The SC heard senior advocate Kapil Sibal in the plea challenging the SIT report giving clean chit to the erstwhile Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi and other high functionaries in the Gujarat Riots of 2002.
Kapil Sibal was appearing for the Petitioner, Zakia Jafri, widow of Congress MLA Ehsan Jafri, who was killed in the Gulberg Housing Society massacre during the 2002, before a bench of Justices A M Khanwilkar, C T Ravikumar and Dinesh Maheshwari. Zakia had filed a complaint in 2006 before director general of police alleging larger conspiracy behind the riots.
There was no action taken on the basis of the FIR due to which she moved to the Gujarat HC which again refused to intervene, as a result she was forced to move to SC. The Supreme Court directed the SIT already constituted by its directions in National Human Rights Commission v. State of Gujarat (2009) to also look into Jafris complaint.
Mr Sibal made it clear that he would demonstrate how the SIT did not conduct any enquiry at all. He also provided an interpretation of Article 21 of the Constitution - It is a mandate for the protection of personal liberty, but in another aspect, it is also a mandate for deprivation of liberty.
He also highlighted that SIT ignored the tapes of the sting operation done by Tehelka in which many people had given open statements about their participation in the violence and accumulation of weapons and bombs.
Although the same tapes were used for conviction in the Naroda Patya case, and although the Gujarat High Court had endorsed the authenticity of the tapes, the SIT ignored them in Zakia Jafri's complaint. Sibal submitted that the SIT did not even seize the phones of the persons in the sting tapes and gather their call data records. Sibal highlighted that the SIT discarded the testimony of the then Gujarat ADGP RB Sreekumar IPS on the ground that he was making the statement due to denial of promotion.
The Bench noted that Mr. Sibal in his Protest Petition was indeed hinting at a larger conspiracy. Agreeing to the same, Mr. Sibal submitted - "We are suggesting a common chain
Prakash Jaisinghani Nov 11, 2021