The Supreme Court on Thursday deferred the hearing of activist Teesta Setalvad’s bail plea to August 30, Live Law reported. The activist was arrested on June 26 for allegedly committing forgery and fabricating evidence in a case related to the 2002 Gujarat riots.
The hearing was postponed after Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing on behalf of the Centre, sought additional time to make some corrections in the government’s response to the case.
A bench of Justices UU Lalit, S Ravindra Bhat and Sudhanshu Dhulia had initially asked Mehta to submit the response at 2 pm on Thursday.
The solicitor general, however, said that there was nothing special about the case and that Setalvad was in custody in accordance with the law. In response, Justice Lalit said that the court was concerned that the person is behind bars.
“We have to test whether her incarceration is needed,” he added.
The Supreme Court had earlier agreed to hear Setalvad’s plea for interim relief on Thursday, despite the proceedings pending before the Gujarat High Court. It had also asked the Gujarat government to file its response in the case.
The Gujarat High Court had sought the response of the Special Investigation Team looking into the case after Setalvad moved a bail plea on August 1. The court had posted the matter for hearing on September 19.
Setalvad objected to this long gap between the date of hearings and approached the Supreme Court on August 16. In her plea, she cited the Supreme Court judgement in the Satendar Kumar Antil versus the Central Bureau of Investigation case, stating that bail pleas must be heard expeditiously.
On July 30, an Ahmedabad court denied bail to Setalvad and former Director General of Police RB Sreekumar. They were arrested on June 26 from their homes in Mumbai and Gandhinagar.
The court said that documents submitted by the police showed that Setalvad and Sreekumar used Zakia Jafri, the wife of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, as a tool to make allegations against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was the chief minister of Gujarat during the 2002 riots.
Ehsan Jafri was hacked to death when a mob went on a rampage in Ahmedabad’s Gulberg Society on February 28, 2002, setting fire to homes.
Zakia Jafri and Setalvad’s non-governmental organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace had moved the Supreme Court challenging the report of a Special Investigation Team that had cleared Modi of charges of being involved in the riots. They sought a fresh investigation into the “larger conspiracy” behind the violence.
In the aftermath of the carnage, Setalvad founded the organisation that assisted the victims in filing cases, arranged funds to pursue the matters in courts and offered protection to witnesses. Sreekumar, meanwhile, had questioned the role of officers from his own department during the riots.
On June 24, the Supreme Court dismissed Zakia Jafri and Setalvad’s plea challenging Modi’s exoneration in the violence.
While dismissing the petition, the court noted that certain people had filed the petition “to keep the pot boiling for ulterior design”. It said that these people must be “in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with law”.
A day after the judgement, Setalvad and Sreekumar were booked by the Gujarat Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad. The first information report filed against them quoted heavily from the Supreme Court judgement.
Just before she was arrested, Union Home Minister Amit Shah accused Setalvad of feeding baseless information to the police about the riots to tarnish Modi’s image.
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