Batla House: Whipping Communal Passion

Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma after injured

A court judgment is open to discussion but it cannot be a tool to whip up communal passion that divides Indians. If a section of people including politicians, social and human rights activists and journalists think that the encounter at Batla House was fake and stage managed and that the accused Shahzad was not present when the incident took place, the activists can challenge the decision of the court. The trial court judgment is open to review in the High Court and in the Supreme Court. The accused has the opportunity to seek redress if the verdict is not correct. Where is the occasion to whip up communal passion amongst the minorities and hammer the point that the police and the prosecution are regular offenders of booking innocent people on charges of terrorism in the country?

Such innuendo would only alienate the minorities further from the mainstream and force them to react and even retaliate in a manner that would aggravate terrorism in India. Those people who are masquerading as the champions of the Muslims flaunting their tags of secularism are in fact harming the cause of the minorities in particular and the country in general.

One can debate a court order or judgment but one can’t question the verdict. The merit of the judgment can be questioned and challenged only in a court of law at higher level.

Some activists argue that the entire encounter was stage managed. Because the slain inspector did not wear a bullet proof jacket showed that the raiding team of Delhi Police knew that people in the flat of Batla House were not ‘terrorists’. The police have explained its position and there is no point in repeating the same.

If one goes by the view of the activists and some Congress leaders that the people hiding in the flat were innocent then question arises who killed Inspector Sharma and grievously injured two more policemen in the firing? Some cynics went out to say that Sharma was killed by his own colleagues. If Policemen killed Sharma then this fact would have come out within days of the shootout at Batla House. Such things cannot be hidden for long. There were and there are many Police officers who would have leaked this operation to assassinate Sharma. If some Police officer wanted to eliminate their colleagues there were other methods to do so. Who knows better than the Police? Why stage a fake encounter in the heart of the capital?

It is ridiculous to suggest that it was a fake encounter at Batla House.

Again, if the Police erred in killing innocent people in the shootout, why the Congress led UPA Government did not book the Police officers guilty of killing innocent people in the guise of terrorists? The Delhi Police is directly under the control of the Centre, the Home Ministry to be precise. Why the then Home Minister Shivraj Patil did not order an inquiry into the incident?

After the trial court verdict in the case, P Chidambaram, a senior Minister of the Manmohan Singh Government is on record saying that the encounter was genuine and that those killed in the shootout were terrorists. But it is typical style of the Congress to allow its leaders to play Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, the characters of the Novel written in 19^th Century by famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson. The senior Congress leaders like Digvijay Singh and Ministers like Rahman Khan and Salman Khursheed contradict the government and Chidambaram on the Batla House case.  Singh still maintains that the encounter was stage managed. Whom the Congress is fooling?

~R. K. Sinha