What will be the fallout of the charge made by Gujarat’s Indian Police Service officer D.G. Vanzara that his actions were on the instance of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s government?

Mr Vanzara is in jail, booked in a case where Gujarat’s anti-terror squad murdered a man, Sohrabuddin, on the charge of fighting terror. Investigative reporting by Gujarat’s newspapers showed that this claim was untrue. Later it was learnt that his wife, Kauser, and then a witness, Tulsiram Prajapati, were also killed.
The courts then got into the act, after which the officers were charged and jailed.
Mr Vanzara was then the head of Gujarat’s Anti-Terror Squad and picked by Mr Modi to this position.
In his resignation letter, sent after six frustrating years in jail,
Mr Vanzara blames his plight on Gujarat’s former deputy minister for home, Amit Shah. The officer says that it is Mr Shah who is manipulating the courts into giving Mr Vanzara and the other jailed policemen a hard time, when they were just doing their duty.
What is Mr Shah’s motive in doing this? Mr Vanzara says it is to protect himself. But against what? If
Mr Vanzara says, as he does in his letter, that all his actions were lawful, what has his former boss
Mr Shah to worry about?
This is something Mr Vanzara does not say. Essentially, his argument is that the Gujarat government adopted a policy of being tough on “jihadi terrorism” and doing what was needed to curb it. This, he indicates, was the reason behind the encounters (or extra-judicial killings, if we take another view) for which he is in jail.
When the courts found out that this activity was going on, the policemen were in trouble and abandoned by the state.
Mr Vanzara says he was only following orders but he refuses to say who gave them. The fact is that Gujarat’s home minister was and is Mr Modi who has never let go of that portfolio from the start of his reign.
We can reason that this mischief happened either without Mr Modi’s knowledge (showing him to be less than in control over the one subject — terrorism — that he gets most excited about). Or that it happened with his knowledge, in which case it makes him certainly a witness and possibly a suspect in a criminal matter.
So far the matter has gone only as far as Mr Shah, whom Mr Modi has backed even though he went to jail and is currently out on bail.
The reason Mr Modi has stood by his man is because the chief minister believes, correctly, that there is no patience in the public for those who dislike such encounter killings.
The idea that there is a judicial process that is to be followed and a Constitution that must be obeyed always comes second to the quick-fix that encounters are thought to be.
So in that sense Mr Vanzara cannot really damage Mr Modi by saying that his government was party to the killings.
Mr Vanzara’s real victim with this attack will be Mr Shah. Though Mr Shah is currently in a position of strength in the Bharatiya Janata Party (he is head of the campaign in Uttar Pradesh), he will not be able to untangle himself. The accusation against him is far too serious for it to be brushed aside. Unless and until he is acquitted on the charges he faces in court, there will be far too much focus on him to make him useful either politically or in a ministry.
The second problem he will have is that Mr Vanzara has resigned (the Gujarat government has rejected his resignation), and so will believe himself free to make more revelations in the future.
As his frustration grows, we are likely to see a little more detail about Gujarat’s anti-terror gambit that has gone totally pear-shaped.

Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist