VINOD K JOSE - Narendra Modi’s shadow lies all over the Haren Pandya case
On 5 July, the
Supreme Court upheld a
Gujarat trial court’s verdict convicting 12 people accused of the murder of
Haren Pandya, a former Gujarat home minister. Pandya, a Bharatiya Janata Party
leader and a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was killed in Ahmedabad
on 26 March 2003. The trial court’s
conviction, on 25 June 2007, had been reversed by the Gujarat high court on
29 August 2011. In a scathing indictment of the investigation, the agencies
responsible and the lower court, the high court had acquitted all the accused
of the murder charges and termed the trial court’s verdict as “perverse and
illegal.” The high court’s judgement noted that the investigation had been
“botched up and blinkered” and “misdirected.” It also came down heavily on the
investigating officers and recommended that the “concerned ought to be held
accountable for their inaptitude resulting into injustice, huge harassment of
many persons concerned and enormous waste of public resources and public time of
the courts.”
Following the high
court’s acquittals, the Central Bureau of Investigation and the state
government—then led by Narendra Modi—challenged the verdict in the Supreme
Court. Notably, the CBI investigation was helmed by YC Modi, an Indian Police Services
officer, who was appointed as the head of the National Investigation Agency in
September 2017 by the Modi government at the centre. Along with the appeals,
the Supreme Court bench comprising
Arun Mishra and Vineet Saran also heard a public-interest litigation filed by
the non-profit Centre for Public Interest Litigation, which sought a fresh
court-monitored probe in the Pandya murder case.
The CPIL’s petition stated
that “new pieces of information that have come to light regarding the
possibility of IPS officers, including DG Vanzara, being involved in the
conspiracy to kill Pandya.” This new information was the testimony of Azam Khan
in the Sohrabuddin
Sheikh fake encounter case on 3 November last year. Khan was an
associate of Sheikh and a key witness in the case, in which Vanzara was among
the prime accused. Vanzara is a former deputy inspector-general of Gujarat
Police and has been implicated in multiple cases of extra-judicial killings in
Gujarat, under Modi’s watch, between September 2002 and December 2006. In his
testimony before a Mumbai court, Khan claimed that “during discussion with
Sohrabuddin, he told me that he, along with Naeem Khan and Shahid Rampuri, got
the contract to kill … Haren Pandya of Gujarat.” According to Khan, Sohrabuddin
told him that “the contract was given to him by Vanzara.” Khan’s testimony led
to speculation that Pandya’s murder and Shiekh’s encounter killing in 2005
could be related.
In the following
extract from “The
Emperor Uncrowned,” a profile of Narendra Modi in The Caravan’s March 2012 issue, Vinod K
Jose, the executive editor of the publication, charts the complex dynamics of
Pandya’s relationship with Modi—first, as a senior leader who refused to
accommodate Modi’s ambitions, and then, as a rebel minister who spoke against
Modi in the aftermath of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in the state.... read more:
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/haren-pandya-narendra-modi-murder-case-supreme-courtMore posts on Vanzara
