The BJP on Saturday accused Sonia Gandhi of being the “driving force” behind an alleged plot to implicate Narendra Modi in the 2002 Gujarat riots, drawing on an affidavit that Gujarat police have placed in court to oppose bail for social activist Teesta Setalvad.

A special investigation team (SIT) has said in an affidavit before a sessions court that Setalvad and retired IPS officers R.B. Sreekumar and Sanjiv Bhatt were part of a “larger conspiracy” hatched by late Congress leader Ahmed Patel to destabilise the government of then chief minister Modi after the riots. The affidavit alleges that Patel paid Setalvad Rs 30 lakh through a conduit.

“Ahmed Patel is just a name. The driving force behind Ahmed Patel was his office, Sonia Gandhi,” BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said at a media briefing, underlining that Patel was Sonia’s political secretary.

The Congress rejected the allegation against Patel and said Modi’s political vendetta doesn’t spare even the dead.

Congress communications chief Jairam Ramesh issued a rebuttal and condemned the vilification of “a deceased person (who) is unable and unavailable to refute such brazen lies”.

“The Prime Minister’s political vendetta machine clearly does not spare even the departed…. This SIT is dancing to the tune of its political master and will sit wherever it is told to,” he said.

“We know how an earlier SIT chief was rewarded with a diplomatic assignment after he gave a ‘clean chit’ to the chief minister (over charges of complicity in the 2002 riots).”

Patel’s daughter Mumtaz said: “I guess his name — Ahmed Patel — still holds weight to be used for political conspiracies to malign the Opposition. Why then, during the UPA years (2004-2014), was Teesta Setalvad not rewarded and made a Rajya Sabha member, and why did the (Modi-led) Centre, up until 2020 (when Patel died), not prosecute my father for supposedly hatching such a big conspiracy?”

Ramesh said: “The Indian National Congress categorically refutes the mischievous charges manufactured against the late Ahmed Patel. 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 raj dharma (duties as a ruler).”

Ramesh added: “Giving judgment through the 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.”

Through the two decades during which the riot cases have been heard in the trial courts, Gujarat High Court and the Supreme Court, the Gujarat police have never furnished any evidence suggesting Patel hatched any conspiracy or funded activists to destabilise the government.

The SIT has said that Setalvad, a critic of the then Modi-led Gujarat government’s role during and after the riots, nursed ambitions of getting into the Rajya Sabha. However, a wait of 20 years appears inordinately long for a Rajya Sabha nomination.

Setalvad was arrested on June 25, a day after the Supreme Court upheld the SIT’s clean chit to Modi over the riots and said those who “kept the pot boiling” through false depositions should be “put in the dock”. Her arrest has drawn widespread condemnation in India and abroad.

Patel, a Gujarat native, had been a key political player in the country for more than two decades. The BJP’s hostility towards him was demonstrated in its desperate bid to block his re-entry into the Rajya Sabha in mid-2017.

Later, at an Assembly election rally in December 2017, Modi had accused the Congress of conspiring with Pakistan to make Patel the chief minister. Posters mysteriously appeared at a few places appealing to Muslims to unite and help Patel become chief minister.

The Prime Minister had gone on to allege an international conspiracy to defeat the BJP in the Gujarat election. He had made insinuations about a meeting at Mani Shankar Aiyar’s residence that was attended by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, former Vice-President Hamid Ansari, the Pakistan high commissioner and senior retired Indian Army officers.

All those present at the meeting had expressed outrage at Modi’s charges and denied any political objective behind the event. Manmohan Singh had expressed pain at the “ill-thought transgression” by Modi and asked him to apologise for the “innuendos and falsehoods”.

After winning the Gujarat election, the BJP promptly forgot about the whole thing instead of pursuing it legally. But the Congress kicked up a ruckus, shutting down Parliament to demand an apology from the Prime Minister.

The then leader of the Rajya Sabha, Arun Jaitley, finally tendered an apology admitting that what the Prime Minister had said was wrong. But Modi himself has never spoken about the matter since.

Just as the “Patel as chief minister” bogey was raised ahead of the 2017 Assembly election, the Congress believes that the charge of “larger conspiracy to defame and destabilise Modi” would be used to the hilt to polarise voters in the run-up to this year-end’s polls.

And as a Muslim Congress leader, Ahmed Patel, even though dead, is likely to be resurrected to squeeze political mileage one more time.