In a clear bid to defend the Modi government over the arrest of two Gujarat IPS officials for fake encounter killings, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday came out with a list of offences against those who had been killed in the police firing.
The list, apparently supplied by the Gujarat government to the BJP, showed that slain Sohrabuddin Sheikh had 12 cases registered against him, three of them in Maharashtra, two in Madhya Pradesh and one in Rajasthan.
He was mostly charged under the Arms Act and the National Security Act.
"What we want to emphasise is that it would be wrong to glorify the 'victims'. They were not innocent," senior BJP leader Vijay Kumar Malhotra told reporters when faced with a volley of questions on whether the saffron party justifies killing of anybody because of his or her criminal record.
Malhotra produced another list that showed 56 cases, some of them under the Arms Act, TADA and POTA, were registered against Tulsiram Prajapati, another man shot dead by the Gujarat police.
The BJP leader, whose party had on numerous occasions sought CBI investigation into cases relating to its political opponents, rejected the rivals' demands for such a probe into the encounters.
"Let the Supreme Court make a decision. It's superior to the CBI, which will do what the ruling Congress would like it to," he remarked.
Gujarat's DIG (Anti-Terrorist Squad) D G Vanzara and SP (Intelligence) Rajkumar Pandayan and Rajasthan's SP (Alwar) M N Dinesh are under arrest in connection with the killings.