Modi endured false claims: Shah
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi “silently endured” the pain of false allegations for 19 years without speaking a word, like “Lord Shiva who swallowed poison and held it in his throat”, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and Union home minister Amit Shah said on Saturday, a day after the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal challenging the clean chit to Modi and others in the 2002 Gujarat riots case.
Shah also sought an apology from people who levelled “politically motivated” allegations against the then Gujarat chief minister following the riots, saying that the truth had come out, “shining like gold.”
“Only a strong-willed person could have taken a stand to not say anything till the judicial process reaches its finality. Our tall leader (Modi) endured the pain of these politically motivated false allegations for 19 long years without saying a word. I saw him suffering through this very closely,” Shah, Modi’s trusted deputy for years, said in an interview with the news agency ANI.
The home minister said the Gujarat government had done everything in its power to control the riots in 2002.
He accused opposition parties, ideologically motivated journalists and some NGOs for spreading false allegations against Modi, saying that this “trikut” or trio created an ecosystem where they “started believing the lies to be true”.
“But, the public sees everything. We have never lost an election in Gujarat. The mandate tells us the public didn’t believe in these lies,” he said.
Hailing the Supreme Court order, Shah demanded an apology from “motivated persons”, who he said targeted Modi for years, naming activist Teesta Setalvad as one of the persons.
The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the clean chit given by a special investigation team (SIT) to 64 people, including Modi, in the Gujarat riots case. The court dismissed a plea by late Con
gress MP Ehsan Jafri’s wife Zakia Jafri, stating that the plea was “devoid of merit and tried to create sensation by making false revelations”. Jafri was among 68 people killed in the Gulbarg Society massacre during the riots.
Apart from concluding that there is no tangible material to prove that the riots were statesponsored, pre-planned, and a conspiracy hatched at the highest level in the state to target the minority community following the Godhra train burning incident in February 2002, a threejudge bench led by Justice AM Khanwilkar was also scathing in its criticism of the “sensation creating” statements of “disgruntled officials” that claimed this.
Referring to the observation made by the apex court, Shah noted that in its order, the court said that the state government under Modi made all efforts to control the riots and had taken the right decisions at the right time.
Asked if there was a delay in state government under Modi requisitioning army to control the riots, Shah said the state government’s response was “swift and neutral”.
“When the Gujarat bandh (curfew) was declared, we called in the army. It takes some time for army to reach,” he said.
Rejecting assertions that Modi influenced the SIT probe, Shah said “it was a court monitored probe. The officers appointed in the SIT came from Centre. How could it have been influenced?”
He also took a jibe at Congress for not doing anything in 1984 anti-Sikh riots despite army headquarters being in Delhi. “How many SITs were constituted then? An SIT was formed in 1984 riots after our government came to the power,” Shah said.