Manoj Mitta on SIT’s desperation to give a clean chit to Modi

Legal Airs / The Times of India

10 May 2012


The recently disclosed Special Investigation Team’s closure report in Zakia Jafri’s complaint has made a malicious imputation against me for the interaction I have had with IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt. Relying on emails hacked by the Gujarat government from Bhatt’s Gmail account, the SIT said on page 425 of its 541-page report that on April 13, 2011 he had sent me “the first draft of his proposed affidavit” to the Supreme Court and “invited” my suggestions on it. Referring to the email I sent in response, the SIT said: “Shri Manoj Mitta advised Shri Sanjiv Bhatt to incorporate a few more paragraphs drafted by him which were incorporated by Shri Sanjiv Bhatt in his final affidavit sent to Hon’ble Supreme Court of India as suggested by Shri Mitta.”

The SIT’s imputation that I drafted “a few more paragraphs” is a mischievous distortion of facts. As evident from my email response to Bhatt the same day, the only change I “drafted” was a single sentence explaining why he was taking the liberty of approaching the Supreme Court: "Given the manner in which the SIT's officials have behaved with me, I believe it is my painful duty to bring to the notice of the court that the SIT does not appear to be living up to the enormous trust reposed in it by the court to conduct an impartial probe into the allegation that there was a high-level conspiracy behind the riots."

In the remaining part of the 227-word email, I made two general suggestions on Bhatt’s draft. One was that he should correct typographical errors and I cited the example of the year of his first deposition before the SIT appearing as 2002 rather than 2009. The other general suggestion I made was that he should straightaway place his testimony before the Supreme Court rather than hinting in the proposed affidavit that he was willing to make more disclosures if he were asked to file a further affidavit.

The SIT conflated these two general suggestions with the single sentence I had drafted on its conduct to pass them off as “a few more paragraphs drafted by” me. The SIT has clearly abused its power to hit back at a journalist who has been critical of its handling of the Jafri complaint and other cases of the Gujarat carnage entrusted to it by the Supreme Court.

It may be added that Amicus Curiae Raju Ramachandran, even as he dealt with the emails “retrieved” by the Gujarat Government, put a question mark on the “legality of such retrieval”. The absence of any such qualms in the SIT report about the hacking, and the conclusions it jumped to from that illegally procured material, betray desperation on the SIT’s part to clutch at any and every straw to give a clean chit to Chief Minister Narendra Modi.