Ex-SP leader opens up on why he is against the father-son duo.
For those who are wondering what Amar Singh has against Shanti and Prashant Bhushan, it was the role played by the Bhushans in a phone-tapping case that got his goat.
The case is old, but revenge is a dish best served cold. When the sun set on 2005 and most of the world was partying, Amar Singh, who was then general secretary of the Samajwadi Party, held a press conference in Goa and said a top government official had told him that his phone was being tapped since October 2005.
The matter went to court. “From day one, the Bhushans were after my blood,” Singh says. “For some reason, they wanted the transcripts of the tapped conversations to be made public”.
The former Samajwadi Party leader has been engaged in a war of words with the Bhushans ever since the latter were named on a panel set up by the government to draft the Lok Pal Bill. The bone of contention has been the authenticity of a telephonic conversation among Singh, Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Bhushan senior.
In an interview with Business Standard here on Friday, Singh said he was a victim of illegal phone tapping. “My phone was tapped by a leading Mumbai-based industrial house and a leading telecom company,” he says. But instead of defending his right to privacy, “the Bhushans kept on publicly reading out a supposed conversation I had with various people”.
In 2006, the then Chief Justice, Y K Sabharwal, prohibited the media from publishing the contents of the tapped conversation. The order said phone tapping was a “very serious matter affecting the privacy of an individual”. The judge also ordered a stay barring the media from publication and telecast of the contents of the tapped conversations. He retired in 2007.
“After that, the Bhushans got into the case, and despite repeated protests by me citing Justice Sabharwal’s order, they insisted the gag order be vacated. They even read out excerpts from the illegally-tapped conversation in complete violation of the Supreme Court order. Was my reputation of no consequence?” he asks.
Amar Singh says the boot is on the other foot now. “It is poetic justice that they are denying the contents of a CD. I’m not saying anything about the contents of the CD. But surely, what is good for Peter Amar Singh, should be good for Paul Bhushans,” he says.
The CD, released by some unknown person, has a conversation among Amar Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Shanti Bhushan discussing how a judge could be fixed. The Bhushans have said the CD is fake, spliced at six places. In his affidavit, Prashant Bhushan says it is spliced at three places. Amar Singh says he doesn’t know how the CD came about.
“And Shanti Bhushan says he doesn’t know me, has never talked to me?” he asks incredulously.
What is even more provoking, Singh says, is that Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar resigned from a government committee on a mere allegation of corruption by Anna Hazare.
