Troubling questions

It may well be that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s opponents, particularly the Congress, ought to combat the party ideologically rather than on issues such as surveillance and the tapping of telephone conversations of a young woman. And questions may be raised over how the recordings of conversations between the then Gujarat Minister of State for Home, Amit Shah, and a police officer, that were handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation, found their way into the public domain, either through a calculated leak or through journalistic resourcefulness. The surveillance and telephone- tapping appear to have been ordered by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and implemented by Mr. Amit Shah, but conversations now made public do not seem to be consistent with the claim that they were undertaken at the instance of the young woman’s father to protect her from some unspecified threat. Given the informal nature of the Gujarat surveillance and interception, it is a moot question if these essential procedural safeguards laid down by the Supreme Court to protect the constitutional and common law right to privacy in telephone conversations were observed.