Responding to the Gujarat SIT charges against activist Teesta Setalvad, which named the late Congress leader Ahmed Patel, an INC statement called the case “manufactured”. “The Congress categorically refutes the mischievous charges manufactured against the late Shri 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 rajdharma,” Jairam Ramesh, the in-charge of the party’s communications, said in a statement.
Moving against activist Teesta Setalvad’s bail application, the Gujarat Police SIT had claimed she 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. Additional sessions judge D.D. Thakkar took the SIT’s reply on record and posted the hearing on Setalvad’s bail application on Monday.
Setalvad has been arrested, along with former IPS officers R.B. Sreekumar and Sanjiv Bhatt, for allegedly 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 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 said the conspiracy was carried out at the behest of late Ahmed Patel. At Patel’s behest, Setalvad received Rs 30 lakh after post-Godhra riots in 2002. 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.
It 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.
