Puzzling – The same R K Anand who gave this statement to MiD DAY went to court two days later and demanded that we be tried for contempt
There was one queer duck in the Sabharwal case- senior advocate R K Anand, who initiated the contempt case against me and my three colleagues. Three days before Anand drew the attention of the Delhi High Court to MiD DAY’s Sabharwal reportage, he had castigated the former CJI in that very newspaper, in that very case. I still have no clue to the mystery of Anand’s flip-flop, but here’s how it went:
On May 21, exactly 19 days after our first story on the Sabharwal issue was published, ace criminal lawyer Anand approached the court of Justice R S Sodhi and presented a copy of MiD DAY’s May 18 edition. He drew the court’s attention to our lead story on Justice Sabharwal, Mall-a-Mall, and the allegations contained therein. Acting on Anand’s complaint, Justice Sodhi issued a suo moto notice against City Editor M K Tayal, publisher S K Akhtar, and me, asking us to explain why we should not be prosecuted for contempt of court.
The notice was a serious issue but it did not perplex us. What really confused us was a glaring anomaly in this episode. Three days before Anand breathed fire and brimstone in court at our effrontery to Justice Sabharwal, MiD DAY had contacted him for his reaction to our exposé. Anand was quite forthright in his comments. “If true, he (Sabharwal) should be brought to book and must be prosecuted. This man demolished the whole of Delhi.” Anand’s reaction was published in the May 19 issue of MiD DAY. Ironically, the same edition carried the cartoon which he later brought to the attention of the court as scurrilous, prompting another notice on MiD DAY’s cartoonist Irfan Khan.
What happened in the time period between Anand’s first statement to us and his demand for our prosecution? We never found out, though after our first hearing, there was a proposal to meet him for a chat. Our team had its differences over that initiative. While one view was that we should at least find out what he had to say, the counterargument was that we should leave all our affairs in the hands of our lawyers. We had frequently used hidden tape recorders and other taping devices for our stories and that always kept us on the alert while discussing important issues with people we didn’t know too well. We, therefore. never met Anand separately.
Senior advocate R K Anand started the case against us, but two years later, was himself convicted of contempt of court in the BMW hit-and-run case
Less than a month after he hauled us over the coals for writing the truth, Anand was caught on camera, trying to bribe a key witness in the infamous BMW case in which several people had been mowed to death by the grandson of a former Naval Chief. The TV channel which carried out the sting operation alleged collusion between the prosecution and the defence in the case. On Aug 21, 2008, the Delhi High Court convicted Anand and senior lawyer I U Khan and on July 29, 2009, the Supreme Court of India upheld the conviction of Anand for contempt of court.
It was just as well that none of us met him separately.
Our news editor in Mumbai, the unflappable Krishna Warrior, discussed the High Court notice with us. A veteran of many a court battle by virtue of the position he occupied in the volatile newsroom of MiD DAY, Krishna was not unduly perturbed. MiD DAY often walked on the wild side, daring to publish reports other newspapers would blanch at. While the management always stood by its reporters, it was left to senior editors to ensure that all news reports were backed by proof. The Sabharwal stories left nothing to chance by way of evidence and that was all Krishna was concerned with. I was told that the company lawyers would draft a reply to the notice.
The court notice did not signal an end to our investigations and we continued to dig around for more information on the Sabharwal companies. However, our stories were still not drawing any reaction and it was not acceptable to us. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain. So we decided to stir the pot a bit and our reporters began calling up lawyers and jurists, to draw their attention to our stories and to elicit some response from them. We were pleased, and a bit perplexed, to find that every one of the people contacted was well aware of MiD DAY exposés and accepted the truth of our contentions. We spoke to lawyers, legal experts and political leaders. Almost all of the people we contacted deemed an inquiry into the affair as the most logical outcome of our reports. Former additional solicitor general K K Sud, former secretary of the Supreme Court Bar Association Ashok Arora, senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan, who was not associated with the case till then, and Dr Harshwardhan and Ram Babu Sharma, the then Delhi presidents of the two leading political parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress respectively, were among those who came on record with their comments, giving us hope that the Sabharwal saga was slowly but surely beginning to nag at the conscience of many.
References:
http://news.oneindia.in/2009/07/29/bmw-case-sc-upholds-rk-anand-conviction.html
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/ndtv-s-bmw-expose-anand-tenders-apology-to-supreme-court-17408
Next: Curiosity Doesn’t Kill the Cat. It Creates a Newshound
To Be Continued
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