The Narendra Modi government in Gujarat is once again in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons with the Central Bureau of Investigation chargesheeting minister of state for home Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case. It cannot get bigger than this. The minister in charge of law and justice is himself in the dock
for subverting it and ordering the killings of Sohrabuddin and his wife Kausarbi. And Mr Shah, chief minister Narendra Modi’s Man Friday, has made things worse by evading the law, of which he is supposed to be a custodian. This is a mockery of the very institution he is constitutionally bound to protect. The Modi government and the Bharatiya Janata Party have made the issue murkier by rising to his defence in an aggressive manner.
As expected, the BJP alleged that the chargesheeting of Mr Shah was a classic instance of the misuse of the CBI by the ruling Congress. It also spurned a lunch invite from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in protest. But it conveniently forgot that it was the Supreme Court, dissatisfied with the Gujarat police probe, that had asked the CBI to take over the investigation into the killing of the couple on November 26, 2005. It was after a thorough and painstaking investigation that the country’s premier investigation agency (which got no cooperation from the Gujarat government) prepared a 30,000-page chargesheet naming Mr Shah and 14 others, including several IPS officers, as the accused in the case. Significantly, it was the state police that arrested 13 Gujarat policemen in this case earlier; the CBI only arrested the Ahmedabad DCP, Mr Abhay Chudasama, on Friday. It was when the CBI targeted Mr Shah that all the hue and cry began. According to the CBI, the minister had felt that Sohrabuddin, a notorious gangster involved in many cases of extortion, was becoming too big for his boots and got him “bumped off” on the pretext that he was a member of the terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. To call the CBI probe politically motivated at this juncture would carry no conviction. The ideal thing would be for Mr Shah to give himself up and for the BJP to face the issue legally. It is to be noted that none of the allies in the NDA have echoed the BJP’s criticism of the naming of Mr Shah as an accused.
The targeting of Mr Shah is seen by analysts as a blow to Mr Modi, who had given the young minister nine portfolios and reluctantly accepted his resignation on Saturday. But given Mr Modi’s penchant for changing setbacks into opportunities, it is too early to say whether this will damage him politically in the long run. In Gujarat’s peculiar political matrix, it is doubtful whether the chargesheeting and possible arrest of Mr Shah will help the Congress even a wee bit though it has already begun dreaming of coming back to power in 2012. Politically, the issue has wrecked the new-found unity forged by the national Opposition after the Bharat Bandh. The Left has already demanded Mr Shah’s immediate arrest. The BJP, which was set to corner the Congress-led UPA government on price rise and Maoism, has lost its focus because of a little-known regional politician. This is perhaps what the Congress-led UPA wanted. Rather than defending the indefensible, the BJP should allow the law to take its course and get back to playing its main role — that of taking the government to task on its real omissions and commissions.