Rajiv convict case: SC seeks CBI reply

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday sought response from CBI on a plea filed by a convict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, A G Perarivalan, seeking recall of its order upholding his conviction in 1999 in the light of revelations by a former CBI official that he left out some statements while recording his confession.

V Thiagarajan, a 1981-batch IPS officer, had recorded the confessional statement of Perarivalan in 1991 in which the accused had admitted that he had purchased two batteries and handed them over to Sivarasan, which were later used to detonate the human bomb to kill the former Prime Minister. Perarivalan also stated that he was not aware of the purpose for which the batteries were bought and did not know about the assassination plot. But Thiagarajan later admitted that he did not record this part of the statement as the probe was still going on at that time.


‘Perarivalan in jail for 26 yrs for just buying batteries’

The officer in his affidavit told the the court that the convict did not know about the plan to kill the former Prime Minister and his version of being not aware about the plot was not recorded in his confessional statement which was heavily relied on by the courts to convict him.

The officer’s affidavit said Perarivalan’s particular statement was “omitted” from his confessional statements. “It is humbly stated that accused Perarivalan’s statement that he was totally in the dark as to the purpose for which the batteries were purchased was not recorded by me, because it would be an exculpatory statement and hence the whole purpose of recording the confessional statement would be lost. Further, I did not deem it fit to record this exculpatory statement because the investigation regarding the bomb was pending at the time of recording the confessional statement,” he said in his affidavit. The officer’s statements is contradictory to the SC verdict which had in 1998 said that “we therefore reach the conclusion that A-18 (Arivu) was actively involved in the criminal conspiracy to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi”. Agreeing to hear Perarivalan’s plea to re-examine the case, a bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and R Banumathi asked CBI to file its response on his petition within three weeks and posted the next hearing for February 21.

Perarivalan’s counsel Gopal Sankaranarayanan told the bench that his client was languishing in solitary confinement for the last 26 years for just procuring the batteries and CBI has not so far been able to interrogate the real culprit who had made the bomb.

Perarivalan was around 20 years old when he was arrested. He was granted parole in August last year for the first time since his arrest in mid-1991.

The officer, who retired in 2012 as DGP (training) in Odisha, had justified his decision to come out 26 years after he recorded the confessional statement saying, “The accused continues to languish in jail even after a long and egregious lapse of 26 years with the prospect of getting the legitimate and long over-due remission of his remaining portion of sentence becoming more and more distant and precarious, I now feel obliged, in good conscience to make this affidavit as the officer who recorded the confessional statement which has been heavily relied upon by SC and TADA court so that this could be helpful in meeting the ends of justice.” 



AT RECEIVING END: Perarivalan was around 20 years old when he was arrested. He was granted parole in August last year for the first time since his arrest in mid-1991

NEW CONTROVERSY 

Row after seer sits during Tamil anthem
Kanchi Mutt Acharya’s Action Condemned By Parties, Activists

Sivakumar.B@timesgroup.com

Chennai: A new controversy is brewing even as the row over reference to ‘Andal’ as ‘dasi’ by film lyricist Vairamuthu seems to be dying out. Kancheepuram mutt junior seer Vijayendra Saraswathi’s refusal to stand up for the ‘Tamil Thai Vaazhthu’ (invocation to ‘Tamil’ mother) has drawn condemnation from activists, Tamil groups and political parties.

They have criticised the junior acharya for not standing up during the ‘Tamil Thai Vaazhthu’ at a function in Chennai on Tuesday. It is customary to play the song in Tamil at the beginning of all government functions.

On Tuesday evening, at a function to release the Tamil-Sanskrit dictionary, everyone on the stage, including governor Banwarilal Purohit, stood up when the song was played.

Vijayendra Saraswathi was

seen seated and in a state of meditation. He, however, stood up for the national anthem. DMK, PMK and Tamil activists have accused the acharya of dishonouring “Tamil mother”.

State ministers reacted strongly, criticising the acharya for “disrespecting Tamil thai”. “It is disrespectful for anyone not to stand up when the Tamil thai song is played,” state information minister Kadambur Raju told reporters.

