D. G. Vanzara

Dahyaji Gobarji Vanzara is the former Deputy Inspector-General for Gujarat, India. He was in judicial custody from 2007 to until his bail in 2015 on charges of having conducted a series of extra-judicial killings while heading the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS).

Cases

An IPS officer of the 1987 batch, his tenure as head of the city crime bureau saw a spurt in encounter killings. He was known to be close to Home Minister Amit Shah, who made 331 calls to Vanzara and other police officers, many of them around the time of these killings.

The suspect killings include:

• Sameer Khan (shot dead Sep 2002)
• Ishrat Jahan and three others (shot dead 15 June 2004)
• Sohrabuddin Sheikh (shot dead Nov 2005)
• Sheikh's wife Kausar Bi (poisoned and body burned in Vanzara's farmhouse)
• Tulsiram Prajapati (killed in 28 December 2006).
• Sadik Jamal (killed 2003)

As of September 2013, there were 32 police officers, including six IPS officers who were on jail for these encounters. Most of them had worked under Vanzara.

These officers were also among those who had been highly rewarded under Modi and Shah. Vanzara himself had a meteoric rise since the early 2000s, when the encounters to eliminate terrorists began.

In his 2013 letter of resignation, Vanzara has stated,

The CID/CBI arrested my officers and me holding us responsible for carrying out allegedly fake encounters. If that is true, then the CBI investigating officers for all four cases have to arrest the policy formulators too as we, being field officers, have simply implemented the policy of this government, which was inspiring, guiding and monitoring our actions from very close quarters.

Indeed, there is no evidence that Vanzara had been carrying out home minister Amit Shah's orders on these killings. On 18 May 2008, ex-DSP N K Amin, also arrested in the case, told the court "that a police-politician-criminal nexus was in operation in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case". The high level of direct communication from Shah, as minister, to an on-duty officer has also been questioned in court.

In the Tulsiram Prajapati case, the encounter killing took place in Banaskantha district. Just 13 days earlier, Vanzara was surprisingly transferred there as DIG Border range. On questioning, Amit Shah could not remember why. Shah has indicted as the "kingpin and prime accused" in the Tulsiram Prajapati murder case.

Vanzara's letter also refers to political mileage obtained from the killings. In the 2007 elections, Modi had asked the electorate as to what was to be done with people like Sohrabuddin, to thunderous responses of "Kill him!".

In September 2013, after six years in prison, Vanzara, who calls himself a "nationalist Hindu" and looks upon Narendra Modi as "god", has become disgruntled. He is said to have suggested a connection between the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case and the unsolved murder of ex-BJP minister Haren Pandya, who at one time a minister under Narendra Modi. Pandya was shot dead while out on a morning walk in March 2003, a year after his fallout with Modi. In 2003, it was Vanzara who had originally investigated the Pandya murder. Similar claims have also been made by the DNA newspaper, which has suggested that Sheikh was eliminated because of his links to the political murder of Pandya.

Vanzara was released on bail on 18 February 2015.

Works

Poetry books

While in jail, Vanzara has written three books of Gujarati poetry, Viyapath, Sinh Garjana and Rann Tankar. The books are dedicated to the guru, Asaram Bapu.