Gujarat SIT claims Ahmed Patel conspired against BJP govt after 2002 riots
Mangalore Today News Network
Ahmedabad, July 16, 2022: Activist Teesta Setalvad was part of a "larger conspiracy" carried out at the behest of late Congress leader Ahmed Patel to dismiss the BJP government in the state after the 2002 riots, the Gujarat police’s Special Investigation Team has claimed in an affidavit filed before the sessions court in Ahmedabad. Additional sessions judge DD Thakkar, which washearing Teesta’s bail plea, took the SIT’s reply on record and posted the hearing on the bail application on Monday.
Setalvad was arrested, along with former IPS officers R B Sreekumar and Sanjiv Bhatt, under charges of fabricating evidence to frame innocent people in Gujarat riots cases. "The political objective of the applicant (Setalvad) while enacting this larger conspiracy was dismissal or destabilisation of the elected government... She obtained illegal financial and other benefits and rewards from the rival political party in lieu of her attempts to wrongly implicate innocent persons in Gujarat," said the SIT’s affidavit.
Citing the statements of a witness, the SIT has told the court that the conspiracy was carried out at the behest of the late Ahmed Patel. At Patel’s behest, Setalvad received Rs 30 lakh after post-Godhra riots in 2002, the police have alleged. “Setalvad used to meet the leaders of a "prominent national party in power at that time in Delhi to implicate names of senior leaders of the BJP government in riot cases," the SIT further claimed.
The affidavit by the police cited another witness to claim that Setalvad in 2006 had asked a Congress leader why the party was giving "chance to only Shabana and Javed" and not making her a member of the Rajya Sabha.
Last month, a day after the Supreme Court upheld the clean chit given to then chief minister Narendra Modi and others in the Gujarat riots case, state police arrested Setalvad. She, along with Sreekumar and Bhatt, was booked under IPC sections 468 (forgery) and 194 (giving or fabricating false evidence with intent to procure conviction for capital offence) among other offences.
The Congress party has dismissed the SIT’s claims in the affidavit and called them “mischievous charges” that have been “manufactured” against Ahmed Patel.
“This is part of the Prime Minister’s systematic strategy to absolve himself of any responsibility for the communal carnage unleashed when he was chief minister of Gujarat in 2002. It was his unwillingness and incapacity to control this carnage that had led the then Prime Minister of India Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee to remind the chief minister of his raj dharma,” the Congress said in a statement.
“The Prime Minister’s political vendetta machine clearly does not even spare the departed who were his political adversaries. This SIT is dancing to the tune of its political master and will sit wherever it is told to. We know how an earlier SIT chief was rewarded with a diplomatic assignment after he had given a ’clean chit’ to the chief minister,” the statement, signed by Jairam Ramesh, who is the General Secretary incharge of communications in the Congress, said.
The statement added, “Giving judgment through press, in an ongoing judicial process, through puppet investigative agencies who trumpet wild allegations as supposed findings, has been the hallmark of the Modi-Shah duo’s tactics for years. This is nothing but another example of the same, with the added object of vilifying a deceased person since he is obviously unable and unavailable to refute such brazen lies.”
Courtesy: The News Minute