An exclusive excerpt from my undercover investigation, 'Gujarat Files'

Read the real thing, ignore the rip-off.

Gujarat Files, by Rana Ayyub

Speaking truth to power has had terrible consequences for me and for my family. Sometimes, though, those consequences are simply amusing. Today, I am writing about my self-published book, Gujarat Files, which has captured Twitter trends and public imagination because of a hate laced, propaganda film promoted by the government that rips off my title.

Here is the name-brand version: When I was 26, my investigation of the first serving minister of the state of Gujarat, Amit Shah, landed him behind bars. (Amit Shah is now the Home Minister of India.) I went undercover with multiple cameras on my body, under the name Maithili Tyagi, a student at the American Film Institute conservatory.

With fake business cards, fake IDs, and a fake American accent, I went to Gujarat to expose the role of the Modi government—not just in the genocide of a thousand Muslims in 2002, but in a spate of extrajudicial killings that had helped to cement Modi’s image as a heroic Hindu leader under attack from Islamists. 

My investigation was censored, and not just by my own news organisation. Mainstream media and publication houses simply pretended my work did not exist, despite my approaching some of the top editors in India between 2011 to 2016. 

My mother had some jewellery kept aside for my wedding. In 2016, I took a gold loan from the HDFC bank, and that money was used to self publish Gujarat Files. I had evidence that I wanted both the Indian judiciary and the Special Investigations Team to examine. My appeals were met with silence, at first; over the years, the apathy hardened into intimidation and persecution. Gujarat Files made me an outsider—an untouchable not just to the media but to many of my friends in the profession. 

In 2019, Justice Arun Mishra of the Supreme Court of India called Gujarat Files ‘conjecture’ when it was cited as evidence in the attempted re-opening of a murder case: The former Home Minister of Gujarat, Modi’s arch rival, Haren Pandya, was murdered under mysterious circumstances, and his father blamed Modi for his son’s killing with his last breath. 

Justice Mishra did not examine my documents, tapes, or any other evidence that established the premise of my book. In 2018, the Supreme Court Bar Association passed a resolution condemning Justice Mishra’s high praise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the International Judicial Conference.

Soon after Justice Mishra handed down his judgment, I wrote a piece in The Caravan appealing to the Supreme Court to examine the tapes of this undercover operation that detailed some damning facts. I got no response.

I will not rest until the tapes see the light of the day. Soon, they will be released as part of a film that tries to also capture India’s descent into fascism. Gujarat Files is a historical document. I risked my life in this operation; it spanned eight months, and I met and taped some of the top officials associated with Modi. The last person I met as Maithili Tyagi was Modi himself. And the Prime Minister of India will vouch for it.

Today, I am publishing one of the most damning chapters from the book here, for free, and I hope, at a time when history is being re-written, when journalism and simple truth-telling in India are being captured, when the country is on the cusp of a genocide, this book will bear witness to the course of that history. If you’d like to read the rest, you can buy it here.

CHAPTER 4

Rajan Priyadarshi

In corporate language there is a term called 'takeaway'—it refers to something profitable that one takes away after a conference, meeting or conversation. Rajan Priyadarshi was an accidental takeaway for me. It was divine intervention as one would say, going by the immense value-addition this retired cop made to my investigation. I must confess that I had never come across a cop by the name Rajan Priyadarshi till the moment his junior Girish Singhal spoke about him during our conversation. I had reported extensively from Gujarat and knew most police officers there, or so I believed. I had not met many, but news reports and interviews with the police fraternity ensured that I had enough information on the relevant ones.

It was surprising therefore when Singhal mentioned this name that I was entirely unfamiliar with. I had absolutely no research on him before I went to meet him. The only reason I did it was not to arouse any suspicion in Singhal's mind and to soothe his nerves about going about diligently as per his advice. It helped Singhal gain confidence in me that I was meeting other cops too, especially those who were non- controversial, who were not in the news. There was another interesting aspect about Rajan Priyadarshi. In an interview given to Times of India in June 2004, Priyadarshi, a 1980- batch IPS officer had said that despite being one of the high-ranking officials in the state he was still treated as an untouchable in his village. The TOI news report said,

People from different walks of life often approach him with folded hands with numerous problems. But, when the same Priyardarshi decides to visit his native Kadagra village in Dehgam taluka, the equation changes dramatically. This senior cop still cannot buy a house in the locality inhabited by higher castes of the village. He continues to have a house in the 'Dalit vaas' of Kadagra. Though Priyadarshi does not want to speak on the subject, sources say that till last year even the village barber did not entertain Dalit customers.