Tamil culture minister K Pandiarajan said, “It is a convention for everyone, from a student to a senior citizen, to stand up during the ‘Tamil Thai Vaazhthu’. I personally feel the acharya should have stood up. At the same time, there is no need to blow the issue out of proportion.”

The DMK and PMK too joined in, raising the pro-Tamil banner. DMK working president M K Stalin told reporters at his party headquarters Anna Arivalayam, “It is highly condemnable that Vijayendra acharya did not stand up for the ‘Tamil Thai Vaazhthu’. It was a function organised by BJP leader H Raja to release a book of his father and during the anthem everyone stood up except the seer.” The incident, he pointed out, took place in front of the governor.

PMK leader S Ramadoss criticised the acharya, saying, “Everyone, including the governor and senior citizen Solomon Pappaya, stood up. It is not acceptable that the acharya was meditating when the song was being played.”

Though the Constitution does not mandate that everyone should stand up for the song, since 1970, it has become a convention to play it at the start of public functions. All those present, either on the stage or off it, stand up, just like when the national anthem is played.

Activists say that each person may have different views on the issue. But, in a public place, out of deference to the gathering, it was accepted convention to stand up for the song. 

Marriages fixed on FB bound to fail: Guj HC

Saeed.Khan@timesgroup.com

Ahmedabad: Fixed-on-Facebook modern marriages are bound to fail, the Gujarat high court observed while dealing with a case of domestic violence where a man and his wife ended up squabbling soon after they wed following a courtship on social media.

The high court also advised the couple, in their 20s, to settle their dispute and consent to a divorce so that they “can think about future avenues in life”.
The court was hearing the case of student couple Jaideep Shah of Navsari, south Gujarat, and Fansi of Rajkot, Saurashtra, who came into contact with each other on social media platform Facebook in 2014.

They fell in love, started meeting offline and got married on February 8, 2015. Problems cropped up in their marital life within two months of their wedding.

The woman left her matrimonial home and accused her husband and in-laws of demanding dowry, torture and criminal intimidation.

The “Mahila” police station registered an FIR under IPC Sections 498A, 323 and 504, and under the Dowry Prohibition Act. Her in-laws approached the Gujarat high court to quash the charges in 2016.

During the hearing of the quashing petition on Wednesday, Justice J B Pardiwala observed, “This is one of those modern marriages fixed on Facebook, and is therefore bound to fail.”

The judge also acknowledged that the couple’s efforts to resolve their differences had been fruitless.

“I am of the view that the parties should explore the possibility of a settlement and put an end to the marriage with consent. Both sides are young. Once the marriage is dissolved, they can think about their future avenues in life,” the judge said.

The HC quashed the charges levelled against the in-laws, commenting that the allegations were mainly targeted at the husband.

The woman’s advocate conceded that the in-laws may not be concerned with the dispute between husband and wife and the court could quash the FIR against the in-laws.

The HC permitted investigation to proceed against the husband.

Judge who convicted Udumalpet honour killing accused dies at 52

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Tirupur: Tirupur principal district judge Alamelu Natarajan, 52, who pronounced a landmark judgment in dalit boy V Shankar murder case, died of pneumonia in Coimbatore on Thursday.

Incidentally, the judgment pronounced in the honour killing case on December 12 was the last one for her. She awarded six death penalties and one life imprisonment in the case. She had reserved order in another case before falling ill.

Judge Alamelu was a native of Podanur in Coimbatore. Her family moved to Trichy after her father, who was in government service, was transferred. She did her schooling from a convent institution and completed her law graduation from the Trichy Government Law College. She was married to Natarajan, a chartered accountant by profession, and they got settled in Chennai. The judge is survived by her husband.

Alamelu had joined as a magistrate in state judiciary in 1991 and she went on to work as presiding officer in various trial courts in districts like Coimbatore and Vellore before she was made PDJ for Tirupur district in 2015.

Sources said the judge had been down with cold and fever since last Saturday. As the cold and fever aggravated, she was admitted to a private hospital in Tirupur on Monday. Test reports revealed that she had pneumonia. She was referred to a private tertiary hospital in Coimbatore the same day. Her condition remained critical and at one stage, she was kept on ventilator. She was declared dead on Thursday, the hospital sources said.

