The Gujarat High Court on Thursday directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to take over the investigation into the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case. Stating that the Gujarat police could not be “relied upon” to conduct an impartial probe, the High Court asked the CBI to consider the case as an “exceptional one having national ramifications.” A Division Bench, comprising Justices Jayant Patel and Abhilasha Kumari, also directed chairman of the High...

-EPW   Will the blatant discrimination against Muslims in the administration of justice ever end? The word secular was inserted into the Preamble of the Indian Constitution by the 42nd amendment in 1976; later on, the Supreme Court, in S R Bommai vs Union of India, held (in 1994) that secularism was an integral part of the basic structure of the Constitution. And yet, it has been a long time coming – Indian...

The first judgment in a 2002 riots case and the SIT report on the Ishrat Jahan killing go against the Gujarat government. THE verdict in a crucial and long-running case involving a massacre and the investigation report in another case, of alleged encounter killings, both delivered in November, give hope to victims of the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat that they will get justice, even if delayed. In the first case, the special...

A Division Bench of the Gujarat High Court on Wednesday reserved order till December 1 on the appointment of an agency for a fresh probe into the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case. Since the State government did not press for handing over the case to the State police, the probe was now open to being assigned to the Central Bureau of Investigation, the National Investigation Agency, a reconstituted Special Investigation Team...

The report of the Gujarat High Court-appointed Special Investigation Team that probed the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case, make it clear that the so-called “encounter specialists” of the Gujarat police handled the post-encounter situation very shoddily. Perhaps driven by over-confidence, or may be lack of experience then, the police did not bother much to cover their footprints and the blunders it left behind made it easy for the investigating officers to...