New Delhi, Feb. 11: The Amar Singh phone tapping case took a new turn on Friday, with the Supreme Court taking serious view of the Reliance Communications putting his phone on surveillance on a forged letter of the Delhi home secretary, and asked the Centre why the licence of the service provider was not cancelled for such a casual approach.
Pointing out at least eight grammatical and spelling mistakes in the letter bearing the date of November 9, 2005, and forged signature of the then Delhi government home secretary, Mr Ramesh Narayanswamy, a bench of Justices G.S. Singhvi and A.K. Ganguly, told the Solicitor General, Mr Gopal Subramaniam, that no service provider could be allowed to get away with such a lapse as it would put the freedom of an individual in “jeopardy”.
“Any service provider will not act on this kind of communication, it is gross negligence. It either has been done deliberately or they are incompetent enough to act on an order full of mistakes. Why did you not cancel its (Reliance) licence? You should have cancelled the licence per se on such an order full of mistakes coming from the home secretary, who is a high ranking IAS officer,” the court told the Solicitor General.
The apex court pointed out that when several people in the country were raising serious questions on phone tapping, no service provider could be allowed to function in such a casual manner.
“Tomorrow if the telephone of Chief of Army staff is given to some terrorist organisations and his conversation is transferred to some other country what will happen to this country? This way any body’s communication can be intercepted by a unscrupulous service provider,” the bench observed.
While SG acknowledged that it was a “serious lapse” on the part of Reliance, the service provider’s lawyer will respond on February 14 to the apex court’s query.