New Delhi : Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde has hinted at the possibility of judicial commission being set up to enquire into the entire gamut of issues thrown up after disclosures related to snooping, telephone tapping and other illegal activities, allegedly at the behest of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
Shinde disclosed that his department was examining the issue after the matter had been referred to President Pranab Mukherjee by several NGOs, and other women’s organizations. It is expected that if the department finds merit in these demands then the Union Cabinet would take a call on the issue, and approach the Supreme Court for the appointment of a sitting judge or a retired judge to head the inquiry commission.
The Congress party has invested a lot of political significance into these complaints, and has alleged that the snooping or telephone tapping is not restricted to the young lady architect now based in Bangalore.
“ When the disclosures were first made public, the BJP took shelter under the pretext that the lady had been put under surveillance at the request of her father. But now there is evidence in the public domain that the young lady’s entire family, her parents, her brothers and their wife were also put under surveillance. Now what does the BJP have to say about this aspect of the case,” said Gujarat Congress president Arjun Modhwadia.
Addressing the media along with a senior Congress leader Shaktisinh Gohil and party spokesperson Sandeep Dikshit, Modhwadia charged that the surveillance was carried on in three states-Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra and is a serious offence.” It will be recalled that when the controversy about the call detail report regarding BJP leader Arun Jaitley had erupted, the BJP had stalled the Parliament for three days, and criminal cases were registered against the persons responsible for that leakage. We demand that the same action should be taken against those responsible for the snooping,” he said.
At the press conference, he played out recordings of conversations between the then Gujarat Minister of State for Home Amit Shah and IPS officer G L Singhal to establish that the entire family of the young lady architect was under surveillance. He also charged that under Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s rule the state government had awarded contracts to the young lady’s family without proper tenders. “ It also reimbursed phone, fuel and food expenses to the young lady,” he charged.
The Gujarat Congress leader also alleged that telephone tapping is a frequent violation of privacy in the state and there have been more than 93,000 such cases in the state.
