NEW DELHI // The Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, in the thick of campaigning to be India’s next prime minister, has been accused of having illegally ordered police surveillance of a young woman in 2009.
Two news websites recently published recordings of telephone conversations between G L Singhal, a Gujarat police officer, and Amit Shah, a politician close to Mr Modi.
The recordings, in which Mr Shah explicitly orders police to track the woman’s movements and access her phone records, had been made by Mr Singhal, who earlier this year turned them over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). According to the Cobrapost and Gulail news websites, Mr Singhal also gave the CBI a set of full statements between April and June this year.
On these tapes, Mr Shah, then a junior home minister in Mr Modi’s government, emphasised that this surveillance was being carried out because of the personal interest of “saheb” – literally “boss”.
The term “saheb” is thought to refer to Mr Modi, who is the prime ministerial candidate of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in national elections next summer. Mr Modi is already a controversial candidate, having been accused of permitting – and even abetting – anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002.
“The tapes indicate that for at least a month the Gujarat Police apparatus used its sweeping powers to rigorously monitor every private moment, every personal conversation and every daily movement” of the woman, a statement by Gulail said.
The woman, whose name has been withheld to protect her privacy, is an architect from Bangalore. She was also referred to in an affidavit filed to the Supreme Court in 2011 by a civil servant who is currently in prison, in the midst of being tried for corruption.
Pradeep Sharma, who has worked in various positions of the Indian Administrative Service in Gujarat over the past decade, submitted the affidavit as part of his defence.
In the affidavit, Mr Sharma hinted at “intimacy” between the woman and Mr Modi.
He stated that his imprisonment was “due to his implication in a number of criminal cases at the behest of the … Modi-led State Government” because it did not want him to reveal information about Mr Modi’s “amorious and illicit liaison”.
Mr Sharma also stated that he knew the woman referred to in Mr Singhal’s tapes, and that she had told him about how Mr Modi “would freely interrupt scheduled meetings, walking out of his office on senior officials in order to speak to her privately.”
The expose published on Friday has drawn a firestorm of criticism upon Mr Modi for abusing his powers and acting illegally, and India’s top women’s rights body said yesterday that it would investigate the allegations.
“We will be writing to the state home minister about the act done by the then-home minister [Mr Shah] .... and at whose instance he has done it,” Nirmala Samant Prabhavalkar, a member of the government-funded National Commission of Women, told reporters.
She said the state government must answer “under what authority” it used “this kind of interception” on the woman.
“The breach of privacy is a minor part of this saga of shocking crime that exposes the gross misuse of police machinery by the state,” said Prashant Bhushan, a lawyer and member of the Aam Aadmi Party.
The ruling Congress party, often the target of Mr Modi’s jibes, called the chief minister’s alleged actions “ a breach of civilised behaviour”.
“This is not the way a state behaves,” said Manish Tewari, India’s minister for information and broadcasting. “They need to come clean on this and say whether it was an isolated incident.”
Neither Mr Modi nor his government has responded officially to the accusations. But his party has come to his defence.
In a complicated rebuttal, the BJP claimed that the woman’s father was known to Mr Modi and had asked him to keep an eye on her during her travels to Gujarat, for her own safety.
“Has the girl complained? Has the father complained?” the BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad asked.
The BJP has also produced a letter, purportedly from the woman’s father, in which he claims that his daughter felt that “no further probe is necessary” into the issue.
“My daughter is fully aware of all types of help that was rendered by the state machinery considering a genuine request of a father for his daughter,” the letter said. “She is fully conscious that the said help was absolutely necessary and was in her own interest, safety and security.”
Nikhil Mehra, a lawyer who practises in the Supreme Court, said it was a “shambolic defence”.
“In fact, it’s not even a defence,” he said. “First of all, a father can’t request this type of surveillance without his daughter’s consent, because she’s an adult.
“But second, even if we assume she consented, the Gujarat government cannot bypass the requirement of the law, which is that you need an order from a magistrate to institute such surveillance.”
The BJP also accused the Congress of engineering the revelations.
“The dirty tricks wing of the Congress will make such baseless allegations against Modi as the elections draw near,” said Rajnath Singh, the BJP president.
“There is no question of doing a rethink on our prime ministerial candidate even if a thousand baseless allegations of this kind are made against Narendra Modi,” he added.
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
* With additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
