By Special Correspondent, TwoCircles.net,
Ahmedabad: Thirty-year-old Reshma Rangrez has become a celebrity overnight with police and civilians organizing felicitations for her and rewarding her in cash and kinds. The reason: she helped the police in recovery of crude bombs and two country made pistols with live ammunition from her husband Shehzad Rangrez on July 19.
Even the president of the All India Anti Terrorist Front (AIATF) Maninderjit Singh Bitta, a former Youth Congress president, flew all the way from Amritsar to Ahmedabad and felicitated Reshma here on July 29. She was earlier felicitated by Minister of State for Home Praful Patel.
Several Muslims organizations in Surat and Ahmedabad also held functions to felicitate Reshma and extended financial support to her. She has so far received more than Rs. three lakh in cash. A Surat-based Muslim organization had promised to open fixed deposit accounts for her two children-son Sohel and daughter Simran-with Rs. 50,000 in each account as a financial security for their future.
Though she has rejected the offer of security cover for her, police in plainclothes can be seen round the clock around her house in the Danilimda area, inhabited mostly by low income group Muslims.
The state government has also promised to get her a job in the Ahmedabad fire brigade and the Ahmedabad city police is likely to shift her to the Gaekwad Haveli police lines, the heavily guarded complex housing the office of the Ahmedabad Detection of Crime Branch (DCB), responsible for investigation and detection of serious criminal and terror-related cases.
But why is Reshma being highlighted and promoted so much? In fact, it has failed the imagination of the common people, being fed daily through news planted in local newspapers that the Muslim lady helped in preventing a major terror incident by informing the police on time. She is being projected as a role model for Muslims as if the latter only are responsible for all the violence in the state.
But there appears to be more in the incident than what simply meets the eye. With Gujarat police having been known for fabricating the crimes, it is hard to believe hundred per cent in what the police is doling out in the case. As Shehzad’s arrest and recovery of explosives and ammunitions from him coinciding with Mumbai’s July 13 serial bomb blasts, there appears an effort on the part of the police to keep Gujarat in the limelight and show the world, that the state ruled by Narendra Modi, which is hated by Muslims and human rights groups for his questionable role in 2002 riots was on the radar of the terror groups.
Like D G Vanzara and his associates, who indulged in fake encounters, a senior police official in Ahmedabad is reported to have done this all to seek his extension as he is due for retirement soon. The police having its well entrenched networks and informers in the Muslim community, seems to have made use of some of them for the purpose, by reported recovery of arms and explosives from Shehzad. The purpose was served as the incident was reported by all the local and national newspapers.
Though police is silent on the background of Reshma, she is reported to be an old informer of the police. In interviews with media, she has said that she had been in touch with DCB police inspectors for quite a long time and in the past as well, she had passed on information about nefarious activities of her husband to the police. But the police simply ignored it. She has also been helping her neighbors whenever they had any problem related to the police, suggesting that she had connection with the police.
Otherwise, an ordinary woman does not know even the phone numbers of the
local police station. This casts doubt on the integrity of Reshma, a Hindu-convert-Muslim.
Reshma claims herself to be a native of Goregaon in Maharashtra. She says she came to Ahmedabad, with her Bengali Muslim husband before 2002. However, her Bengali husband working in a transport company reportedly eloped with another girl. As Reshma was living in the neighborhood of Shehzad, she married him though he already had a wife and three children.