P Chidambaram-era note on Ishrat goes missing

New Delhi: The draft note which recorded changes in the Ishrat Jahan affidavit during former home minister P Chidambaram's tenure as well as the legal opinion tendered by the then attorney general are not traceable in the home ministry files.The record pertains to the UPA government's controversial decision in 2009 to virtually disown its affidavit submitted to the Gujarat high court in which it had stated that Ishrat and three others killed in a 2004 encounter were linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba.The controversy has gained fresh currency with former home secretary G K Pillai stating that the second affidavit that reversed the Centre's stand on Ishrat's alleged Lashkar links was amended by Chidambaram and came to him only later.The NDA government is expected to make a statement on the Ishrat Jahan case in the Lok Sabha on Thursday in response to a calling attention motion. BJP has demanded a probe into the "flip-flop" in the Ishrat case.Not only is the draft note missing but more puzzlingly the legal opinion tendered by the then AG has vanished. Pillai is understood to have had asked for the reworked Ishrat file to be referred to the AG.Reacting to Pillai's statements, Chidambaram had recently said the former home secretary was equally responsible for the second affidavit and held the first was misinterpreted and that the Intelligence Bureau provided intelligence which did not amount to proof.The Modi government, which seized on Pillai's comments and those of another former home ministry official R V Mani who said he was tortured by the CBI to discredit the first affidavit, to accuse the Congress of hatching a plot against Narendra Modi who was then the chief minister of Gujarat.The government is expected to point out that while the previous government could have revised the relevant affidavit, it also tampered with the facts of the case by choosing to delete references to Ishrat and others as terrorists.The inputs that IB provided to the Gujarat police were based on the assessment that Ishrat, along with Javed Shaikh - a convert - and two Pakistani nationals, were part of a plan to target a senior political figure.BJP has argued that the decision to revise the Ishrat affidavit led to the investigation of four IB officers and almost resulted in their arrest while the CBI investigation led to the opening of a sensitive national security operation to public scrutiny.