Gujarat HC rejects Zakia Jafri’s plea against clean chit to Modi over 2002 riots

There was no conspiracy in the 2002 Gujarat riots, the high court in Ahmedabad said on Thursday, upholding a report of a special investigation team that cleared 59 top state ministers and bureaucrats, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was then the chief minister.

The petition, filed by Zakia Jafri — the widow of Congress leader Ehsan Jafri who was one of the victims of the communal violence — and Tessta Setalvad’s Citizens for Justice and Peace specifically challenged the findings of the SIT and the ruling of a lower court that upheld it.

The HC, however, allowed Jafri to approach the magisterial courts or higher courts for further investigation.

Mobs went on a rampage in Gujarat killing Muslims and burning down their homes in 2002 in retaliation to a fire on a train that killed Hindus. Modi and his top officers were at the time accused of being complicit in the violence, a charge that was rejected by a Supreme Court-monitored special investigation team.

Ehsan Jafri, a Congress leader, was among 68 people who were killed at the Gulberg Society, a day after the Godhra train burning incident.

The SIT submitted before the high court that its probe was conducted under the Supreme Court’s attention, and its report was largely accepted by all.

In December 2013, a metropolitan court had rejected Jafri’s plea to book Modi and others for criminal conspiracy, after which she moved the Gujarat High Court in 2014.

On Thursday, the high court rejected her plea and upheld the SIT’s closure report.

Jafri’s lawyer Mihir Desai argued in the HC that the magistrate, while accepting the SIT’s closure report, did not even consider other options such as rejecting the report or ordering a fresh probe.

The lower court ignored the Supreme Court guidelines and did not consider signed statements of witnesses which suggested that there was a conspiracy, he argued.