Avant garde vigilante media like Cobrapost and Gulail and the anti-Narendra Modi mainstream electronic and print media have been caught between a rock and hard place with the Supreme Court upbraiding suspended IAS officer Pradeep N Sharma for repeating scurrilous allegations against the Gujarat Chief Minister instead of removing the objectionable references in his petition of 2011, as directed by the Court and promised by his then counsel Colin Gonsalves. Pradeep Sharma and his new counsel, Prashant Bhushan, risked contempt of court in their attempt to malign the Chief Minister and bring him within the ambit of their case on Friday, January 17, 2014, but failed.
This has made all media reportage of the alleged snooping into the movements of a young female landscape architect at the supposed behest of the Chief Minister utterly baseless, defamatory, and liable for legal redress if the much-maligned gentleman chooses this course of action. It is a timely and salutary warning to the media about the need for stringent precautions when playing with the reputations of Constitutional authorities.
It bears noting in this connection that the intern who defamed Justice AK Ganguly and had him hounded out of the office of the West Bengal Human Rights Commission has still not answered the police summons to file a case of sexual harassment against him. The Supreme Court, which then acted in undue haste at the behest of Attorney General GE Vahanvati, has since become cautious in the matter of allegations against Justice Swatanter Kumar. There is a feeling in judicial circles that like Justice Ganguly, he too may be the target of some party aggrieved over a judgment or matter pending with the National Green Tribunal that he is presiding over.
As for the snoop-gate story, it began and may well end with Pradeep Kumar. Unknown to most citizens, it was officially ‘launched’ in 2011, when the former Bhuj Collector approached the Supreme Court with a petition against the Gujarat Government and Chief Minister. It made colourful reading, to say the least.
After hearing arguments from counsel for the petitioner, the Chief Minister Narendra Modi, and the State of Gujarat on whether or not to admit the petition, on May 12, 2011, Justices Aftab Alam and RM Lodha ordered, “Mr Colin Gonsalves, learned senior counsel appearing for the petitioner states that he does not wish to retain the averment made on page F of the synopsis in its present form and the elaboration of that statement as contained in paragraphs 15 to 25 of the Writ Petition. In this connection, he states that he will file a supplementary petition making suitable amendments to those averments which tend to cast an unintended and wrong information in their present form. Mr Gonsalves added that neither he nor the petitioner has any intent to make the faintest allegation of any personal impropriety against the Chief Minister”.
In an astonishing move, however, Pradeep Sharma did not amend his petition and simply lay low for a while. Then, suddenly in November-December 2013, the web portals Cobrapost and Gulail carried sensational news about the Gujarat Chief Minister and former minister Amit Shah as an exclusive investigation (read plant). They aired audio tapes related to the salacious averments in the not-admitted petition, with a ‘statutory warning’ disowning responsibility for their authenticity. Several leading television channels, newspapers and magazines picked up the non-story and flogged it for all it was worth (or not, as the case may be).
Confident that the ‘groundwork’ for his case was established, Pradeep Sharma filed a fresh petition on November 23, 2013 and, far from removing the impugned paras 15-25, he cleverly condensed the allegations. But when the petition came up for admission, he was promptly caught out by Justices Ranjana Prakash Desai and MB Lokur, who said that his plea for a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) would be examined only after verifying that he had complied with the previous order to delete the ‘scurrilous’ allegations against the Gujarat Chief Minister.
Prashant Bhushan pleaded that the gist of the allegations were necessary for the Court to understand the mala fide behaviour of the Gujarat Government which had allegedly filed a number of ‘false’ cases against the IAS officer, Pradeep Sharma, and his brother, Kuldeep Sharma, IPS (retired). But the bench would have none of it, and also denied Sharma permission to visit his wife and son in the United States. The crux of Pradeep Sharma’s demand is to have four cases pending against him with the Gujarat Crime Branch transferred to the CBI.
Journalists and media organisations that gave Sharma and his twice-punctured hot air balloon prime-time publicity day after day in 2013 need to introspect about the calibre and credibility of their work. Standard reporting norms and professional ethics were given the complete go-by, and the media seemed satisfied to be petted and cheered by Congress spokespersons on Twitter!
It is an unspeakable embarrassment for the media that the Supreme Court has said it will examine Pradeep Sharma’s fresh petition para by para against the old petition of 2011 to ensure that he has removed the impugned references to Narendra Modi. Sharma now has the option of withdrawing his appeal altogether, or filing a fresh petition within two weeks, as stipulated, without any overt or covert references to the Chief Minister and the snoop-gate story. That should save the lame duck UPA Government the trouble of finding a judge willing to impale Narendra Modi at its behest.
Niticentral.com, 20 January 2014
http://www.niticentral.com/2014/01/20/snoopgate-on-modi-backfires-on-media-181160.html
