Mumbai, July 26 (IANS) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Nitin Gadkari Monday reiterated his party’s stance by alleging that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was using the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) as a ‘weapon of vendetta’.
Addressing mediapersons at the BJP state headquarters here, Gadkari said the government had declared ‘a hostile political war against Gujarat’, referring to the arrest of former Gujarat minister Amit Shah by the CBI in connection with the killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh.
‘The Sohrabuddin encounter probe by CBI was to target BJP and to keep Congress out. This is evident from the fact that though the then Andhra Pradesh government of Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy was equally involved in the arrest and encounter (shootout) death of Sohrabuddin, the CBI completely left out his government from the radar,’ Gadkari claimed.
This is despite the fact that the Supreme Court had specifically observed that the identity of the seven Andhra Pradesh policemen, who had accompanied Sohrabuddin, was not known in the probe conducted by the Gujarat government. This was one of the reasons the apex court handed over the matter to the CBI.
‘The CBI had not bothered to interrogate the AP government or its police officials at all. What other proof is needed to show that it (CBI) did only what the Congress would have liked it to do? It has acquired the identity of becoming the ‘Congress Bureau of Investigation’ to vitiate the atmosphere against BJP,’ Gadkari added.
Gadkari accused the Congress of using the Sohrabuddin staged shootout case to promote its vote bank politics ahead of the Bihar legislative assembly polls and said that the BJP was prepared to fight the case against Amit Shah legally and politically.
The BJP chief noted that under the UPA rule, ‘terrorists are treated with biryani but the patriotic police officials and their political bosses who deal with terrorists are humiliated like hardened criminals’.
Gadkari pointed out that by ‘fabricating false and frivolous charges through the CBI’, and by arresting Shah, the UPA government has ‘declared a political war on the best performing state government in the country’ led by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
Touching upon other issues, Gadkari said the government had failed to tackle inflation, infiltration in Jammu and Kashmir, the Maoist menace and even the foreign minister’s recent visit to Pakistan had failed.
