A day after a special court acquitted all the accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, a former policeman who had worked with Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) claimed that he was asked to pick up RSS Sarsanghachalak Mohan Bhagwat for ‘saffron terror’, sparking a political controversy in the State.

No saffron terror: CM

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis claimed that there was a botched effort by the Congress to implicate several RSS and right-wing leaders on trumped-up charges of ‘saffron terror’ as a part of vote-bank politics.

“There was no saffron terror or Hindu terror or Sanatan terror. They are all the same, and they don’t exist,” he told reporters on Friday.

When asked about a former policeman’s claim about the instructions to arrest Mr. Bhagwat, he said: “Congress’ Hindu terror narrative has been busted due to Malegaon verdict. In the decade of 1990s and in the beginning of 2000s, several terror cases were seen across the world. The strings were linked to Pakistan. Islamic terrorism was a terminology, which was coined then across the world.”

“In India, Congress realised that it was affecting their vote bank. To brand Hindus as terrorists, Congress and UPA cooked up this conspiracy. They built pressure on the agencies, including the police, to include all the RSS and Hindutvavadi leaders on saffron terror charges, though there was no evidence. But the police did not act under pressure. All the events will come out slowly now. There was a plot to term Hindus as terrorists,” he added.

NCP(SP) MP Supriya Sule said she will have to look into the context of the statement by the police official. “I don’t know in which context the former policeman has said this. There are no details. It has been so many years. I don’t know how to make sense of it,” she said.

Mehboob Mujawar, a former policeman who had worked in the Maharashtra ATS, told the media earlier that he was pressured to arrest Mr. Bhagwat.

‘Accused met Bhagwat’

He said that he was given orders by former IPS officer Parambir Singh and “higher officials” to pick up the RSS leader. “They told me that the accused had met Bhagwat before committing the crime. I was given 10 persons to work with me. I was given funds from the Service Secret Fund. As a part of the probe, I went to Indore, Gokak, Nagpur, and a few other places. There was pressure on me. But I didn’t act on it. They talked about ‘saffron terror’. How can I do something that was completely wrong?” he asked.

He told The Hindu that he received the orders within 15 to 20 days of the Malegaon blasts that year. When asked about dealing with the responsibility during the probe, he said: “I played a minor part. My responsibility was to look for the absconding accused, and to probe about them.”