argued that the party’s candidate announcement should wait till Assembly polls in five states were over in December. Some of her supporters went to the extent of claiming that the so-called ‘Muslim factor’—only two constituencies in Madhya Pradesh have a decisive share of minority votes—could damage Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s electoral prospects.

Nitin Gadkari, the man who had lost the party presidency but not his influence, too, tilted towards his one-time critic Advani. He was giving Advani the impression that the tussle over the party’s future leader was far from settled. He suggested that a formal decision be made only in the presence of Advani, which would be preceded by deliberations by the BJP Parliamentary Board. But party chief Rajnath Singh had already made up his mind. Singh told Gadkari that he could not promise Advani that a decision on Modi would be taken only by the Board and with his prior consent.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, the plot against Modi thickened. The protagonists of the 5/9 Conspiracy met for the second time three days later, on 8 September, in the backdrop of the power struggle within the BJP. This time round, they wanted the CBI to proceed against Modi and Shah. If the Gujarat Chief Minister, fast emerging as the BJP’s only choice for the Prime Minister’s post, were to seek legal recourse and embroil himself in a judicial rigmarole, all the better. By the time he extricated himself from it, the Congress would have fired its political missile at Modi and gained electoral mileage in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls due in April-May this year. The outline of the strategy was already known to the plotters, and this meeting was just to fill in the details.

As the evening wore on, the ministers began to fret as a crucial chair in the room was still empty, as those privy to these events tell me. Ranjit Sinha, the special invitee, the man who was supposed to lead the operation, was nowhere to be seen. Sinha did turn up finally, but conveniently too late for details of the plot to be discussed at length that evening. CBI insiders say Ali and the Congress bosses realised that Sinha would not play ball.

Sensing the CBI dither, the BJP decided to raise the ante. It quickly alleged that the Government had indulged in ‘dealmaking’ and that the investigative process of the Ishrat Jahan case had been politically calibrated by senior ministers at the Centre. Gujarat officials who were willing join the plot were let off the hook, at least temporarily— formal charges were not filed within 90 days, for instance— so that they could get the benefit of default bail. Again, names of the accused were struck off the first and second chargesheets in the case.

The BJP also alleged that a quid pro quo had been involved in the plot to frame party leaders in Gujarat. The BJP pointed out that the Human Resource Development Ministry had offered CBI Special Director Ali the vice- chancellorship of Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia.

In the end, Congress pressure on the CBI to nail Modi boomeranged, with Sinha turning rebel and putting a spoke in the plot’s wheels. Sinha recently grabbed eyeballs in political circles when he suggested that the UPA Government would have been pleased if the agency had actually implicated Shah in the Ishrat case. Sinha was playing smart and safe: he’d calculated he would get an extra year as director after the General Election.

The Congress was in no mood to give up, however, even though its first attempt fell apart. On 27 December, Modi’s antagonists got a rude shock when an Ahmedabad metropolitan court rejected a petition to prosecute the Chief Minister for conspiracy in the 2002 post-Godhra riots. The court upheld the Supreme Court- appointed Special Investigation Team’s 2012 clean chit to him. The magistrate ruled that there was no sufficient evidence to prosecute the Chief Minister.

Hours before the court passed the order, the Union Government swung into action to push Modi into another tight corner. It appointed a commission of inquiry under Section 31(b) of the Commissions of Inquiry Act to probe allegations of ‘snoopgate’: a young woman architect from Ahmedabad being placed under surveillance on instructions of the Chief Minister. The allegations came from an IAS officer, Pradeep Sharma.

In this case too, the Congress found it hard to trap Modi. The Centre has yet to appoint a judge to head that Commission. Government sources say that three judges— Justice Aftab Alam, Justice HS Bedi and Justice Deepak Verma—have turned down the Government’s offer to head this commission.

Even if the Government finds a judge now, it may not be able to table the commission’s findings in Parliament before the Lok Sabha polls for a variety of reasons. Mainly, the Centre has set a deadline of three months for the investigation’s completion. Even if it funds a judge in the next two or three weeks, it will finalise its report only by May. By then, the Lok Sabha would have been dissolved and new members elected to it.

If the Government goes ahead with its plans to appoint a commission, it will also have six months to submit the report to Parliament. This will have to be along with an ‘action taken report’. But the real motive of the ruling party in this case may be different: the timeframe for the report’s submission suggests that the Union Cabinet is only interested in keeping the ‘Snoopgate’ controversy alive. In that, it succeeded at least for a few days during which Sharma gave a spate of television interviews and got the backing of Modi’s political rivals.

In the meantime, efforts to corner Modi in the Ishrat Jahan case have strained the once-cordial relationship between the CBI and the IB. A significant section of the latter now backs Rajinder Kumar’s charge that the CBI had fomented mischief and indulged in foul play in this case although he was merely doing his duty to counter the threat of terror in India.

Sections within the IB now contend that even if the encounter was fake, its intelligence inputs were certainly not. If individual officers are hounded for having generated an input acted upon by the state police, it would have highly adverse consequences. Officers would turn wary of supplying specific inputs. Security experts emphasise that this has the potential to throw the agency out of gear and negatively affect its operational capability.

Sinha is now highly assertive and far more defiant in his dealings with the regime at the Centre. The CBI Director’s post has only recently been equated with that of a Government of India secretary (an IAS rank), which has meant he need not buckle under every whim of the regime.

Sinha tested his leeway soon enough by pitching for Archana Ramasundaram, a 1980 batch IPS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, as a special director in the agency once that post fell vacant. A tug-of-war with a five-member selection board saw Sinha repeatedly turn down the Centre’s choice for the job, Ranjit Kumar Pachnanda, former police commissioner of Kolkata. Among those who pitched for him were the Chief Vigilance Commissioner, two central vigilance commissioners and the Union Home and Personnel secretaries. A newly empowered Sinha, though, managed to rebuff the board and ensure the appointment of Ramasundaram, the CBI’s first ever woman special director.

Clearly, the CBI director is looking beyond the summer, by when Delhi is likely to witness a dramatic shift in power. He is hoping to be the Robert Gates of the next government (whose indispensability saw him serve as the US defense secretary under George W Bush as well as his successor Barack Obama). Who knows, the man who survived the 5/9 Conspiracy may soon have an ally in the officer who refused to play ball with the conspirators.

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