By Online Desk
Activist Teesta Setalvad was taken into custody by the Gujarat Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad from Mumbai in connection with a foreign fund case related to her NGO, on Saturday, news agency ANI reported.
The move of the Gujarat ATS comes hours after Union Home Minister Amit Shah in his interview with news agency ANI slammed Teesta Setalvad and said her NGO gave baseless information about the Gujarat riots. “I have read the judgment very carefully. The judgement clearly mentions the name of Teesta Setalvad. The NGO that was run being run by her – I don’t remember the name of the NGO- had given baseless information about the riots to the police,” Amit Shah, in an exclusive interview, told ANI.
On Friday, the Supreme Court had questioned the role of those who had “kept the pot boiling” on the 2002 Gujarat riots – seen as an allusion to Setalvad’s NGO that has worked extensively with the victims of the violence.
Setalvad’s NGO had provided information about the 2002 riots to the police and her name has been mentioned in the Supreme Court judgment which upheld the SIT’s clean chit to Narendra Modi.
The activist’s lawyer said cops had barged into her house in Mumbai and assaulted her. She was later taken to Santa Cruz police station. Later, she will be taken to Ahmedabad, her lawyer added.
The apex court on Friday, while rejecting an appeal by Zakia Jafri, wife of Congress MP Ehsan Jafri who was killed in the violence, said that the appeal was “devoid of merits.”
A three-judge bench headed by Justice AM Khanwilkar, upholding the Special Investigation Team or SIT’s 2012 clean chit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Gujarat riots case, said that Setalvad, co-petitioner in the case, exploited the emotions of Zakia Jafri.
All those involved in such abuse of process need to be in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with law,” the judges said, adding that the appeal was filed under “dictation of someone.”
“Antecedents of Teesta Setalvad need to be reckoned with and also because she has been vindictively persecuting this lis [dispute] for her ulterior design by exploiting the emotions and sentiments of Zakia Jafri, the real victim of the circumstances,” the top court said in its order.
The case pertains to what came to be known as Gulbarg Society incident, in which 68 people, including former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, were killed in the riots triggered by the burning of a train coach in which 59 pilgrims perished in February 2002. A decade later, the SIT report, exonerated Narendra Modi, citing “no prosecutable evidence” in the Gulbarg Society case.
