"It is true that Ram Jethmalani had given a proposal about Dawood's willingness to return. But there was a condition that Dawood should not be kept in jail. Rather, he be allowed to remain in a house. This was not acceptable. We said he had to face the law," Pawar told reporters in Mumbai on Saturday.
A day after senior advocate and former Union minister Ram Jethmalani said that the then Maharashtra chief minister Sharad Pawar rejected underworld don Dawood Ibrahim's offer to surrender after the 1993 Mumbai blasts, Pawar said the state had rejected the offer as it was conditional.
Pawar, who later split from the Congress to form the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), and was the Union agriculture minister in the Congress-led UPA government from 2004 to 2014, said that though Jethmalani had contacted him on Dawood's surrender offer, the conditions were not acceptable.
"It is true that Ram Jethmalani had given a proposal about Dawood's willingness to return. But there was a condition that Dawood should not be kept in jail. Rather, he be allowed to remain in a house. This was not acceptable. We said he had to face the law," Pawar told reporters in Mumbai on Saturday.
Dawood is the prime accused in the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, which took place after the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition. The March 1993 blasts, which Dawood is said to have engineered in cahoots with the ISI and associates like Tiger Memon, saw locations like the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), Air India building at Nariman Point, and the fishermens' colony at Mahim being targeted. The attacks led to 257 people being killed and over 700 injured.
The blasts and the underworld don's involvement have led to politicians repeatedly promising to get him into India from Pakistan to face trial. In the run- up to the 1995 assembly elections, held after the serial blasts, senior BJP leader, late Gopinath Munde had promised to get Dawood to India "bound in shackles." Munde later became the state's home minister in the Shiv Sena- BJP led dispensation from 1995 to 1999, but the promise to make Dawood face the law remained unfulfilled.
Earlier this year, the Centre claimed it had no information about the location of India's most-wanted man, union home minister Rajnath Singh said Dawood was in Pakistan and promised to bring him back.
Actor Sanjay Dutt has also been convicted in the blast case under the Arms Act, 1959, for illegal possession of weapons.
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