IF Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was at pains to explain that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was not the Congress Bureau of Investigation, the truth was not lost on anyone. The political mechanisation became clear when the charge-sheet against Amit Shah, former junior Home Minister of Gujarat, made by the CBI, was available to the media and not to the accused. It has become a vogue, especially in case of Gujarat, that media is used widely to create a skewed public opinion and authorities, however high, play hand in glove.
The former Gujarat junior Home Minister might find solace in the fact that the media is not as shrill as it used to be earlier when action-and-reaction statement deliberately wrongly attributed to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was not withdrawn in spite of repeated clarification.
The best joke in the media is that if the government wants to go on a witch hunt the best implement available to it is the CBI. Either it can scuttle a case as effectively as Ottavio Quattrocchi’s, where even evidence has been obliterated, not to talk of conviction, or on the other extreme bring disrepute to the most progressive state in the country like Gujarat.
The glee with which the Congress state governments are watching the developments in Gujarat over the arrest of the former junior Home Minister Amit Shah and the way he has been hounded by central agencies only suggest a larger conspiracy to even stall the fascinating pace with which Gujarat has left behind other states in inclusive development.
Encounter killings by police is a fact of life that most states live with. As BJP president Nitin Gadkari said, there have been 600 encounters in Uttar Pradesh and 19 in Gujarat, yet Narendra Modi’s state is singled out. Earlier, the Manmohan Singh’s government used to be caught in a bind over the Left support, for which the compromises used to be made brazenly. Today, even if it does not need the Left support, its various wings have been infiltrated by extremist elements, mostly Left.
The National Advisory Council can’t even hide its open support to terrorist organisations like the Maoists and naxalites. The council is headed by Congress president Sonia Gandhi, no less.
In the specific case of Amit Shah, the ploy is as clear as daylight. The CBI first would make grave charges against some senior policemen and then involve the ministers in it, all on tenuous grounds. Now the CBI will be working over time to force the policemen in their custody to make up stories against the former minister in return for a lesser punishment for a crime they have not even committed.
With reports leaking from the CBI office that former additional director-general of police O.P. Mathur going to be arrested on more specious grounds, the witch hunt is not going to end soon. The shamelessness of the government coupled with a pliable CBI make it conducive for a grand plan to derail a state which has been recognised by global multilateral agencies as one of the best in the world.
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