Charges against Ahmed Patel manufactured & mischievous: Congress

New Delhi: The Congress on Saturday dismissed as "mischievous and manufactured", Gujarat police SIT's charges that its leader Ahmed Patel had financed civil rights activist Teesta Sitalwad and hatched conspiracy to dislodge the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi-led state government.

"This is part of the Prime Minister's systematic strategy to absolve himself of any responsibility for the communal carnage unleashed when he was chief minister of Gujarat in 2002. It was his unwillingness and incapacity to control this carnage that had led the-then Prime Minister of India Atal Bihari Vajpayee to remind the chief minister of his rajdharma," Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh said.

The statement said that this is Prime Minister's political vendetta machine which does not even spare the departed who were his political adversaries.

"This SIT is dancing to the tune of its political master and will sit wherever it is told to. We know how an earlier SIT chief was rewarded with a diplomatic assignment after he had given a 'clean chit' to the chief minister," Jairam said.

He said giving judgment through press, in an ongoing judicial process, through puppet investigative agencies who trumpet wild allegations as supposed findings, has been the hallmark of the Modi-Shah duo's tactics for years.

"This is nothing but another example of the same, with the added object of vilifying a deceased person since he is obviously unable and unavailable to refute such brazen lies."