HINDU NATIONALIST STATE

Activist Held as Court Strikes Petition Against Modi

Ronojoy Mazumdar and Upmanyu Trivedi
Sun, June 26, 2022 at 2:14 AM·1 min read

(Bloomberg) -- Police detained an activist linked to a petition to probe Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in orchestrating deadly violence in Gujarat state in 2002, the Hindustan Times reported.

Teesta Setalvad, secretary of human rights group Citizens for Justice and Peace, was taken from her home in Mumbai by police on Saturday, and later transported to Ahmedabad in Gujarat, the organization said in a statement on Saturday. She has been detained by the Gujarat Anti Terrorism Squad on “trumped up charges” that are “part of an elaborate witch hunt,” it said.

Calls to Mumbai police were not answered while an official with the Gujarat police declined to comment. Setalvad didn’t immediately respond to calls and emails requesting comment.

Setalvad’s reported detention follows the Supreme Court’s dismissal of the petition on Friday against a special investigative team’s findings in 2012. A decade earlier, religious riots when Modi was chief minister of Gujarat left more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead. The Citizens for Justice and Peace was formed to advocate for the victims of that violence.

“It appears to us that a coalesced effort of the disgruntled officials of the State of Gujarat along with others was to create sensation by making revelations which were false to their own knowledge,” the Supreme Court said in a judgment Friday. “All those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with law.”