Togadia now wants PM’s phone records made public

On his release from the hospital in Ahmedabad on Wednesday, Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s international president Pravin Togadia levelled serious allegation against city crime branch joint police commissioner J K Bhatt. The police officer, he alleged, was harassing his family members on instructions from someone in Delhi.

“I want details of phone calls between the police officer and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be made public,” he said. Togadia charged that the Ahmedabad Crime Branch had earned the epithet of ‘Conspiracy Branch’.

Bhatt on Tuesday had alleged that Togadia had stage managed his ‘abduction’. Citing CCTV footage and call records, the police officer had briefed the media and declared that Togadia had used his driver’s phone to call a friend, who in turn had spoken to a doctor in the hospital and informed him in advance that Togadia would be taken to the hospital, hours before he actually arrived there.

Earlier reports had suggested that Togadia was found unconscious in a park.

But why is Togadia hallucinating that the police of Gujarat and Rajasthan would eliminate him in a fake encounter? He did not have such a fear, even once when he was breathing fire in his anti-Muslim speeches when the Congress Governments were there in both Delhi and Gandhinagar.

“Some people want to get me killed so that I stop talking about Ramjanmabhoomi temple, cow protection, jobs to unemployed youth and remunerative price for crops grown by farmers,” he claimed after resurfacing in a private hospital yesterday.

Togadia said he was not afraid of death but was worried about the grave consequences throughout the country in case he was eliminated by the police in a fake encounter. “That’s why I evaded the police team from Rajasthan which had come ostensibly with an arrest warrant from a Jaipur court related to a 10- year-old case,” he said.

He wondered how the chief minister and the home minister of Rajasthan, whom he contacted over phone, did not know about the Rajasthan police team’s presence in Ahmedabad to serve him the arrest warrant.

Togadia broke down with tears rolling down his cheeks when he said that the Central Intelligence Bureau had been dogging him and his supporters – over 10,000 medical practitioners – who had pledged to treat patients free of charge, responding to his appeal.

The VHP supremo refused to divulge the name of persons who, according to him, wanted to see him dead. “I will disclose their name with full proof at the appropriate time,” he said.

Togadia said he had received a call from an anonymous person advising him to leave the VHP office immediately as a team of policemen from Rajasthan and Gujarat on their way to kill him in a fake encounter. He said he left for his friend’s house after informing his personal security guard and thereafter for the airport to catch a flight to Jaipur with the objective of surrendering to the court.

Togadia then switched off his mobile phone, leading to wild speculation in media and among his supporters that the VHP leader might have been arrested by the Rajasthan police. The rumour mill prompted his supporters to come out in protest in large number near the VHP office at Paldi, disrupting traffic. They also manhandled a couple of Muslim pedestrians.

“On way to the airport, I suddenly started perspiring profusely and fainted. When I gained senses I found myself in the hospital,” he said.

However, investigation by journalists revealed that Togadia was brought to the hospital, not by a stranger who is said to have spotted him lying unconscious by the roadside at Kotarpur near the city airport, but by his close friend to whose house he had gone in the morning.

What made Togadia stage such a drama and express fear that ‘someone’ wanted to eliminate him through fake police encounter?