The Ishrat File: Unravelling The Political Plot

- PR Ramesh And Ullekh NP

David Coleman Headley’s sensational disclosure via a video link from the US that Ishrat Jehan, the young woman who was killed in Gujarat along with three others in a 2004 police encounter, was an operative of Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT),has evoked much shock, relief as well as denial. The political opposition, various human rights groups and NGOs have cried foul, arguing that Headley, a former Chicago drug dealer who later became an LeT accomplice—he of heterochromatic eyes, with a brownish left one and a bluish-green right eye, and who had conducted a reconnaissance exercise on prospective targets, including the iconic Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, for the brazen 26/11 attack in 2008 that killed 166 people—had named Jehan as part of a quid pro quo deal to help the BJP, which has been under a shadow of allegations that its leaders had approved of staging the encounter. The BJP, for its part, has demanded an apology from the Congress for targeting its top leadership, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah, for more than a decade over Jehan’s death. Caught in a bad spot, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who according to some reports once referred to Jehan as a ‘daughter of Bihar’, has denied ever saying so and has threatened legal action against various media houses for “putting words into his mouth”.

The focus is still on Jehan and Headley, the Pakistani-American LeT hand who had sneaked into India several times, acted as a conduit between several terror groups, plotted against the country, and avoided easy detection thanks to his skin colour and multiple passports. The name that neither Headley, aka Daood Sayed Gilani, nor investigative agencies have bothered to raise is that of a suspected Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh-born LeT associate of Javed Sheikh (formerly Pranesh Pillai), Jehan’s friend who had allegedly inveigled her into the LeT fold.