Stung by the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) charge sheet naming Leader of the Opposition in Rajasthan Gulab Chand Kataria in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, the Bharatiya Janata Party said on Wednesday that it was a “well-planned conspiracy” by the agency executed at the behest of the Congress. The constitution of a Group of Ministers (GoM) to consider freeing the CBI from the government’s influence was a sham, it alleged.
BJP president Rajnath Singh, flanked by Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley and Rajasthan unit chief Vasundhara Raje, asserted at a news conference that his party would explore all options to defend Mr. Kataria. They argued that the CBI “concocted a new fictional case” against Mr. Kataria after it had failed to link the former Gujarat Home Minister, Amit Shah, to the encounter. The charge sheet against Mr. Kataria was part of the CBI’s larger “conspiracy” to implicate senior BJP leaders, at the behest of the Congress. The BJP president said the CBI had earlier chargesheeted Mr. Shah and when the matter came to court, it turned out that there was negligible or no evidence.
“The bail granted to Mr. Shah by the trial court was confirmed right till the Supreme Court. It appears from media reports that since the fictional story of a conspiracy involving Mr. Shah did not hold together, a new story has now been concocted of the two former Home Ministers engineering the encounter at the behest of some marble traders,” Mr. Singh said. The leaders said an effort was also made to implicate senior party leader Rajender Rathore in another case of alleged encounter.
