Teesta Setalvad's plea: Gujarat High Court judge, Justice Samir Save on Thursday (August 3) recused himself from hearing a plea filed by social activist Teesta Setalvad seeking the quashing of an FIR by the Ahmedabad crime branch for allegedly fabricating evidence in the 2002 riots cases.
“Not before me,” Justice Save said when the matter came up for hearing. The case will now be allotted by the chief justice of the high court to a new judge.
A sessions court had rejected Setalvad’s discharge plea in the case last month, after the Supreme Court granted her bail after the Gujarat High Court denied relief to her.
Setalvad then moved Gujarat High Court seeking quashing of the FIR.
Setalvad and two others - former state Director General of Police R B Sreekumar and former Indian Police Service officer Sanjiv Bhatt - were arrested by the city crime branch in June 2022 on charges of forgery and fabricating evidence with the intent to implicate the Gujarat government functionaries in the 2002 riots cases.
An FIR was registered against them after the Supreme Court last month dismissed the plea filed by Zakia Jafri, whose husband and former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was killed during the riots.
Setalvad was booked under sections 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) and 194 (giving or fabricating false evidence with intent to procure conviction for capital offence) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), among others.
Gujarat government on Setalvad
During a hearing in the sessions court earlier, the state government alleged that Setalvad drafted affidavits in the names of victims to implicate innocent persons including the then chief minister (now Prime Minister Narendra Modi), senior officers, and ministers.
Jafri’s plea alleged a ‘larger conspiracy’ behind the 2002 post-Godhra riots in Gujarat which involved then CM Narendra Modi.
The SIT’s clean chit to then CM Modi and 63 others was upheld by the court.
“At the end of the day, it appears to us that a coalesced effort of the disgruntled officials of the State of Gujarat along with others was to create sensation by making revelations which were false to their own knowledge,” the Supreme Court observed in its judgment.
Ehsan Jafri was among the 68 people killed at Ahmedabad's Gulberg Society during violence on February 28, 2002, a day after the Godhra train burning that claimed 59 lives.
The riots that it triggered killed 1,044 people. The Central government had informed the Rajya Sabha in May 2005 that 254 Hindus and 790 Muslims were killed in the post-Godhra riots.
(With PTI inputs)
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