Technically speaking this made my job much easier from the point of view of the film. Additionally, by the end of the investigation there was enough material to suggest that most of the officers being manipulated and mistreated by the administration were from the backward classes. But I had missed something very important. Rajan Priyadarshi was the Gujarat ATS Director-General in 2007 when the investigations into the fake encounters were undertaken by the Gujarat CID. Not just this, he also held a very significant posting as the IG of Rajkot during the 2002 riots.

And so Mike and I met Rajan Priyadarshi. I don't think we can ever forget our first meeting with this 60-something individual. He had a one-storey bungalow in one of the middle-class localities of Ahmedabad-Naroda Patiya. It was the same constituency where another of our subjects Mayaben Kodnani was an MLA. It was also the same area which saw the most gruesome communal riots and where the maximum casualties took place.

We had a tough time locating Priyadarshi's house; it was a rather unassuming location for an ex-ATS chief who had held some of the most significant postings across Gujarat for over 30 years. There was a government school and many chawls and nallahs that one had to cross to reach his residence. Not many were aware of his existence, but his next-door neighbours identified him as the policewala who had his own photograph framed and hung at the entrance of his house.

Priyadarshi was waiting anxiously for us, waving to us as our taxi entered his lane. 'Welcome', he cheered from the first floor of his residence. Both of us entered his house soaking in its rather unassuming details. There was a plaque right at the entrance which had details of the various postings Priyadarshi had held in his career. As we entered, a rather boisterous gentleman with the moustache of a village pehalwan and greying beard shook our hand. Two cotton shawls, pens and notebooks were handed to us.

What transpired in the next few minutes was hilarious. Priyadarshi took an instant liking to Mike. The nimbu pani arrived. We had just about recovered from the shock of how generously we were being welcomed when a man in his early 30s entered the room with a 10-year-old boy. They were Priyadarshi's son and grandson and the latter was carrying a digital camera. 'It's not every day that we have foreign filmmakers at our place, it's our honour. One photograph please,' we were told.

When you are undercover the last thing you want to do is to be in the public eye or leave traces of your undercover existence. But refusing to let photographs be taken would not really have helped in this situation. Also a brief glance at the plaque with the chronology of his career graph suggested that Priyadarshi could be of help. Mike and I complied with his grandson's wishes and a couple of photographs were taken before we were escorted to the living room. There was a photograph of Priyadarshi with state and cabinet ministers and with the ex-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the living room.

'So you wish to frame our photographs, sir?' I asked cheekily, curious to know the purpose of the photos for which we had posed. We were informed that he published a local news supplement on a monthly basis and he circulated it for free to people he knew. That was a relief. We let go of that conversation with the assurance that he would use the photos only when we had introduced ourselves to all the subjects of the film in Gujarat. 'We would not want unwanted attention you know, sir, we would want to keep a low profile, 'I requested, and he courteously obliged.

The conversation was a monologue.

In a span of an hour we realized that Priyadarshi had given us enough material to write a brief for his biography. He was in every sense a character. The kind you catch a glimpse of in a film or a novel. But this meeting would help me with some very relevant insights into the manner in which the state machinery worked in Gujarat. He shocked us with details about the village barber who would refuse to cut his hair and therefore he had to build a house in the Dalit nivas, despite holding the position of IG, Border Range of Gujarat. The Dalit tag continued to haunt him. On many ocassions during his tenure in the Gujarat police force he was forced to do his seniors' dirty work. But he refused to take orders. 'It was very strange, you know it was like if you are a Dalit, anybody in the office can get away with saying anything. There was no dignity attached. I mean a Dalit officer can be asked to commit cold-blooded murder because he (apparently) has no self-respect, no ideals. Upper castes in the Gujarat police are the ones in (everyone's) good books.'

