Tehelka tapes to be replayed, now by CBI

Beginning Monday, the nearly-canned Tehelka tapes will play again as the CBI initiates a series of steps against those featured in it. The C...

Beginning Monday, the nearly-canned Tehelka tapes will play again as the CBI initiates a series of steps against those featured in it. The CBI will file either five or six criminal cases in court. For this, different FIRs will be lodged, each dealing with separate segments of the tapes that showed acts of alleged corruption. The FIRs may be lodged as early as Monday.

As reported last month, former BJP President Bangaru Laxman will be booked, but the CBI has decided that for now, no FIRs will be filed against senior Army officers currently facing court martial proceedings. Five or six Defence Ministry officials could, however, find themselves named in a separate FIR, with transcripts from the tapes being cited as evidence against them.

Despite a meeting that included CBI chief U.S. Mishra, no decision has yet been taken on whether to prosecute Jaya Jaitly. As Samata Party chief, Jaitly featured in a segment of the tapes where Rs 2 lakh exchanged hands at the residence of former Defence minister George Fernandes.

CBI has moved into overdrive ever since the Government announced the winding up of the S.N. Phukan Commission in October. The agency took a tactical decision to register regular cases instead of a preliminary inquiry. But FIRs require a formal complaint, so CBI asked the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) to file one. The complaint came in last week from S.K. Dasgupta, a DoPT official.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More