Singh at the iftar at his residence on Friday. (PTI)

New Delhi, Sept. 19: An emailed rebuff to an invite from the Prime Minister has dragged back to the Congress’s memory an alleged fake encounter in Delhi last year that threatened to alienate the Muslims.

Social activist Shabnam Hashmi’s email said she would not be attending Friday evening’s iftar at Manmohan Singh’s residence because she could not forget the Batla House gun battle that killed two young Muslims on September 20 last year.

The email was sent just an hour before the iftar started. Even more dramatically, Hashmi wrote that her computer screen carried two visuals of Atif and Saajid lying dead, one of them with the skin peeled off his back.

“These boys were killed in an encounter staged by the brave cops of our country,” said the mail, written in Hindi and circulated widely.

Hashmi also mentioned other encounter killings that are in the news, such as those of Ishrat Jahan and Sohrabuddin by Gujarat police, and said she would not like to see the “drops of blood” shed by the victims go waste.

Azamgarh residents Atif and Saajid, alleged members of a terror module that plotted the Jaipur and Delhi blasts last year, were killed a month before the Delhi Assembly polls. Muslims were up in arms when the government rejected their demand for a judicial inquiry on the plea that the security forces’ morale should not be undermined.

But the Congress won Delhi and later the Lok Sabha polls and, its fears of a Muslim backlash belied, banished Batla House from its memory.

Till last evening, a day before the incident’s first anniversary, that is.

Hashmi is with the NGO Anhad, which works at the grassroots to “create and strengthen secular and democratic consciousness”, and has worked extensively among the Gujarat riot victims.

Before the 2007 Gujarat Assembly polls, Sonia Gandhi and other Congress leaders had tapped her and fellow activist Teesta Setalvad for their experience and insights. But after the party was routed, sources said, it turned “cold” towards Hashmi.

Hashmi said she had received no answer from the Prime Minister’s Office, nor did she know whether Manmohan Singh had seen the mail. But as the news broke, the handful of Urdu journalists at the iftar resolved to meet Singh “shortly” and demand that these encounter deaths be probed afresh.

Masoom Moradabadi, the editor of Daily Jadid Khabar and one of the guests at the iftar, said: “Shabnam’s an activist; she has to take such positions…. We are journalists doing our job. Nonetheless, when the PM meets us Urdu editors shortly, as his media adviser has promised, we’ll take all these issues up as well as those of the young boys who are languishing in Mumbai (jails) and other jails on suspicion of terror even though charge-sheets are still to be filed.”

Adding to the discomfiture of the Urdu editors at the iftar was a speech by Ahmed Bukhari, the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid, after the Friday prayers. Bukhari blasted the Centre for making “fake arrests and allowing the security forces to trample on the political and economic rights of Muslims”.