As our meeting progressed, Priyadarshi seemed to become increasingly anxious, but by then he had already said too much. During his third meeting with us, I went to see him alone. I had decided to rest Mike for the day so that he could go to Maya Kodnani's office for a recce for our shoot. It was something Mike had himself suggested. 'Should we not do something to make them believe that we are actual filmmakers?' Kodnani's staffmembers were more than happy to show him around. In the evening, there was a message from her: Did I want any specific location in the house and if we would be interested in a Sunday lunch made by her. I replied with a prompt 'yes'.

That day when I met Priyadarshi, he had sifted through copies of the newspaper he had published. 'You can take whatever you want from these. I think you have all the information about me now. When do you start shooting?' He was anxious, his body language made that clear. He had divulged a bit too much for his own good. Details of the time when he was posted as the State ATS head, of his clandestine meetings with the then Home Minister Amit Shah late at night at his bungalow and who once asked him to kill an accused in custody. Every time I met Rajan Priyadarshi, I felt I came back with more.

Q) Your CM Narendra Modi is very popular here, in Gujarat?
A) Yes, he fools everybody and people get fooled.
Q) In that case, as additional DG, you would have had a tough time working under them?
A) They never had the guts to force me to do anything illegal.
Q) Lawlessness is rampant here no? Hardly any officers who are upright?
A) There are very few of them. This man Narendra Modi has been responsible for the killing of Muslims across [the state].
Q) Achcha, I hear that the cops also toed the line of the government?
A) All of them, like this P.C.Pande, it all happened in their presence.
Q) Most of the officers say that they have been implicated wrongly?
A) What wrongly, they have done it which is why they are now going behind bars. They killed a young girl in an encounter.
Q) Really?
A) Haan, they called her a Lashkar terrorist. She was from Mumbra. The story created was she was a terrorist, who had come to Gujarat to kill Modi.
Q) And it's false?
A) Yes, it's false.
Q) And ever since I got here, everybody is talking of the Sohrabuddin encounter?
A) The entire country is talking of that encounter. They bumped off that Sohrabuddin and Tulsi Prajapati at the behest of the minister. This minister Amit Shah, he never used to believe in human rights. He used to tell us that I don't believe in these human rights commissions. And now look at this, the courts have given him bail too.
Q) So, you never served under him?
A) I did, when I was the ATS chief. He transferred Vanzara and brought me [in]. And I am a person who believes in human rights. So this Shah calls me to his bungalow. Now I have never gone to anybody's bungalow. Nor anybody's residence or office. So I told him, Sir I haven't seen your bungalow and he was baffled and asked, why haven't you seen my bungalow. Then he said, Ok I will send you my private vehicle, come in that. So I said, Ok, you send me your vehicle. So when I reach he says. 'Achcha aapne ek bande ko arrest kiya hai na, jo abhi aaya hai ATS mein, usko maar daalne ka hai.' I didn't react. And then he said, 'dekho maar daalo, aise aadmi ko jeene ka koi haq nahi hai.' So I immediately came to my office and called a meeting of my juniors. I feared that Amit Shah would give them direct orders and get him killed. So I told them, see I have been given orders to kill him, but nobody is going to touch him, just interrogate him. I have been told, I am not doing it so you also are not supposed to do it.
Q) That was some bravado!
A) This Narendra Modi called me the day I was retiring. And then he said, 'So what are you planning to do now' and all those kind of questions. So I told him how I was stifled. Then he said, 'Achcha ye bataao, sarkaar ke khilaaf kaun kaun log hai, matlab kitne afsar sarkaar ke khilaaf hai.' Then I asked Modi, 'Am I allowed to ask you something?' So he said, 'Ask.' I asked, 'In the last two decades I have served in various capacities, did you hear of anything against me?' He replied saying I had been doing great work. Then I told him, 'Sir, in that case for the last 4 years, my ACRs have been termed as Excellent and Outstanding by my immediate seniors and Home Secretaries, then why did you downgrade them? Why was my performance downgraded by you?' I told him that I got all the information through RTI. He was stunned. He said, 'I don't call up my officers and HS?' I said that, 'Sir you don't have to call up the HS, you knew everything as the file came to you' So basically I could have become the DG but he did not allow me to.
