New Delhi: Continuing the tirade against former home minister P. Chidambaram in the Ishrat Jahan case, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday said the Congress Party, which stands exposed for helping the culprits, should apologise to the nation.
“Nothing can be worse if the Congress Party tries to prove a terrorist as a nationalist. The way things are getting revealed, it shows the Congress Party is a den of sins and many sins are coming out from the den,” Minister of State for Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi told ANI.
“This is the first time it can be seen that the former home minister becomes the helper of the culprits and the Congress tries to prove the terrorist as nationalists. The Congress should ask forgiveness in this matter. The latest revelations with regard to this matter are maligning the image of the Congress Party,” he added.
New developments unfolded in the Ishrat Jahan case with the 51-page file of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) recording that Chidambaram had signed the original affidavit describing Ishrat as part of a Lashkar module.
Media reports revealed that Chidambaram had in fact signed the first affidavit which declared Ishrat and three others as terrorists, but gave all four a clean chit a month later as serious amendments were made in the second affidavit also signed by him.
The first affidavit in the encounter case stated that Ishrat was a LeT operative, who was part of a plot to assassinate the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
Chidambaram had initially claimed that the first affidavit declaring Ishrat and three others as terrorists was filed in the court without his approval, adding that he had made some editorial changes to avoid misinterpretation when the matter was brought to his notice.
Chidambaram, however, completely altered his stance in the second affidavit, saying that intelligence inputs on Ishrat and the three others did not constitute conclusive proof and favoured a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe in the encounter. (ANI)