Selective: Ishrat encounter outraged, not a sound on the one at J&K

New Delhi, Mar 3: There have been a series of allegations and counter allegations over the Ishrat Jahan issue. What is actually surprising is that the government of India in 2009 decided to file two affidavits in a span of one month which ran totally contrary to each other.

There are questions that come to one's mind about the manner in which the government handled this issue. Why was all the focus on the Ishrat Jahan case in which people tried to term the encounter as fake. Why was a similar noise not raised when two persons from the same module were killed in an encounter in Jammu and Kashmir.

Two persons Mehmood and Zaid were arrested 11 days after the Ishrat encounter and while they confirmed one part of their team was in Gujarat, it came as a surprise that the duo were killed in the encounter when the Gujarat police had sought to examine them.

Witch hunt?
There were murmurs in Jammu and Kashmir when the encounter of the two Lashkar-e-Tayiba militants had taken place. However there was no nation wide outrage as we got to witness in the Ishrat Jahan case. This encounter had become the talk of the town with a large majority questioning the authenticity of the encounter. The question is why didn't the same people question the encounter at Jammu and Kashmir which happened in the same year (2004).

Those killed in the J&K encounter were part of the three team module. One module was to carry out attacks in Srinagar while the other two at Delhi and Gujarat. The duo killed in J&K had confirmed that those in Gujarat were part of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba module. There was however no talk about Ishrat about them which gives the impression that she was roped in as a cover at a later stage.

The timing of the encounter in Jammu and Kashmir is also quite suspicious. These two persons were in fact in custody and the version given by the police was that they tried to escape and hence had to be killed in an encounter. While it is the job of a court to verify the authenticity of an encounter, the bigger question is why was the selective outrage restricted just to the Ishrat encounter.

OneIndia News