Gujarat High Court judge Justice Samir Dave on Tuesday recused himself from hearing the regular bail petition of activist Teesta Setalvad in a case of alleged forgery and fabrication of evidence, Bar and Bench reported.
“Not before me,” Justice Dave said when the matter came up for hearing. He did not assign any reason.
The bail application will now be placed before the chief justice, who will assign it to another bench.
Setalvad, along with former state Director General of Police RB Sreekumar and former Indian Police Service officer Sanjiv Bhatt, is accused of fabricating evidence pertaining to the 2002 Gujarat riots to destabilise the state government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat at the time.
Setalvad and Sreekumar were arrested on June 26. Their bail pleas were rejected by the sessions court on July 30, after which they approached the high court.
Setalvad later moved the Supreme Court after objecting to a long gap between the hearings in the high court. She was granted interim bail on September 2.
Meanwhile, on September 28, Sreekumar secured interim bail till November 15 from the Gujarat High Court. The court had said at the time that it would hear a fresh petition by Sreekumar seeking bail along with the plea by Setalvad on November 15.
Arrests of Setalvad and Sreekumar
On June 24, the Supreme Court dismissed Zakia Jafri and Setalvad’s plea challenging Modi’s exoneration in the violence. Zakia Jafri is the wife of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, was hacked to death when a mob went on a rampage in Gulberg Society in Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002, setting fire to homes.
While dismissing the petition, the Supreme Court had 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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