The Supreme Court on Monday deferred to November 26 the hearing of a petition filed by the widow of a former Congress MP, Ehsan Jafri, challenging the clean chit given by a special investigation team (SIT) to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others in connection with the 2002 post-Godhra riots.
Ehsan Jafri was among 68 people who were killed at the Gulberg Society in Ahmedabad when a mob attacked it on February 28, 2002, a day after a coach of the Sabarmati Express, carrying kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya, was burnt down in Godhra, killing 58. Modi was then chief minister of Gujarat.
In 2012, the SIT filed a closure report, giving a clean chit to Modi and 63 others, in the Gulberg Society massacre, following which Ehsan's wife, Zakia Jafri, filed a plea in the Gujarat High Court .The Gujarat High Court rejected her plea against the SIT report in October 2017.
The Supreme Court had on November 13 announced it would be taking up the petition of Zakia Jafri on Monday. During proceedings in court on Monday, the Supreme Court objected to activist Teesta Setalvad wanting to be made co-petitioner with Zakia. Setalvad has been a prominent critic of Modi's record with respect to the Gujarat riots.
On November 13, a Supreme Court bench of Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and Deepak Gupta said Zakia Jafri's plea would be heard on Monday as the court had not gone through her petition in detail. Zakia's lawyer C.U. Singh said her plea needed to be heard as it pertained to the “larger conspiracy behind the Gujarat riots”.
Zakia's petition argued that the Gujarat High Court order be set aside as “It failed to appreciate that the then chief minister and other prominent members of the political rightwing made inflammatory speeches, the home department turned a blind eye towards various SIB reports for prosecuting certain VHP office bearers and publishing houses for propagating an incendiary rhetoric, which would amount to an offence under the IPC."
(With PTI inputs)
