Candid Camera

Subsequently, the police issued an arrest warrant for the schoolboy featuring in the clip and he was produced before the Juvenile Justice Board. The police alleged that the boy had destroyed evidence and tried to evade arrest by fleeing to Nepal.

THE incident threw up several questions: e-culpability, unchecked cellphone use by the underaged, loopholes in the IT Act, e-awareness of the authorities. While the debates dominated the media for days, newer crimes and bigger gaffes soon nudged them out of the way.

Similar seems to be the case with the investigation; there appears to have been little headway since the headline-making arrests and visuals. All the accused are now out on bail.

DCP Economic Offences Wing Prabhakar, however, says the investigation is definitely progressing. ‘‘We are now in the process of working out the links in the chain. The clip was shot somewhere, then put up on the website and also landed up in Palika Bazar. We only need to tie up the loose ends,’’ he says.

WHILE the police justify their alleged high-handedness in arresting Bajaj by claiming the site did not act with due diligence in stopping the sale, Baazee defends itself by saying they took the item off the site as soon as they got to know of its pornographic content: It was posted on November 26 and pulled off on November 28 after informing seller Ravi Raj.

So far as Raj is concerned, his defence is that he was unaware he was breaking any law. The police teams that visited IIT Kharagpur found that the clip had been put up on the local area network (LAN) after being received on MMS; Raj says he merely put it up for sale on Baazee to earn some extra money.

The payments—the clip sold for Rs 125—were made through online bank transfers to paisapay.com, an allied website of the portal, which forwarded the money to Raj through an HDFC bank draft.

Raj was granted bail within three days of his arrest.

THOUGH the two minor students involved in the act—the boy was 17 and the girl, 16—were subsequently expelled from their school, the juvenile court took a lenient view of the boy’s act of filming an essentially private moment and circulating it among friends.

Describing it as a ‘‘misadventure’’, rather than ‘‘moral depravation’’, the magistrate granted him bail and asked him to undergo a month-long psychiatric counselling with his parents.

Based on the Social Investigation Report, the court said that as the boy’s family adheres to social values and has a good reputation, ‘‘it appears that his family is in a position to exercise necessary supervision and control over him.’’

In an indirect fallout of the case, several states, including Delhi, banned the use of cellphones in schools.

THE Bajaj arrest, however, may be less easy to forget. Apart from the US Government, which expressed concern over the arrest of an American citizen, industry heads pointed out that Bajaj had come down to India and cooperated with the police throughout the probe—and had been rewarded with a stint in judicial custody.

Bajaj was released on bail by Delhi High Court on December 21. However, he was ordered to surrender his passport and not to leave the country without permission.