April 22, 2009

More about warped minds

Following up to my previous post, About warped minds, consider these quotes:


* The Special Investigation Team (SIT) ... on Tuesday slammed reports that riots witnesses were tutored to give false evidence for exaggeration of the situation, by activists and organisations helping the victims.

* [T]he Supreme Court termed the leak as a "betrayal of the faith reposed in those to whom the report was allowed access".

* "The alleged reported leaks appear to be inspired by dubious motives. I cannot confirm such claims. The act is highly condemnable," [SIT chief] Raghavan said.

* The SIT sources said the alleged leaks appear to have been based on statements of state police officials and "cannot be termed as findings of the report."


All from the Hindustan Times today (April 22), this report: Gujarat riots witnesses not tutored: SIT.

13 comments:

Rahul Siddharthan said...

The link is broken (changing tunyurl to tinyurl fixes it). But why a tinyurl link? I can see it's useful for twitter users, but I don't see the point otherwise, and it seems to make deceptive redirection easier: I like to hover the mouse before clicking to see where the link goes...

Dilip D'Souza said...

Rahul, thanks. It's fixed, and it does not use the tinyurl (nor the tunyurl, for that matter...)

I had created the tinyurl for a bit of email I was sending someone about this before the post -- you know how long URLs sometimes break in email messages. When I was putting together this post I typed in the tinyurl without thinking, and of course made it tuny too.

Anonymous said...

maybe now Swapan Dasgupta will follow his own rule and apologise for his attempt to malign Teesta and whole bunch of others.

Ramesh said...

> maybe now Swapan Dasgupta will follow his own rule and apologise

swapan-da?? your'e joking, right?? He is only interested in maligning...

Ramesh

Smitha said...

Thanks for letting us know.. This is good to hear!

natbas said...

I am not an apologist for Modi or Teesta...

I am as neutral as I can be...

The Hindustan Times link ascribes everything to an unnamed SIT official. And the " SIT chief, R. K. Raghavan told Hindustan Times that he could not confirm whether the leaked contents were true."

However his statement, "“I am answerable only to the Supreme Court. The alleged reported leaks appear to be inspired by dubious motives. I cannot confirm such claims. The act is highly condemnable,” is valid. Politicians here selectively use what is in their advantage for their own profit, it is nothing new.

However it is worth noting that he has neither confirmed or rejected the TOI claims about what SIT has said.

In The Hindu I find these:

"The Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed concern at selective leakage of the Special Investigation Team’s report on the Gujarat riot cases in the media,"

"When senior counsel Indra Jaising complained about a news item (relating to social activist Teesta Setalvad) in an English daily, quoting excerpts from the SIT report, Justice Pasayat said: “The SIT report is in a way a charge sheet given to the Supreme Court. That is why we have not given copies to all. We gave copies only to the State of Gujarat and the amicus curiae.”

"Justice Pasayat showed counsel copies of the SIT report given to the court still in sealed covers. “If anybody has given a copy or access of the report [to the newspaper] he has betrayed the trust of this court. We don’t approve of this. We deplore this…”"


"Justice Alam said: “Whoever did it, this is grossly unjustifiable. It should not have been done. It is a grossly irresponsible act and we feel ashamed.”"


"Ms. Jaising accused the Gujarat government’s senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi of divulging the contents of the SIT report to the electronic media. “I am entitled to speak to television channels,” Mr. Rohatgi retorted. However, Justice Pasayat cautioned him not to mention anything selectively about the report."

This is a report of what happened in the Supreme Court.

Reading what the learned counsels and the judges said, it seems that the TOI had quoted from the SIT report itself.

And again, the correspondent who wrote this particular article in TOI reiterates, ""My report was based on the SIT report and not any document circulated by the Gujarat government, as suggested by CJP. Whether any section of the
media has the report or not is irrelevant as TOI has access to the report..." here in Times of IndiaI think it is more important to be sure what the truth is and what the facts are than to make sure that Modi or anyone else is punished.

Anyway we will get a clearer picture of this in days to come...

Regards,

JIten Gajaria said...

Dilip,

The HT report is as vague as it can get. And plus nowhere is Mr. Raghavan denying the report as mentioned in ToI. While leak of the report can be called lack of ethics, why shoot the messenger and ignore the message?

Regards

Dilip D'Souza said...

Jiten, among other things here's a line from the HT report:

The SIT sources said the alleged leaks appear to have been based on statements of state police officials and "cannot be termed as findings of the report."

Prasanna said...

"The SIT sources..."

and who is this SIT source??

Prasannatoo! said...

> and who is this SIT source??

you.

Anonymous said...

The Truth, my Dear Sirs, is neither on the side of Mr. Dasgupta nor on the side of Ms. Seetalvad but somewhere in between...as always it is.

Jo said...

Mr. Raghavan said that he cannot "confirm" the claims. Note that he did not "deny" the claims. Since the specific part of the reports have been leaked just before the elections we can say that it has "dubious motives". So one thing that we can assume is that since Mr. Raghavan did not want the report leak to be used politically, he did not "confirm" claims. The statement that "alleged leaks appear to have been based on statements of state police officials" could be a result of this good gesture.

In an Outlook report (http://news.outlookindia.com/item.aspx?658698), they mainly say that the report was actually leaked by some. It says,

"The apex court was furious that the report of SIT, which was submitted to it in a sealed cover and made available only to Gujarat government and amicus curaie Harish Salve, was made public."

So again, we have reasons to believe that what has been made public is "parts" of the original report (I agree that why only "parts" were leaked is suspicious though, but still the leaked parts seems to have come from the "sealed" report).

Now we have to wait for the Court's judgement to see whether what has been said in the the leaked or sealed reports are true or untrue.

Prasanna said...
This comment has been removed by the author.