By Aayomi Sharma
It has been 13 years since
Sohrabuddin Anwarhussain Sheikh died. He was killed in an “encounter” with the
Gujarat police, which is widely believed to be a case of “fake encounter”. He
died on November 26, 2005 and since then his brother Rubabuddin has fought for
justice. Rubabuddin filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court which led to the
probe into the alleged encounter.
It is rumoured that
Sohrabuddin was associated with the terrorism group, Lashkar-e-Taiba and with
Pakistani intelligence agencies. Another rumour was that because of these
associations, he had plans to assassinate an important political leader.
Sohrabuddin had been accused of extorting protection money from marble
factories in Gujarat and Rajasthan. The Gujarat Police allegedly also found 40
AK-47 rifles from his residence in Madhya Pradesh. There were at least 60 cases
pending against him for murder, extortion and smuggling weapons when he was
killed.
Sohrabuddin had been on the
run when the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the Gujarat state police caught him
travelling in a public bus to Sangli, Maharashtra. He was with his wife, Kauser
Bi and his friend Tulsiram Prajapati. All three of them were taken away by the
police to a farmhouse at the outskirts of Ahmedabad city. Sohrabuddin was
killed four days later in an encounter, as the police claims. As the Gujarat
police still apparently believes, Sohrabuddin “wanted to assassinate Narendra
Modi”, then the Chief Minister of Gujarat and now India’s Prime Minister, no
hard evidence was presented to substantiate the claim.
As the Gujarat police still
apparently believes, Sohrabuddin “wanted to assassinate Narendra Modi”, then
the Chief Minister of Gujarat and now India’s Prime Minister, no hard evidence
was presented to substantiate the claim
Kauser Bi was not seen after
the encounter till November 29. The CBI says that she was taken to some other
place, raped and then killed. New evidence has recently come to light which
shows that she may have been raped by members of the Gujarat Police. A year
later, Tulsiram was killed on December 27, 2006 in another encounter by the
Gujarat and Rajasthan police. He was the only witness to Sohrabuddin’s killing
other than the police involved. The police said that he was attempting to flee
and that is why he had to be shot dead.
Right from the beginning, the Sohrabuddin
trial was marked by macabre happenings of extraordinary nature which have
rattled the highest court of the country. When the trial began, many powerful
people were named in the case including Amit Shah, then the home minister of
Gujarat and a very close associate of Narendra Modi. The other accused included
IPS officer Abhay Chudasama, former Rajasthan Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria,
former Gujarat police chief P C Pande, D G Vanzara and senior police officer
Geeta Johri. But soon enough all of them were discharged. Finally, in September
2012, the case was transferred from Gujarat CID (Criminal Investigation
Department) to CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) at Mumbai by the Supreme
Court.
Sohrabuddin has two more
brothers other than Rubabuddin: Nayamuddin Shaikh and Shahnawazuddin Shaikh who
were also included as prosecution witnesses. Rubabuddin claimed that many
material witnesses were not called as witnesses like Gujarat investigator
Rajnish Rai, Gujarat builders Ramanbhai and Dashrathbhai Patel. Totally 38
people were originally accused in the case, while 16 of them got discharged in
2014.
One of the most sinister
points in the trial was in 2014 when the case was entrusted to Judge Brijgopal
Harkishan Loya. At that time, Amit Shah was still one of the accused. Soon
after the transfer of the case to Judge Loya, he died under extremely
mysterious circumstances on November 30, 2014. This led to the case being
shifted to two more times and finally the third judge to hear the case, Judge M
B Gosavi, dropped the charges against Amit Shah on December 30, 2014.
The echoes of Judge Loya’s
mysterious death continue to sound in the Supreme Court’s corridors till date,
creating unprecedented factions among the Justices. Another strange occurrence
was in November 2017 when the CBI Court issued a gag order against media
reporting on this trial. It was later set aside by Justice Revati Mohite-Dere
of the Bombay High Court.
It took 12 years for the
deposition of witnesses to be conducted in the case. On top of that out of the
210 witnesses deposed, 92 turned hostile and nobody till date has questioned
why or how that happened. The Special CBI court left it at that and said that
since there was not enough evidence, the accused could not be held guilty for
the deaths of Sohrabuddin, Kauser Bi and Tulsiram Prajapati. The special CBI
Judge S J Sharma has, in the judgment and order dated December 21, acquitted
all the 22 accused. He also said that he felt sorry for the families of the
three who died in the encounters but could not help it because the system
demands that the court follow the evidence. His exact words were: “The
prosecution has failed to put forth any documentary or substantive evidence to
suggest or establish the conspiracy theory against the 22 accused. It has
failed to establish all charges levelled against them. Hence all the accused stand
acquitted.”
This verdict shows how flawed
our judicial system really is. The CBI and the Special CBI Judge were convinced
that it was a fake encounter yet could not do anything about it, they were
“helpless” before the system. This just reflects how the judiciary entirely
failed the three victims. Bias in the final verdict was perhaps expected since
senior political leaders and police officers were involved. However, this
extreme kind of blindness is shocking, where the court did not find anything amiss
even as most of the key witnesses turned hostile, and even the bus driver and a
passenger in the same bus could not stand up for the three people killed after
they were taken off that very bus.
In any case, the circumstances
of Sohrabuddin’s killing are stark — it cannot be a coincidence that Tulsiram,
a key witness was also killed later in another alleged encounter. The
circumstances of the death of Sohrabuddin’s wife are also unclear even after
all these years. It is likely that she was brutally raped by the policemen and
then killed to be cremated at a spot nearby.
This extreme kind of blindness
is shocking, where the court did not find anything amiss even as most of the
key witnesses turned hostile, and even the bus driver and a passenger in the
same bus could not stand up for the three people killed after they were taken
off that very bus
December 21, 2018 was
certainly a sad day for Rubabuddin. It has been a long journey for him, yet he
has not got any justice for his brother. He now plans to challenge the decision
and appeal to the Supreme Court. At a systemic level, there are grave questions
of impunity of police in fake encounters, especially at the behest of the
politically powerful, apart from the safety of witnesses in political crimes.(IPA Service)
Courtesy: The Leaflet
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