Q) So why isn't there any DG in your state?
A) Because Modi has to take revenge against an officer called Kuldeep Sharma.
Q) And I have been told that he has his own team of officers.
A) You know when I was IGP Rajkot, there were communal riots near Junagadh. I wrote FIRs against some people. The HM called me up and said, 'Rajanji where are you?' I said, 'Sir I am at Junagadh.' So he said, 'achcha write down three names, and arrest all these three.' I said, 'Sir these three are sitting with me and let me tell you Sir that they are all Muslims and because of them normalcy has been restored. And these are the people who have brought the Hindus and Muslims together with their efforts and brought the riots to an end.' So he said, 'dekho CM sahib ne kaha hai' and then this guy only was the CM, Narendra Modi, [and he told me] that it was the CM's order. I said, 'Sir I can't do it even if it's the CM's order because these three are innocent.'
Q) Who was the one talking to you on the phone.
A) The Home Minister Gordhan Zadaphia.
Q) When was this?
A) Around July 2002, so Zadaphia said he will himself come.
Q) And so who were these people?
A) Arre, they were good people, Muslims, people who were actually helping bring an end to the riots. Anybody else in my place would have arrested them.
Q) And what about this Singhal? He was the one who asked me to speak to you ?
A) I was his boss, he's now in the ATS. He was my probationer, Dy.Sp.
Q) So who all worked under him?
A) Of those in jail for instance, Vanzara was under him. So what they did was I was Border Range IG, so they got me transferred because they had to bring in Vanzara. So they downgraded the position to accommodate him.
Q) So is the police anti-Muslim here?
A) No, actually these politicians are. So if an officer does not listen to them they send them to a side posting so what are they supposed to do.
Q) The person who Amit Shah asked you to bump off, was he a Muslim?
A) No, he wanted him to go because there was some pressure from the business lobby.
Q) In fact I was told that some officers had been forced to do the Ishrat Jahan encounter?
A) See, between you and me, at one time these people Vanzara and gang had arrested five sardars, and one of them was a constable. So Vanzara said that their encounter should be done because they were terrorists. Luckily Pandian was the SP then and he refused so those five [innocents] were saved.
Q) But the officers are not really anti-Muslim?
A) No, they are not, the politicians make them do this. If you are upright they will never let you be in a posting. Look at what they have done to Rajnish Rai and Rahul Sharma.
A) This government is communal and corrupt. Like this Amit Shah would come and boast to me about what he did to instigate riots in 1985. He would call everybody to his place, like in one meeting he called the Home Secretary and Chief Secretary and one MP and I too was called; I was serving as the IG [then]. So the MP told Amit Shah that you could not even transfer one constable. So Amit Shah turned to me and said, 'Why was this not done.' I had to retort that the constable had done nothing wrong. He was only stopping the BJP MP's son.
Q) But I am surprised he would tell you.
A) He would confide in me. In fact he was the one who told me about the Ishrat case. He said he had kept Ishrat in custody before they were killed and that all five of them were killed and there was no encounter. He would tell me, she was no terrorist.
Q) I am surprised he let you be in the ATS which was such a crucial position?
A) Haan, they thought I was their man and would do as told. So Shah told me, 'See, we have two pivotal positions vacant, the ATS and that of the Commissioner of Police and we need our men in both these positions. So we are making Ashish Bhatia, the CP and you the ATS chief.' He told me that see, we have trust in you that you will work as the state tells you. So I said if you really had the faith, why not make me the Commissioner of Police. Look at P.C.Pande, he did not take any action against the rioters. He should be booked. He's in the good books of the CM. He's his blue-eyed boy. He was responsible for the killing of Muslims. Hence you see, he has been given a position post retirement also. Although I have an excellent rapport with him, I know what he has done is wrong.

