Battle lines have been drawn between the ruling BJP and the Congress before the coming session of Parliament with the BJP deciding to raise the issue of changed affidavits in the Ishrat Jehan encounter case, and taking the attack right upto then Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
Senior BJP MPs Anurag Thakur and Kirit Somaiya have moved notices for discussion on the Ishrat issue in Lok Sabha, with specific references to how and why the two affidavits showed a difference in the way the question of Ishrat Jehan’s involvement with the Lashkar-e-Taiba was treated.
“I have sent notices on this issue to the Speaker’s [Sumitra Mahajan] office. It is under various rules, a question, a short duration discussion, or even a calling attention. It depends on the Speaker as to how she allows it,” said Mr. Somaiya, speaking to The Hindu .
“In the last session we had discussed the matter via a calling attention motion, and Home Minister Rajnath Singh had responded to it, he had assured us that there would be a proe on missing papers from the file especially those that pertain to the first and second affidavit,” he added. The MP was quite clear that the then Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Sushil Kumar Shinde were both on the firing line of this strategy.
“What are the facts of the case, did Chidambaram or Shinde knowingly declare Ishrat innocent of involvement with the LeT?” he added.
The BJP is also expected to attack Congress president Sonia Gandhi for allegedly being in the know of things.
The ruling coalition will be under fire from the Opposition parties over the Constitutional crisis in Uttarakhand, and appears to be sparing no ammunition to combat that with a counter attack on the Ishrat Jehan affidavit issue.
