On Monday, the Supreme Court adjourned the hearing of a plea by Zakia Jafri in a case challenging a clean chit given to PM Modi during the 2002 Gujarat riots. The hearing is adjourned till the third week of January 2019.
Zakia is the widow of Ehsan Jafri, a former Congress leader and MP, who was killed in one of the worst incidents during the 2002 Godhra riots.
Zakia had challenged the decision to cancel her plea in the Gujarat High Court in 2017. The court had put aside the plea. The plea challenged the clean chit given to Modi.
Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, who had appeared on behalf of the Special Investigating Team(SIT), which had given the clean chit, said that Ms Jafri’s plea was not maintainable and had also argued against social activist Teesta Setalvad to be the second petitioner in the case.
The lawyers for Zakia said that the plea concerned an alleged “larger conspiracy” during the period between February 27, 2002 and May 2002. Her counsel alleged that when the case was before the trial judge, a protest filed by the petitioner was set aside without considering “substantiated merits”.
SIT filed its closure report on February 8, 2012, citing “no prosecutable evidence” against Modi and 63 others, and handed a clean chit to all the 64.
Zakia’s petition in SC says that the Gujarat High Court had “failed to appreciate” the petitioner’s complaint. She seeks an interim order to the SIT for carrying out a further investigation.
Ms Jafri submitted in her plea,”The present Special Leave Petition is filed before this Court against the final judgement and order dated October 5, 2017 passed by the High Court of Gujarat…which erroneously upheld the order of the magistrate accepting the closure report filed by the Special Investigative Agency appointed by this Court concerning the violence in Gujarat in 2002,”
A bench of Justices AM Khanwilkar and Hemant Gupta adjourned the plea till the third week of January next year.