Some time in May 2013, my investigation of the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case dropped a bombshell on the Gujarat dispensation. I had scooped one of the most crucial documents in the Ishrat Jahan and Sadiq Jamal fake encounters case. The investigation had the Ministry of Home Affairs in a tizzy. News channels went berserk. I was on every possible news channel explaining the details of the investigation. For the first time perhaps in the fake encounters case, a direct link had been established with intelligence officials; this time the mastermind seemed to be Rajinder Kumar, the Central IB official posted in Gujarat.

The exposé dominated headlines with the MHA on the backfoot and the CBI forced to question the IB officer, more importantly Rajinder Kumar, special IB director whose role in the Ishrat encounter had been established.

¹

More recently Rajinder Kumar was in the news yet again after ex-Home Secretary G.K.Pillai, who had in his tenure stated that Ishrat was to be given the benefit of doubt, told the media early in 2016 that he had changed the affidavits at the behest of the Congress government in power. This led to Rajinder Kumar giving a series of TV interviews stating that he was being implicated. Questions have been asked about Pillai's dereliction of duty and the timing of his alleged 'truth' when he is now on the board of directors of the Adani group. Worse still none of them seem to have any remorse about the fact that irrespective of a person's credentials, an encounter was unconstitutional. None of them addressed why almost the entire Gujarat Home Department was caught on a sting tape by Singhal, talking of obfuscating the Ishrat Jahan investigation.

The crux of my expose was laid bare in the first paragraph of my article which read,

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is set to drop a bombshell in a case of extrajudicial killing of four alleged terrorists by the Gujarat Police nine years ago. TEHELKA has learnt that the CBI will testify before a trial judge in Ahmedabad that one of the accused officers has, in a sworn testimony, identified Rajendra Kumar, now a Special Director with the Intelligence Bureau (IB), as a mastermind of the encounter killing of a woman and three men, all Muslims, on 15 June 2004. Explosively, a testimony by another officer claims that Kumar met the 19-year-old woman, Ishrat Jahan, while she was in illegal police custody before being killed. Another testimony by a cop claims that an AK-47 assault rifle, which the police said belonged to those killed, had actually been sourced from the Gujarat unit of the IB, to which Kumar belonged then, and planted on the four dead bodies . The CBI also possesses a secret audio recording made by a key accused, GL Singhal, who was one of the police officers who shot the four that fateful night. That recording of November 2011 is a conversation among Gujarat's then junior home minister, Praful Patel, who had succeeded Shah in the job a year earlier; Additional Principal Secretary Girish Chandra Murmu, an IAS officer who has served in Modi's office since 2008 and considered to be one of his closest advisers; the state government's most senior law officer, Advocate General Kamal Trivedi; his deputy, Additional Advocate General Tushar Mehta; an unnamed lawyer; and Singhal. (Patel, not to be confused with a namesake who is a Union minister, lost in the Assembly elections in December and did not find a place in Modi's new cabinet.)

It was as if the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to emerge and fit together perfectly. Priyadarshi was the State ATS chief and Amit Shah had confided in him that Ishrat Jahan was being held in a bungalow, confined in custody before she was killed in cold blood. But like every investigation, I had to pay a price for this one too. There were stories linking my faith to my journalism. Within days I started getting calls from editors of various channels and lawyers that MHA officials had been slandering me by saying that there was a salacious CD of me with a CBI official.

I was stunned to hear this. I knew this was an attempt to silence me thinking that I would be intimidated for fear of character assassination. I went to my father who was till now blissfully unaware of what was happening. My brother Arif, a pillar of support to me, and my mom, the backbone of my determination, joined us when I called for them. My dad realized I was nervous and looked at my mother questioningly. She looked equally confused and nervous.

I told them all about the phone calls and the rumours which had been circulated. I distinctly remember my father's words, 'Dekho beta, ye sab drama hai, unko kaho cd dikhaayein, hum sab dekhenge.' He laughed; my mom started to breathe easy and carressed my hair. She said, 'Beta, hum sab jab tumko trust karte hain, jab tumhari family ne ek sawaal nahi poocha, toh tumhein kisi aur ki kya fikar.'

