Congress leaders continued to centre-stage the controversy over illegal surveillance of a woman by the Gujarat Police, with Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal calling on the BJP to come clean on “the real story behind the manufactured one.”
The issue also reached the Supreme Court, with IAS officer Pradeep N. Sharma urging it to take cognisance of the tapes that surfaced during a Gujarat High Court-supervised investigation of the alleged extra-judicial execution of Ishrat Jehan Raza. He said they were relevant to corruption cases the Gujarat government filed against him.
Lawyer and political activist Prashant Bhushan, appearing for Mr. Sharma, told reporters outside the court that he would file an application for a CBI probe.
CBI sources told The Hindu that the agency had no mandate now to conduct an inquiry into the tapes.
In a related development, the Union government issued an order that Superintendents of Police or their superiors alone could seek mobile phone call data records.
The decision came within days of the arrest of six Delhi Police personnel and private detectives for allegedly obtaining the call data records of prominent persons, including Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley.
