Union minister Arun Jaitley accused the Congress of vilifying the entire Hindu community using the Samjhauta Express blast case.

At a news conference on Friday in the BJP headquarters in Delhi, Jaitley said: “Yeh Hindu aatankwaad ka naara jo Congress ne diya tha vote bank ke liye… unhone farzi evidence ke base pe yeh theory banayi thi (this slogan of Hindu terror that the Congress made up for the vote bank politics…. They created this theory on the basis of baseless evidence.)”

On March 28, a special NIA court said the anti-terror agency lost some valuable piece of evidence. Special court judge Jagdeep Singh said that according to the prosecution’s case, the covers of suitcases with the unexploded improvised bombs were bought from Kothari market in Indore and found to have been stitched by a tailor there. The judge added that, “very strangely”, the agency did not a get an identification parade of suspects conducted to establish this.

Sixty-eight people, mostly from Pakistan, were killed in the train blast in February 2007 near Panipat, Haryana.

The court acquitted all four accused – Swami Aseemanand, Lokesh Sharma, Kamal Chauhan and Rajinder Chaudhary – on March 20. The judgment was made public on Thursday.

At today's news conference, Jaitley said: “During the UPA and Congress tenure, they tainted the entire community without any evidence…. Innocents were killed and under a political theory of Hindu terror you arrested the wrong people. All the investigation was done in 2007-09. You kept these accused in jails for 10 years. Then you filed the chargesheet. The trial started on the evidence you gathered. And the judge said that it is a case of no evidence.”

The judge, however, said that the identification parade “might have given some vital clue about real culprits involved in the crime”.

Jaitley countered such comments by saying that this parade should have been done in 2007-08 when the case was brought. “In the end, the court has to decide the case on the basis of eye witnesses and evidences,” the minister said.

The judge also said the agency “failed to prove the charge of conspiracy”. While the case was on, of the 224 witnesses summoned, 51 turned hostile, severely impairing the cause of justice.

A former director-general (law and order) of Haryana police, Vikash Narain Rai, who had investigated the case initially tracking the evidence trail to RSS member Sunil Joshi, had told a newspaper that the NIA had “gone soft” on the case. He also said acquittals were expected since the prosecution was eager to bury the truth.

The judge recalled that the NIA had said that during the investigation it learned through telephone call records that one of the accused, Sunil Joshi, was in the Kothari market area on February 14, 2007, four days before the blast.

The anti-terror agency also submitted that call records show Joshi’s connection with Sandeep Dange and Aseemanand in February-March 2007.

A witness, who was on the train, said that some persons had got down from the general coaches, “meaning thereby that some suspects are stated to have de-boarded the train after start of journey”, according to the judgment. “However, there is no investigation on this aspect and in fact as per the version put forth by the investigating agency, none of the accused persons travelled on the Samjhauta Express train and the accused had allegedly planted explosives in the train at the platform of the Old Delhi Railway Station and escaped then and there,” the judgment said.

Jaitley on Friday said that perhaps it was because of this case that “those who considered Hindus as terrorists are today busy showing their devotion to the religion… and the entire community will never tolerate being labelled as terrorists”.

He quoted a portion of the judgment that said “‘there was no evidence regarding any meeting of minds between the accused to commit the crime’. No concrete oral, documentary or scientific evidence was brought on record to connect the accused, facing the trial, with the crime in question,” he said.