My brother, equally supportive, reacted like the senior media-professional he is, 'Write a letter to them, lash out at these disgusting souls, is this all they could come up with?'

But I did not have to do much, my co-workers and colleagues from the journalism fraternity stood firmly behind me like a rock. Shoma Chaudhary who was then the Managing Editor wrote the editorial that week in response to the malicious campaign against me:

Senior Editor Rana Ayyub has been having a close taste of this in recent weeks. Over the past three years, Rana — one of TEHELKA's most sterling and fearless journalists — has doggedly chased the story of fake encounters in Gujarat. Her journalism has been driven by a keen sense of justice and constitutional values. Yet, as her scoops on the Ishrat Jahan case began to make national headlines, she has had to face the humiliating experience of being assessed not as a professional but as a 'Muslim journalist'. Equally dismaying, a despicable slander campaign has been unleashed against her — shadowy whispers about a CD involving her andCBI officers that have absolutely no basis in truth. India is an imperfect experiment. But if we abandon the poetic idea that underpins it, this is what we will get: 'Hindu nationalists', 'Muslim journalists', and women professionals we try to defang with scurrilous lies.

The planted CD story died a silent death.

On the other hand, revelations were being made each day about Amit Shah's connivance with state cops to carry out surveillance against innocent civilians, one of them being being a young architect named Mansi Soni. It was evident that one of the key people at the centre of this was G.L.Singhal, once an Amit Shah confidante. The conversations were recorded at a significant time, when the SIT appointed to look into the Ishrat Jahan case had begun to make initial investigations into the case. Singhal, the officer concerned, who had begun to see through the state policy of using officers from backward classes, wanted to safeguard himself. And what better way to do it than use the methodology that was made rampant in Gujarat at that time—illegal phone tapping.

Data obtained through RTI by activists in Ahmedabad had stated that more than 65,000 numbers in the state were illegally been snooped upon—the list included members of the opposition, those in the party who were trying to rebel against the establishment, journalists and cops.

Singhal was no stranger to the mechanism and the dirty tricks which he had confided about to us. And so began the task of tapping the phone calls of the minister and his conversations. One of the most significant such tapped conversations recorded Shah's orders to Singhal to keep surveilling the activities of a young architect from Gujarat, Mansi, who had been introduced to him during the rehabilitation phase following the devastating Bhuj earthquake by an IAS officer called Pradip Sharma.

I had found out that Mansi was at this point living in Bangalore. I had all the facts of the surveillance on tape. But I was aware that publishing the tapes would mean that Mansi's privacy and peaceful existence in Bangalore would come to an end.

²

Time was running out. My editor Shoma would call me from her personal assistant's cell phone on a PCO number I had given her. 'What have we got?' she would ask, 'what's going on there.' I would give her the details of the transcripts and she would squeal with excitement. 'It's huge, Rana!' she would exclaim.

But for me, there were many loose ends which had to be tied together first. I needed to get in touch with some bureaucrats—home secretaries, principal advisors who were the ones responsible for signing various incriminating documents, and who would have taken direct orders from Modi and Shah. Most of them had been grilled by the Nanavati Commission where they had developed amnesia. Most were not complicit directly but by staying silent on any knowledge of wrongdoing they had become obfuscations in the due process of justice for the riot victims in Gujarat. It was easier for my colleague Ashish to get local goondas to speak about their bravado over killing Muslim women during the Gujarat riots. But I was looking at the key men responsible—the Home Secretary of Gujarat, the DG of Police, the Commissioner, and the Head of IB during the riots. My head was spinning each day.

As if this wasn't enough stress, Manik bhai asked us to vacate our rooms for an in-house conference because delegates would be occupying all rooms at the Foundation. I was without a roof again.

1. http://cbi.nic.in/newsarticles/pressclips/aug_2013/pc_20130802_4. pdf

2. Going by the indignity Mansi Soni had to suffer when the story later became public, and the pressure she was under from her family to relocate to USA, my fears were clearly not baseless. I ultimately decided not to publish my footage on this case.