NEW DELHI: The Congress on Saturday dismissed as "mischievous and manufactured", Gujarat police SIT's charges that its leader Ahmed Patel had financed civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad and hatched a conspiracy to dislodge the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi-led state government.
"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 Atal Bihari Vajpayee to remind the chief minister of his 'rajdharma'," Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh said.
The statement said that this is Prime Minister's political vendetta machine which 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," Jairam said.
He said 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."
Setalvad has been arrested, along with former IPS officers R B Sreekumar and Sanjiv Bhatt, for allegedly fabricating evidence to frame innocent people in the Gujarat riots case.
Citing the statements of a witness, the SIT HAD 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, 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.
Last month, the Supreme Court dismissed the plea filed by Zakia Jafri, widow of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, challenging the clean chit given by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to then Chief Minister Narendra Modi and several others in the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Ehsan Jafri was among 69 people killed during violence at the Gulbarg Society in Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002. His widow Zakia Jafri challenged the SIT's clean chit to 64 people including Narendra Modi who was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time.
After 58 pilgrims were burnt alive on the Sabarmati Express train at Gujarat's Godhra Railway Station on February 27, 2002, riots broke out across the state in which more than 1,000 people were killed. (ANI)
(With online desk inputs)