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    Radical reform of IB accountability calls for lawmaker attention

    Synopsis

    The parliamentary standing committee on home affairs must initiate a review of the mechanisms in place to hold the IB to account.

    ET Bureau
    The contents of the charge sheet in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case are deeply disturbing. They show that entirely defenceless people can be killed off in cold blood by the police, and charges framed and evidence planted, with the connivance of the Intelligence Bureau (IB). While fake encounters by state police personnel have been known to occur, it is truly shocking that officers of the IB cannot just collude in the act but also fabricate evidence to justify the extra-judicial executions. This points to clear failure of accountability and breakdown in the organisation’s chain of command. This is just not acceptable. The functioning of the IB needs thorough overhaul.

    An IB report portraying Ishrat Jahan, killed in the June 2004 encounter along with three others, as a Lashkar-e-Taiba agent, based on what detained American terrorist David Coleman Headley had told his interrogators, had been sent up to the highest levels of the home ministry. Now, as the Gujarat High Court pointed out emphatically, the crime of staging a fake encounter is not mitigated by the background of the victim. But it is pertinent to ask if the home ministry checked if Headley had first-hand knowledge of Ishrat Jahan being an LeT recruit or whether any corroboration of such a claim could be gleaned from investigations into Ishrat Jahan’s conduct. Such a question is relevant, given the apparently tenuous integrity of lines of command in the shadowy world of the IB. This cannot continue like this.

    The parliamentary standing committee on home affairs must initiate a review of the mechanisms in place to hold the IB to account. It must be accountable to the civilian executive leadership as well as to a committee of the legislature. Ideally, it should be accountable, along with all other arms of the security apparatus, to the National Human Rights Commission as well. While the politics of staging a fake encounter against alleged wouldbe killers of Hindutva icon Narendra Modi is entirely material to the prosecution, and therefore would inevitably be controversial, reform of the IB to institute accountability should be a bipartisan objective.

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