Rajeev Khanna, IANS
Ahmedabad : Angry over Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s apparent justification of the staged police killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, the victim’s brother said Wednesday that he would approach the Supreme Court against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader.
Addressing a rally in south Gujarat Tuesday ahead of the assembly elections next week, Modi had said: “Sohrabuddin got what he deserved.”
However, the victim’s elder brother Rubabuddin Sheikh asked: “Why is Modi referring to my brother as a terrorist just six days before the polling in Gujarat?
“If the Gujarat government was convinced that he was a terrorist then why did it not say so in black and white in its affidavit before the Supreme Court?” Sheikh told IANS on telephone from Nagda in Madhya Pradesh.
Sohrabuddin Sheikh was killed in a police shootout near here in 2005. Police had termed him as a terrorist. However, Rubabuddin Sheikh filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking an investigation.
Following the court orders, the Gujarat police this year launched an investigation, booking several senior police officers even as the state government admitted in an affidavit that cops had erred in killing the Muslim youth.
Over the last two days, Modi has made a reference to the killing in his election rallies and has been challenging the central government to hang him if he was guilty.
Rubabuddin Sheikh said: “How can he justify the killing of my brother for which police officials have been arrested? I will take it up in the Supreme Court and ask for stringent action against him.”
He said he was going to file a complaint to the Election Commission seeking Modi’s disqualification to contest the elections.
“How does the government explain the killing of Sohrabuddin’s wife Kausar Bi? She was an innocent who was also killed by them.
“Fearing an electoral defeat at the hands of his opponents, Modi has lost his mental balance and has been talking like this. Does he have no respect for law? He knows that very soon he will be the ex-chief minister of Gujarat,” Rubabuddin Sheikh said.
Dinsha Patel, a central minister and Congress candidate fighting against Modi in the Maninagar constituency, said: “Since Modi knows that his fake development agenda is not going to get votes for his party, he has started raising such issues and is talking in such a language.
“I want to ask him, why is it that the terrorists have stopped coming to Gujarat to attack him since the police officials involved in the fake killings in the state were arrested?”
However, BJP general secretary and Gujarat poll in-charge Arun Jaitley said, “It was a mere reference to an incident in his speech which the media decided to play up.
“It is the Congress and its president Sonia Gandhi who have taken the campaign agenda from development to other issues. It is they who have started calling Modi and his team ‘maut ke saudagar’ (merchants of death). It is they who have talked of ‘Hindu terrorism’ in Gujarat. Now when things have gone on that track, these will obviously be debated in public.”