Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) President Sharad Pawar on Friday termed the recent acquittal of 69 accused in the brutal 2002 Naroda Gam (Gujarat) riots as a “murder” of the judiciary and the Constitution. Addressing a party meeting, Pawar said that there were riots, there were deaths (11) and the accused included ruling party leaders, MLAs and ministers, many of whom were arrested and released on bail. was given. “Now, the court’s verdict has come, all 69 accused have been acquitted in that incident. Along with the murders of the victims in those communal riots, the judiciary and the Constitution have also been murdered. Threatened by the ED,” he said. , “ED or CBI have become household names.”
Continuing the same context, he referred to a senior NCP leader, Anil Deshmukh, who was arrested by the ED in late 2021 on bribery charges of Rs 100 crore, spent 13 months in jail and barely 1.25 in the charge sheet. There is a mention of a donation of Rs.- cr. Similarly, in the case of another NCP leader, Nawab Malik – jailed for over 14 months, news keeps coming in that his bail plea is on some other date, Pawar said. Adopting the stand of the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), Pawar demanded a probe into the April 16 Navi Mumbai tragedy that killed 14 people after Union Home Minister Amit Shah presented the ‘Maharashtra Bhushan Award’ 2022 to reformer Dattatreya Narayan Dharmadhikari. People had died. Pawar said, “It was a state government program and there was negligence in organizing the program. An officer will not report against his own administration, only an inquiry by a retired judge can bring out the truth.”
Referring to former Jammu and Kashmir governor Satya Pal Malik’s comments, the NCP supremo alleged that no probe has yet been ordered into the February 2019 terror attack in Pulwama in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. Accompanied by top NCP leaders, Pawar appealed to his party workers to start preparations for the upcoming civic, Lok Sabha and assembly polls and strengthen the ‘booth-level’ and improve contact with the public.