The seculars’ poster boy

Syed Sohrabuddin, who was killed along with his wife in a despicable fake encounter in Gujarat, was for long Indian seculars’ poster boy. In the 2007 Gujarat Assembly polls, Sonia Gandhi first put him on the Congress election poster and called Narendra Modi “merchant of death”. But that didn’t fetch votes. But, being a Muslim killed by Modi’s policemen, Sohrabuddin predictably emerged at the national level as the poster boy of secularism.

True that out of the 440 fake encounter deaths under the National Human Rights Commission’s scan in 2006, Gujarat accounted for just four. Yet, thanks to the secular tag to Sohrabuddin killing, it was Gujarat’s four encounters, not UP’s 231, nor Maharashtra’s 33 or AP’s 22 or Assam’s 12, that attracted the seculars, and also the judiciary. And to continue this secular tag on, the CBI, which probed Sohrab’s case, suppressed the vital fact that the BJP(read ‘communal’) governments in Gujarat and Rajasthan and the Congress (read ‘secular’) government in Andhra Pradesh were partners in the killing. Would they join without central intelligence intermediation? But why Shorab as target?

 It is established that out of the arms shipped by Dawood Ibrahim to blast and kill 300 plus in Mumbai in 1993, Abdul Latif, a D-gang member in Gujarat, had kept buried 24 AK-47s, 27 grenades, 5,250 cartridges, and 81 magazines in the backyard of Sohrab’s home in Jharnea village in Madhya Pradesh. Sohrab thus had direct nexus with terror. Besides he had some 21 serious crime cases against him.

Therefore, search for a better secular icon to target Modi was always on. Sanjiv Bhatt, a Gujarat police official, suddenly claimed that cap. First, to foist a criminal case on Modi, Bhatt came out in 2011 asserting that Narendra Modi told the officials nine years earlier,  to “allow Hindus to give vent to their anger” after Godhra carnage.

Later, when the Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by  the Supreme Court found his assertion a blatant lie, Bhatt charged that R K Raghavan, the SIT head and former police official with exceptional integrity, was out to protect Modi. More, as a serving police official in Gujarat, he called Modi “a criminal”.

Is he precisely not the one the seculars were longing for?

Look at the past life of this secular avatar. See what he did in 1996, within eight years of joining the IPS in 1988. He got planted 1 kg of narcotics in a hotel room in Palanpur in Gujarat and forged records to show that Sumer Singh Rajpurohit, a lawyer from Pali in Rajasthan, was staying in that room. That was to fix Sumer Singh in narcotics offence! This real life drama climaxes thus.

Bhatt got Sumer Singh abducted at midnight, brought to Palanpur, thrown into the hotel room with narcotics kept ready to fix him, and arrested. For what? That Sumer Singh must forthwith hand back the property he was occupying on lease from a relative of R R Jain (a judge in Gujarat High Court then).

Read full article by Shri S Gurumurthy at
http://expressbuzz.com/search/the-seculars%E2%80%99-poster-boy/393912.html