Fraternity members from the Bar and bench paid their homage to the judge at the hospital. Later, the body was taken by air to Chennai, where she will be cremated on Friday.

A scam that should teach TN a lesson 

In Wake Of TRB & TNPSC Rackets, TOI Reconstructs The Modus Operandi Of Private Agencies That Rigged TN Recruitment Exams
A.Subramani@timesgroup.com
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office can take credit for blowing the lid off an unprecedented recruitment scam in Tamil Nadu. It took just a nudge from the PMO, based on an innocuous letter by a job-aspirant, to expose how several thousand high-paying government jobs had been sold by scamsters handling recruitment on behalf of the TN government for years.

It will need either the CBI or a special investigation team under the direct supervision of Madras high court to bring all culprits, including IAS officers who had stints in Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC) and Teachers Recruitment Board (TRB) to book.
Officers, sleuths and judges are stunned by the ease with which the scamsters managed to rig the recruitment protocol for government jobs, including the state’s top civil service — Group -I — and push candidates who had paid ₹25 lakh to ₹35 lakh each.

For long, TNPSC and TRB have outsourced the selection process, compromising on the very sanctity of selection procedures. Just three private companies now conduct recruitments for almost every government job in the statefrom that of village administrative officer (VAO) to Group-I services. The other services include National Eligibility Test (NET) and State Level Eligibility Test (SLET) which are a must for college lecturers, Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) which is mandatory for school teachers, BT/PG assistant recruitment for schools and all Group-I to IV services under TNPSC.

At present, the ‘recruitment’ of 270 to 280 assistant lecturers for polytechnics and more than 70 ‘appointments’ made to Group-I services which include DSPs and deputy collectors have been put on hold, thanks to the timely intervention of the Madras high court. Prodded by the court, half a dozen people have been arrested. Some key suspects have gone underground with family.

Piecing together documents and interviews with people privy to the investigation, TOI has reconstructed the scam. The following is the criminal modus operandi, perfected by scamsters over the years.

TNPSC and TRB have been giving ‘recruitment contracts’ renewable every year to private agencies, so much so that it is this private company, not TNPSC, which places orders with a Hyderabad-based ‘security press’ for coding sheets. While placing orders, the company asks the press to supply specimen copies of coding sheets, but without printing the word ‘specimen’ across the pages. Though specimen coding sheets are meant for demo purposes, these companies illegally coded the specimen sheets at their scanning centres.

A gang of brokers, some already arrested, and employees of different departments, fanned out scouting for candidates with paying capacity. Once a deal was struck, the candidate was given his ‘registration’ number well ahead of the examination, and crucial instructions such as use of a specific kind of pencil to mark the coding sheets. Of course, allotment of registration numbers, dummy numbers and matching these two with photographs of candidates were all responsibilities of these agencies. Within a day or two after the examination, the outsource agencies marked the specimen sheets with appropriate answers and scanned them.

As per procedure, TNPSC and TRB secure hard copies of all answer sheets in their strong rooms and ask the agencies to scan all coded OMR sheets under 24X7 CCTV surveillance. Scamsters gave original marksheets and cloned scan records to TNPSC and TRB authorities, but took soft copies of the scanned sheets.

The actual tampering of scores took place while compiling marks. In the case of ‘payment category’ candidates, the tampered marks were entered and scanned images of fraudulent answer sheets inserted as files.

The scam was working quite well, till a failed candidate (name withheld) noticed that many of his peers who flunked in several competitive examinations, just as he did repeatedly for several years, were selected as assistant lecturers in the TRB examination. He gave details of 19 candidates, and wrote a letter to the PMO, which forwarded it to TRB for action.

It did not take much time for a diligent woman officer to compare the scores of the 19 ‘selected candidates’ with their original answer sheets and the cloned scan copies of their code sheets in possession of TRB, to realise that a fraud had been committed. As the issue was being debated in courts, police stations and in the media, the official chose to hold up the result and publish online the entire list of more than 1 lakh code sheets of candidates, with a suggestion that candidates compare their marks and bring any anomaly to officials’ notice.

