"Our charge is that Mr Chidambaram wasn't doing this on his own. He had orders from the Congress top brass to tarnish Mr Modi's image," Ravi Shankar Prasad said.
The BJP today accused the Congress's top leadership of ordering fudging of facts in 2009 in the Ishrat Jehan encounter case to try and implicate Narendra Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, and current party chief Amit Shah.
The party demanded a high level probe into the charges made by a former Home Ministry official that he was tortured into changing the ministry's affidavit to the Supreme Court on Ishrat Jehan in 2009.
Ishrat Jehan, 19, was allegedly shot down with three others on June 15, 2004, near Ahmedabad by a Gujarat police team. The police claimed they were terrorists plotting to kill Mr Modi.
RVS Mani who was an under-secretary with the internal security department has charged that he was tortured by officials to change the affidavit. Mr Mani has claimed that the Home Ministry's affidavit, based on intelligence inputs, on August 6, 2009, had clearly said that Ishrat Jehan was an operative of the terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba or LeT and that there was no need for the CBI to probe her death.
Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, "Mani is now saying that on September 30, 2009 a new affidavit wad filed. (The) then Home Secretary Mr (GK) Pillai has already said that the affidavit came from (then) Home Minister P Chidambaram and not his department. And, Mani is saying he was pressurised to sign the changed affidavit."
Using Mr Mani's claims, the BJP has turned the heat on Mr Chidambaram and the Congress. "Our charge is that Mr Chidambaram wasn't doing this on his own. He had orders from the Congress top brass to tarnish Mr Modi's image ahead of the next Gujarat polls," Mr Prasad alleged.
"It is the BJP's reasonable suspicion that the affidavit change was decided to implicate the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and then Gujarat Home Minister Amit Shah," the minister said.