Prashant, an eminent lawyer, alleged that the copies of the CD – purportedly containing unauthenticated tapes of his father’s conversation with Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav – had been anonymously sent to media-persons to tarnish their images in the wake of their role in Anna Hazare led civil society campaign for a Lokpal Bill to fight the menace of corruption.
The junior Bhushan alleged that the former SP general secretary Amar Singh appeared to be ‘prima facie’ involved in the making of the fabricated CD. He did not rule out the involvement of the “people in the Government”.
In the conversation recorded in the controversial CD, Shanti Bhushan – a former Union Law Minister – appeared to be discussing with Yadav how a particular judge in the Supreme Court could be ‘fixed’ through Prashant for a price of Rs 4 crore.
“Even more ominous than the attempt to discredit my father and me and thereby derail the civil society participation in drafting the Lokpal Bill is the innuendo in the fabricated CD (in the voice of Amar Singh) that a particular judge in the Supreme Court could be managed through me,” the junior Bhushan told a news-conference on Sunday.
Shanti Bhushan and Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee co-chair the joint panel set up by the Government with five Union Ministers and an equal number of civil society activists to draft the Lokpal Bill. Prashant too is a member of the panel.
The conversation on the CD suggests that Shanti Bhushan was with Amar Singh, when the latter called up Yadav. Singh later apparently handed over the phone to Shanti Bhushan, who then talked to the SP chief. “It seems to be no coincidence that the judge Amar Singh appears to name in that context is heading the bench, which has heard and reserved judgments in the Amar Singh tapes case as well as the case challenging the legality of the 2-G licenses, in both of which I was a lawyer,” said Prashant.
Prashant said that he would send a legal notice to Singh for contempt of court and hoped that the Supreme Court would investigate the matter to reach at the ‘root and bottom’ of the conspiracy.
“Cut and Paste Job”
Bhushans got the CD analyzed by United States-based eminent acoustic phonetics expert George Papcun as well as by former Central Forensic Science Laboratory director S R Singh at Hyderabad-based Truth Lab.
Papcun, who has been employed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, Aerospace Corporation and University of California Phonetics Laboratory, found “discontinuities” in the taped conversation suggesting that “the recordings were not an authentic and valid representation of an original conversation”. He found “tampering in at least five critical places in Shanti Bhushan’s speech.”
“It’s a cut-and-paste job. At least in six places the tapes have been tempered and the words of Shanti Bhushan have been inserted into the sliced tape of the Amar Singh-Mulayam Singh Yadav tape,” said Prashant.
“At least three portions of Mualayam’s speech in this CD have been bodily lifted from the very tapes I had filed in the Supreme Court in 2006 asking it to lift the injunction restraining the media from publishing Amar’s intercepted phone conversations,” he added.