<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/16/amit-shah-narendra-modi-right-hand-man-india>
Warning: violence and murder
"Late one night in November 2005, a small group of plain-clothed police
officers pulled over a bus in western India. They escorted off a man named
Sohrabuddin Sheikh, who was joined on the side of the road by his wife, Kausar.
Sheikh and Kausar were put into separate police cars and driven 600 miles away,
across state lines, into Gujarat. They would never see each other again.
Sheikh had not been charged with anything. The Gujarat police did not have any
legal grounds to detain him, let alone his wife. Upon reaching Ahmedabad,
Gujarat’s most populous city, Sheikh and Kausar were not taken to a police
station. They were instead detained in separate bungalows in a residential
neighbourhood. Two days later, on 26 November, Sheikh was driven to a highway
intersection in south Ahmedabad and shot dead. Police claimed that Sheikh was a
member of an Islamist terrorist group and had been shot while trying to escape.
Four days after Sheikh’s death, on 29 November, Kausar was killed. Policemen
allegedly poisoned her, then carried her body to the Narmada River, where they
burned it and dumped the remains in the water.
According to records later obtained by central government investigators, the
officers allegedly involved made several phone calls around the time of each
killing. On the other end of the line, each time, was a senior Gujarati
politician who ran the state’s home ministry, which put him in charge of the
police. His name was Amit Shah.
These details emerged in 2010, when the Central Bureau of Investigation,
India’s equivalent of the FBI, was investigating the killings. The CBI charged
Shah with kidnapping, extortion and murder. It alleged that the officers who
killed Sheikh and his wife were working on Shah’s orders. (The CBI also
confirmed that Sheikh was a gangster who had collaborated with Gujarat police
for several years. He had, it seemed, outlived his usefulness.)
The CBI found that Shah had exchanged five calls with the superintendent
officer at the scene on the day of the abduction. Over the next few days, they
spoke regularly. On the day Sheikh was killed, Shah spoke to the officer five
times. The next call they exchanged was on the day of Kausar’s killing. (Shah
did not deny making these calls, but later stated that they concerned another
case.)
When a warrant was issued against Shah, in July 2010, he eluded arrest for four
days, before surfacing in a press conference to deny any wrongdoing. He told
the press that he was the victim of a political witch-hunt, orchestrated by the
central government, which was then run by the Indian National Congress party,
the main opposition to Shah’s own party, the BJP. “The chargesheet had already
been made at the behest of the Congress. It is fabricated and had nothing to do
with my summons,” Shah said. “I am not afraid of anyone. We will fight the
legal battle, and expose those who have tried to wrong us in court.” Shah spent
three months in jail and was then released on bail. To prevent any attempts to
influence witnesses or judges, it was a condition of Shah’s bail that he stay
out of Gujarat until the end of the trial.
Banished from his own state, journalists informally referred to Shah as
tadipaar, the fugitive. Witness transcripts recorded by the CBI, which
included claims that Shah had been running an extortion racket through the
state police, were published in national newspapers. But four years later, in
December 2014, all the charges against him were dropped. Echoing Shah’s
defence, the judge stated that the whole case against him had been “politically
motivated”. After years of work on the case, the CBI didn’t challenge the
court’s decision."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
