Gujarat High Court rejects Teesta Setalvad’s bail plea, asks her to ‘surrender immediately’

Senior advocate Mihir Thakore, following the pronouncement of judgment on Setalvad’s bail plea by Justice Nirzar Desai, requested the court to stay the operation of the verdict for a period of 30 days but Justice Desai rejected the request.

Setalvad was arrested by the Gujarat Police on June 25, 2022, on an FIR by the Ahmedabad Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) on alleged charges of conspiring to falsely implicate innocent people in connection with the 2002 Gujarat riots. She was kept in police remand for seven days and was sent to judicial custody on July 2.

Her arrest, along with that of co-accused former IPS R B Sreekumar had come just a day after the Supreme Court on June 24 had dismissed a plea by Zakia Jafri, wife of slain Congress MP Ahsan Jafri, against the Special Investigation Team (SIT) clean chit to then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi and others over allegations of conspiracy in the riots.

The Supreme Court in its verdict had observed that proceedings were pursued to “keep the pot boiling, obviously, for ulterior design” and said “all those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock and proceed in accordance with law”.

The charge sheet filed by the SIT alleges that Setalvad, in a bid to implicate “then chief minister (and now Prime Minister Narendra Modi) and higher officials of the state government and top leaders of the BJP” for the large-scale deaths due to the 2002 communal riots “with death sentence”, hatched “a conspiracy” to institute a “false case with false evidence”.