Charges of Rape by Married Woman

In another twist to the raging controversy over Narendra Modi government’s illicit surveillance on a young woman, investigative website Gulail has claimed that it has a set of 39 new secret tapes which show that the pervasive snooping on the architect extended outside Gujarat.

The new tapes also establish beyond doubt that the surveillance, which involved massive use of state machinery, was mounted not to protect Madhuri (not her real name) but to stalk her and pry into her private life. Just like in the first batch of tapes, here too, all the persons involved in this illegal operation – from G L Singhal to A K Sharma to Amit Shah were passing on the information gathered to a superior authority who is repeatedly referred to as ‘saheb’, claimed Gulail, which also released the first set of tapes of purported conversations between Modi’s aide and former Gujarat home minister Shah and suspended police officer Singhal. The tapes of the purported conversations between Shah and Singhal suggest that the former had used Gujarat police to tail the woman at the instance of ‘saheb’.

Based on the tapes in its possession, Gulail claimed that the focus of the illegal snooping was to know about the woman’s love life. “The police secretly observed Madhuri’s meetings with a man she was about to marry, eavesdropped on her private conversations and then relayed the information back to saheb,” the website claimed. The website also contended that the fresh tapes refuted BJP’s claim that the surveillance was mounted by Modi at the behest of the woman’s father.

The timing of the release of the fresh set of tapes is significant. They have become public at a time when BJP has questioned Centre’s reported move to set up a judicial panel to probe the illegal snooping by saying that it would be an encroachment on the turf of the Gujarat government, all the more so because it has already set up a commission to look into the matter. The claim that the surveillance extended beyond Gujarat can give the locus Congress regime at the Centre may be looking for to order a judicial inquiry into the matter.

The purported tapes show that not just Madhuri, but her would-be husband, her friends, brother and parents were all kept under close watch through physical and telephonic surveillance, which went on for at least two months, if not more, the website said. It claimed that phones within and outside Guajrat were illegally intercepted. “There was correspondence between Modi’s government and B S Yeddyurappa’s Karnataka government over Madhuri’s cell numbers. Her Bangalore cell phones were also intercepted,” the site claimed.

The website claimed that the tapping of her phones were not done following due process. “On one occasion, the Karnataka government turned down the request citing non-compliance of the requirement of the Indian Telegraph Act,” it said. According to Gulail, the new set of tapes are conversations between Singhal, an IPS officer and one of the prime accused in the Ishrat Jahan encounter who has been on bail because the CBI, inexplicably, failed to file a charge-sheet against him in time, and A K Sharma, then IG of the state intelligence bureau. These tapes are besides the 267 secret recordings of Singhal that are with the CBI.

Denisha Sahadevan