Taking out the sting: Cobrapost's videos are just extra-judicial admissions

The Delhi High Court in Anirudh Bahl’s case might have upheld the citizens’ right to sting as integral to enjoying the fruits of the freedom struggle but both the Gujarat High Court and the Supreme Court refused to order authentication of the Operation Kalank tapes in 2007. It then took the National Human Rights Commission to order the CBI to authenticate the tapes.

Cobrapost has now gone to town with a sensational disclosure – its sting operations reveal that the late prime minister Narasimha Rao, Advani, Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharati, among others, abetted or acquiesced in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Assuming that the tapes/CDs/DVDs (tapes for short) are authenticated by experts as undoctored, it doesn’t mean clinching evidence has been found against the alleged conspirators/abettors.

Stinging is an exercise in catching a person in a weak or animated movement, with his pants down, so to speak. The spontaneous talk made by him might contain truth or falsehoods or a mixture of both. That the recent Babri sting was carried out by a person posing as an author of a book in the making on the Babri demolition of course should carry greater credibility given the fact that even one given to empty boasts and loose talk would have tempered his enthusiasm. For, he would have surmised that his outpourings might find mention in the work of the author. In the event he would have chosen his words with care and even withheld self-incriminating confessions.

Be that as it may, the truth is that in criminal law, the most readily acceptable evidence is the smoking gun. The results of stinging by no means are smoking guns. The second and third best evidences are tell-tale marks left on the scene or found on the alleged criminal and eye-witnesses respectively. Sting tapes by no means are tell tale marks nor do they necessarily bring out the eye-witness account of the crime.

Whether the revelations made regarding Babri Masjid demolition contain bluff and bluster or truth can therefore be brought out only on further investigations in a court trial. That is why the BJP is right in petitioning the Election Commission to ban telecast by Cobrapost of its Babri sting operation. Indeed, the sooner the law is made in India regulating stinging the better, because there are in its absence a lot of grey areas and unfettered freedom to indulge in competitive character assassination. In days to come, the itch to telecast salacious stings would be greater now that elections are upon us. Free and fair elections posit that half-baked truths and surmises are not allowed to sway the voters one way or the other.

In other words, the tapes must not be allowed to come into the public domain till the trial court has pronounced its verdict based among other things on the evidence produced by the tapes and follow up evidences gathered thereon. Otherwise, the BJP and Akali Dal may be tempted to go to town with tapes on operation Blue Star and the Sikh massacre that followed in Delhi and other parts of the nation. Doing such a quick sting operation may not be difficult at all given the enormous grudge the Sikh community harbors against the Congress leaders at whose behest the pogrom was alleged to have been carried out in 1984 following the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi.

The short point is that ideally stinging should be done only at the behest of the state. If for some reason people are allowed to sting each other with gay abandon as exhorted by Kejriwal in the context of fighting corruption at low levels, the least that can be done is to ask the stingers to hold their horses. They must be compelled to hand over their tapes as prima facie evidence to the investigating authorities. This is all the more necessary in cases of stings with political overtones especially in an election season. But then there cannot be two sets of laws. Therefore it must be the law for all seasons and reasons that the tapes born of sting operations should not be made public much less aired on television until the trial courts have disposed of the matter one way or the other.