Shopping malls, restaurants, gym, cinema halls, hotels and even hospital, she was being followed everywhere. When she boarded a flight from Ahmedabad to Mumbai, cops were put there to keep a watch on her. Who is she and why she was being followed and at whose behest her phone was tapped?
No, she is not a terrorist like the girl who was alleged to be a terrorist and murdered along with her three friends in 2004 in a fake encounter at the outskirt of Ahmedabad. She is an architect by profession. Then why the Gujarat police, state intelligence bureau and anti-terrorist squad of Gujarat police were behind the said woman on the oral orders of Minister of State Amit Shah, one of the confidantes of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. There is no need to say that Amit Shah was only second to Narendra Modi in the Gujarat state government machinery.
In the second week of November two investigative news portals cobrapost and gulail.com claimed that Amit Shah in 2009 ordered illegal surveillance of this unmarried young woman from Bangalore at the behest of one ‘saheb’. In order to back their claim they released a taped conversation between Amit Shah and an IPS officer G L Singhal. This taped conversation is about the posting of IB men around the then Bhavnagar municipal commissioner Pradeep Sharma, to ascertain that he was in contact with the said woman.
The two referred to sites said that the telephonic conversation of the woman with her family and friends was tapped. This information was being conveyed to Amit Shah without any delay who was again passing it on to his ‘saheb’. It is really difficult for most of the people to understand why the ‘saheb’ was so much interested in that woman. Why did the ‘saheb’ want the woman to be watched?
Though no one directly named Narendra Modi in the whole episode, BJP came forward in his defence. BJP president Rajnath Singh said the girl’s father had asked Narendra Modi for security of his daughter. They have family relations. The head of the government is responsible for the safety and security of the people. Modi was only performing his dharma.
Gujarat IPS officer G L Singhal, who is an accused in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case and is out on bail, has handed over hundreds of recorded telephonic conversations to CBI, revealing the details of the surveillance of the young woman.
According to Cobrapost report, the around-260 recordings submitted to the CBI primarily contain telephonic conversations between Shah and Singhal, who was at the time posted as SP with ATS. In many of these conversations, Shah alludes to his saheb’s acute personal interest in the snooping of the woman.
The tapes released show that for over a month the Gujarat Police used its sweeping powers to rigorously monitor every private moment, every personal conversation and every daily movement of the woman.
Illegal snooping is rampant in Gujarat and agencies such as police, the state IB, the ATS and crime branch are all routinely do illegal surveillance, either for the investigation or at the instance of their bosses or ‘saheb’. Gujarat DGP Amitabh Pathak was shocked to hear that his own police officials has obtained call detail records of as many as 93000 mobile phone numbers without his knowledge since December 2012.
Though the matter has reached the Supreme Court and BJP has dismissed the entire controversy as a ‘dirty trick of Congress’, this scandal has given to Congress the chance to grill the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate. Congress even said that the BJP should rethink about its prime ministerial candidate.
On this issue BJP president said, there is no question of doing a rethink on their prime ministerial candidate even if a thousand baseless allegations of this kind are made against Narendra Modi. “We had already said much earlier that we apprehend that the dirty tricks wing of the Congress will make such baseless allegations against Modi as the elections are near.”