NEW DELHI: The public prosecutor in right-wing Hindu terror cases, including the Samjhauta Express blasts, has accused the Modi government of asking her to go soft on the accused, the Indian Express reported on Thursday.

“Since this new government came, I have been told to go soft on accused (Hindu extremists),” Maharashtra state’s Special Public Prosecutor Rohini Salian said in an interview.

Ms Salian said she wanted the federal investigating body for terrorist cases (NIA) to officially denotify her from the case to which she was appointed in 2008, “so that I am free to take up other cases, against the NIA, if need be”.

Soon after the Modi government came to power last year, she said, she got a call from one of  the officers of the NIA — the agency investigating all the alleged Hindu extremist cases — asking to come over to speak with her. “He didn’t want to talk over the phone. He came and said to me that there is a message that I should go soft,” Salian told the paper.

The NIA issued a statement on Thursday denying Ms Salian’s charges. The apex anti-terror body said Ms Salian was due to finish her tenure in August, and no pressure was applied on her to influence the cases. 

Ms Salian said matters came to a head this month, on June 12, when just before one of the regular hearings in the case in the Sessions Court, she was told by the same NIA officer that “higher-ups” did not want her to appear in the court for the State of Maharashtra and that another advocate would attend the proceedings. 

Published in Dawn, June 26th, 2015

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