Ahmedabad: Congress leader Ahmed Patel, who passed away two years ago, conspired against Prime Minister Narendra Modi alongside activist Teesta Setalvad after the 2002 Gujarat riots, said the Gujarat Police’s Special Investigation Team before the session’s court.
The Gujarat police said this while opposing activist Teesta Setalvad’s bail application on Friday.
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, claimed an affidavit filed by the police’s Special Investigation Team before the sessions court.
Additional sessions judge D D Thakkar took the SIT’s reply on record and posted the hearing on the 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 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 said 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, it 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.
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.
The Congress on Saturday said the “mischievous” and “manufactured” allegations by the Gujarat Police against its late leader Ahmed Patel were part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “systematic strategy” to absolve himself of any responsibility for the communal carnage in 2002.
The Congress made this allegation in a statement issued by Jairam Ramesh, the party’s general secretary in-charge of the communication department.
Last month, a day after the Supreme Court upheld the clean chit given to then chief minister Narendra Modi and others in 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.
With inputs from PTI.
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