Charges Against Teesta Setalvad a Move to Eliminate her: Prof Madhu Prasad

Newsclick and Indian Cultural Forum covered the Public Hearing on the Hounding of Teesta Setalvad and Other Activists, held at the Press Club of India. Here, Professor Madhu Prasad , a close aide of Teesta Setalvad, remarks on the clear intervention of the state upon agencies that are designed to function independently. She cites the Best Bakery Case as the first instance of the opposition to state protection of the perpetrators of communal violence. She also cites the Zakia Jaffrey case in the Gulberg Society massacre as the first instance of the law holding the state administration responsible for widespread communal violence. She also emphasised the importance of the SIT Closure Report being made available in the public domain. Jaffrey received the Special Investigation Team (SIT) Closure Report in February 2013 after repeated appeals to the Supreme Court. The Report includes 23,000 pages of evidence containing administrative and police records. Prasad read out from the report which clearly indicts the state administration in the 2002 Gujarat riots. Some of them are excerpted here : “The SIT Report does not deny that post-mortems of the kar sevaks killed in Godhra were done in public; that photographs of 59 burnt corpses went viral on the internet; that a meeting was held in the Collector's office where the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's Jaideep Patel was allowed to be present”.