Two things stunned the TRB top brass: One, the number of fraudulently selected candidates was not 19, but between 270 and 280. Two, scamsters had not just jacked up marks of their candidates, they had also ‘reduced’ the marks of some deserving candidates to make it doubly sure that those who paid them got through.

Only five people have so far been arrested in connection with the scam, but police are closing in on a Tangedco supervisor who had apparently made a couple of hundreds of crores of rupees through such deals. He is seen as the mastermind and a crucial link. He, along with his family, is absconding.

Email your feedback to southpole.toi @timesgroup.com 


TNPSC in soup too
TNPSC’s recruitment of 74 Group-I service officers was challenged by a transsexual candidate. Madras high court has put the result on hold, asking the 74 candidates to file replies by April 2. TNPSC sends at least five answer sheets extra to every examination centre. There will be absentees too. Neither the extra sheets nor those belonging absentee-candidates were accounted for by it.

Same sets of question papers for all NEET examinees: CBSE 
 
Students Can Take Exams In 11 Languages

AmitAnand.Choudhary@timesgroup.com

New Delhi: The current practice of preparing different sets of question papers for students taking the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test in regional languages is set to go with the CBSE telling the Supreme Court on Thursday that from this year only one question paper will be set, and that it will be translated into different languages.

The decision was taken after the board found itself in a fix following allegations that the question papers in regional languages for NEET 2017 were more difficult than the English and Hindi papers and a bunch of petitions was filed in the apex court by students seeking quashing of the exam. The students also alleged that some questions in regional languages were wrong, hampering their chances in the entrance test.

The CBSE, which conducts the medical entrance test, was forced to take the decision after the SC termed the practice illogical as there would be no uniformity in the entrance examination and students would be asked different questions.

Appearing before a bench of Justices Arun Mishra and S Abdul Nazeer, CBSE’s counsel, Tara Chandra Sharma, told the court that only one question paper would be set for all students and those who opted for vernacular languages would be provided translated question papers in their preferred medium.

Students are allowed to take the exam in 10 languages — Hindi, English, Gujarati, Marathi, Odiya, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Assamese. From this year, Urdu will be added as a medium. 


Top court was not convinced by CBSE

The SC had earlier said there would no uniformity in the entrance examination if students were provided different question papers. It had asked the CBSE to get the same question paper translated into different languages.

“It is an illogical practice. How will you evaluate the competence of students when their questions are different. There is no reason for setting different question papers. There must be same question paper for all students who take the exam in Hindi, English or other language,” the court had said.

The board had contended that if the level of difficulty of all papers was same, then it served the purpose of uniformity in the examination process and there was nothing wrong in having multiple papers. But the court was not convinced and asked it to do away with the practice.

Around 11.35 lakh students appeared for NEET 2017 and around 6.11 lakh candidates qualified.

CA’s refund racket busted in Bengaluru

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Bengaluru: The income tax department on Thursday busted a racket in which tax refunds running into crores were fraudulently claimed by employees of around 50 companies in Bengaluru, including Infosys, IBM, Biocon and Vodafone.

I-T officials of Karnataka and Goa found the employees had availed the services of a chartered accountant in Bengaluru, who filed false returns for them and secured refunds amounting to Rs 18 crore. The CA, the employees told investigators, took a 10% cut on the refund.

The I-T department said its investigation wing searched the premises of the chartered accountant on Wednesday and seized bogus claim documents of his clients. They also found WhatsApp chat messages related to the fudging. The department is yet to name the CA.

Investigators said the CA filed revised returns for his clients, making false or inflated claim of loss from house property – which reduced their tax liability and ensured a refund. Loss from house property refers to the loss suffered by the taxpayer in occupying or renting out the house he owns against interest paid on the housing loan.

The CA filed nearly 1,000 false returns, adding up to a loss claim of Rs 18 crore. Some of these employees were also questioned in their respective offices. Besides the companies already mentioned, the CA’s client list included employees of SAP Labs, ICICI Bank, Cisco and Thomson Reuters India.

I-T officials said the employees admitted they did not have any “real loss” to declare from house property. They claimed that the CA had told them he could get them a refund by manipulating claims. He also took a 10% commission on the refund as “incidental charges”, they said. The employees shared some WhatsApp messages as supporting evidence.