http://ia.rediff.com/news/2006/jan/06flip.htm?q=tp&file=.htm
Holy mackerel! The Indian bugging frenzy just blew sky high.
That's TWO MORE top guns in COMPLETELY DIFFERENT Indian political parties who are suddenly claiming they too are being spied on. There are calls for investigation. And there have been arrests! Holy literal cow!
This is no mere sex outing as with the BJP; we've moved from Indo-Monica to Indo-Watergate.
The new players in the rapidly unfolding surveillance pageant are Amar Singh of the Samajwadi Party, and Jayalalitha, the "Iron Lady" chief of Tamil Nadu.
(((A pundit weighs in:)))
http://ia.rediff.com/news/2006/jan/06flip.htm?q=tp&file=.htm
'At the end of a week of confusion we can discern some islands of clarity amidst a raging sea of confusion.
'First, Amar Singh's phone was being tapped.
'Second, the tap was illegal.
'Third, some private detective was being paid a crazy amount of money to do the job.
'Fourth, the Delhi police admit that they have a fair idea about the identity of the 'influential' person behind it all.
'This is an outrageous assault on civil liberties. Anyone and everyone who is responsible for it should be punished. Does the Congress agree with that basic fact?'
(((There are busts, to boot!)))
http://www.ndtv.com/template/template.asp?template=Phonetappingcase&slug=PMO+reacts+to+Amar+Singh's+allegations&id=18517&callid=0&category=National
Third man arrested
Meanwhile, Delhi Police have arrested a third man for the alleged tapping of phone lines of Amar Singh.
The arrested man has been identified as Anurag Singh.
Sources say, Anurag could be the main operator in the tapping cases and the police have kept his arrest under wraps so far.
For the record, the police claim Anurag runs a detective agency called Metro Intelligence Agency in Delhi.
The second suspect is an employee of Reliance Infocomm, the company that provided the phone service for Singh.
((('Follow the money.' Who's gonna sing?)))
(((Jayalalithaa is weighing in as a victim, and declaring this an Indian Watergate.)))
(((Who the heck is Jayalalithaa? She's former Tamil film actress, head of a Dravidian regional ethnic party, and general Indo-political loose cannon with a proven history of toppling central Indian governments that annoy her.)))
(((Gonna need a lot of extra popcorn for this one, folks.)))
Jaya: My Phones Tapped Too
The Asian Age India | R. Bhagwan Singh
Chennai: The phone-tapping row hit a new high on Thursday with Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa suspecting that her phones were also being tapped by the Centre.
"While this specific instance of tapping of telephones of political leaders has now come out into the open, I have all along felt that my telephones are being tapped by the Centre. I have so far refrained from making this public because I knew that there would be a flat denial by the Centre," said Ms Jayalalithaa, throwing a bombshell in her statement in which she criticised the UPA government, after Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh met her at her office and provided copies of the official instructions that had authorised Reliance Infocomm to tap his phones.
Emerging from the 30-minute meeting with her, Mr Amar Singh told reporters that he would move the Supreme Court "very soon" for an impartial inquiry so that the "real culprits are caught." He accused Congress president Sonia Gandhi of ordering the tapping of his phone and said, "I will drag all concerned to the court and prove my point."
In her statement Ms Jayalalithaa said that now that Mr Singh had furnished "solid proof" that the Centre had organised the tapping of the telephone of an Opposition political leader, an "immediate impartial inquiry" into the entire matter should be ordered, she said. "A detailed investigation to uncover the conspiracy behind this is called for at once. What is immediately required is that the responsibility has to be owned up at once by the Centre," the chief minister said.
"This is a most disgraceful and serious issue which clearly violates the basic guarantee of freedom of speech and right to life enshrined in the Constitution of India. It also clearly violates the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court on this issue. I feel this is a very grave situation which has shaken the basic structure of our great democracy," she said.
"What we now have is clinching evidence that there has been a collapse of democratic governance by the Central government infringing fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution," Ms Jayalalithaa said.
Recalling the Watergate scam that unseated President Richard Nixon in the United States "because he ordered the bugging of the Opposition party office", she said: "The Central government should take responsibility for this shocking act of infringing the basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Jayalalithaa
(((It's sure as hell not gonna stop here. Jayalalithaa fights dirty:)))
2. Some people express doubts over the genuineness of the cases filed during her Chief Ministership accusing the possession of Narcotics filed against her detractors like, Muthu (MGR’s car driver), VN.Sudhakaran (her estranged foster-son)[9], (((two names removed by request))) ( both reportedly friends of VN.Sudhakaran), Sherija Banu (reportedly a friend of the husband of Sasikala) and Kumar (nephew of Justice A.R.Lakshmanan) [10] [11]
3. Chandralekha, then an IAS officer and Chairperson of state owned Industrial Development Corporation was attacked on the road and acid was thrown at her face. She alleged that it was because she refused to toe Jayalalithaa's line in disinvestment in SPIC, a joint sector company. An accused in the acid attack case, Surla, alleged that he did it under instance of Jayalalithaa and her friend Sasikala. Later he died while in prison due to AIDS. [12]
4. R.Shanmugha Sundaram, a rival DMK party affiliated advocate was grievously injured in an attack with deadly weapons by a gang of goons led by notorious rowdy “Welding” Kumar in his house on May 30, 1995 while he was preparing a petition to be filed in the high court on behalf of another DMK advocate Alandur Bharathi against the purchase of Tansi land by then chief minister J Jayalalitha and her close aide Sasikala Natarajan. The prime land in Guindy in Chennai was purchased by Jaya Publications in which Ms Jayalalitha and Mrs Natarajan were partners." The incident happened when Jayalalithaa was the Chief Minister during 1991-1996. [13]
