Maneka Gandhi slams Digvijay Singh for terming Batla house encounter as fake

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Commenting over Digvijay Singh's statements over the 2008 Batla house encounter, senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Maneka Gandhi has said that it is 'disgraceful' of the Congress leader to call it a fake encounter.

"Digvijay Singh is talking in order to garner votes and others are seeing the truth that the encounter occurred, people died and I think there were some fatalities of police personnel too. It is disgraceful of Digvijay Singh to deny the (genuineness of the) encounter. Nevertheless it is worth noting that Singh has not uttered a single word of sense over the past five years in order to prove he has brains," she told the media here on Friday.

Digvijay Singh, who had been expressing doubts on the issue, recently repeated that the encounter was fake and added it could not be probed, as the Prime Minister and Home Minister believed the encounter was true.

"The Prime Minister and Home Minister were of the view that the encounter was true. That's why I did not press it further," he said.

Batla House encounter officially known as Operation Batla House, took place on September 19, 2008, against suspected Indian Mujahideen (IM) terrorists in Batla House locality in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, in which two suspected terrorist, Atif Amin and Mohamed Sajid, two other suspects Mohd Saif and Zeeshan were arrested, while one accused Ariz Khan managed to escape.

Encounter specialist and Delhi Police inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, who led the police action was killed during the incident.

Meanwhile, labelling the Congress party as 'shameless' for using the issue of reservation for its benefit, Gandhi said: "It is complete shamelessness to talk about reservation during elections. I am not against giving reservation to the poor or backward classes but it should comply with the provisions of the constitution and this is crossing 50 percent."

"It can be termed as nothing but cynicism to not bother about effects of their (Congress party) reckless actions during elections would have on the country or even giving a thought to their move over its legality. This is wrong," she added.

On Monday, Khurshid had promised to raise reservation as against the existing quota of 4.5 percent reserved for groups bracketed under other backward classes, if his party is elected to Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.

Following the statement by Khurshid , the BJP has been criticising the Congress party for such assurances of increase in Muslim reservation right ahead of the polls.

Uttar Pradesh will elect a new 403-member state assembly in March, and the poll results are expected to broadly indicate trends for 2014 general elections.