ORDEAL ENDS FOR MAN WHO HELPED ED AGAINST CHIDAMBARAM

The Bureau of Immigration told Delhi High Court that the treatment Shah was getting at airports could be a case of ‘matching names’.

For more than four and a half years, Indian citizen Mohammad Alam Shah @ Danish Shah, who works in Dubai, was subjected to harassment at immigration counters in whichever country he would land at—be it India, Sri Lanka or Turkey.

This would entail being interrogated at airports, being followed by men once he would exit the airport; gun carrying men who would make no effort to hide the fact that they were there to follow him and intimidate him as they would stand in front of him and click his pictures and record his videos.

His trouble started after the then Joint Director (JD) of Enforcement Directorate (ED), Rajeshwar Singh, who is now a BJP MLA from Sarojini Nagar, Lucknow, while investigating the Aircel-maxis case involving former Finance and Home Minister P. Chidambaram reached out to Shah seeking his help in the investigation. Shah, at the time was well aware of the banking structure of Dubai, given his experience of working as a banker with Dubai based banks since 2004 and Singh knew each other since 2001.

Chidambaram was later arrested on 21 August 2019 in a dramatic manner from his house in Delhi and was released on bail 106 days later.

Shah’s assistance to Singh in the case, as it turned out, did not remain a secret and in June 2018, in a case that was being heard by the Supreme Court against Singh on allegations of accumulating properties disproportionate to his known source of income, one of the allegations that were levelled against Singh was that he was in touch with Danish Shah, who was declared as an ISI agent. This was seen as a bid to scuttle the probe against Chidambaram by officials who were close to him and were in influential bureaucratic posts.

This was immediately rebutted by the ED and its then director, Karnal Singh, in an unprecedented step, had to come out publicly and say that Singh had spoken to Shah regarding a case that the ED was investigating.

However, the clarification by Karnal Singh did not stop the people that were being impacted by the Aircel-maxis probe from taking steps that would ensure Shah never again helped any Indian agency.

After approaching everyone he knew in India, whom he believed could stop this harassment and humiliation at airports, Shah filed a case in the High Court in 2019 seeking response from Government of India regarding why and which government agencies had ordered that he should be interrogated and stopped at airports, ostensibly on the basis of a lookout notice issued from Indian officials.

After multiple hearings in the case, in August last year, the Bureau of Immigration, in its reply to the Delhi High Court hearing the case, stated that no “lookout notice” had been ever issued against Shah and the treatment that he was getting at airports till now could be a case of mistake due to “matching names”. “However, in case of matching names, who have Look out Circulars against them, it takes time for immigration officials to ensure that a Look Out Circular subject does not escape the law,” and “since no LOC has been issued against the Petitioner and the question of any harassment caused to the Petitioner herein does not arise.”

Shah is now likely to file a criminal defamation suit against officials who illegally ordered the harassment, intimidation and public humiliation that he faced all through these years at airports.