The Snoopgate story starts with the abduction and cold-blooded murder of an innocent young woman, who was framed as a terrorist by her killers [1]. One of them, G.L. Singhal, kept recordings of his telephone conversations with Minister of State for Home Amit Shah, in case he might need them to exonerate his own conduct. It is clips from these recorded conversations that were released by Gulail and Cobrapost.
"February 1992. In the midst of a political storm stirred by the Ram Mandir movement, Mahant Lal Das, the then chief priest of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple inside the Babri Masjid complex in Ayodhya was murdered. The search began for a new mahant, one with a clean reputation and free of any criminal charges or political motives. It was after much difficulty that Satyendra Das was appointed the new mahant.
"Adani Group was given 2008.41 hectare reserve forest land, which falls in Mundra and Dhrub villages in the Kutch east forest division, for Solar Salt Project & Salt Washery Plant on the condition that it would make compensatory afforestation over equivalent non-forest land and to bear the cost of raising and maintaining compensatory afforestation.
"...Once Reliance invested in the group, editors approached stories about their benefactor gingerly. In one instance in 2012, a possible story containing a reference about Reliance and TV18 bidding for Indian cricket rights was discussed by the channel’s core editors for two days. “People were saying, ‘Yeah, let’s play it up,’” a person involved in the story’s production told me. But the reference worried them, and they asked the reporter to confirm once more that Reliance had placed a bid. This was confirmed, but the story that ran contained only the names of other bidders...
"Ahead of general elections in six months, the snooping allegations have put Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime minister-designate Narendra Modi on the backfoot, especially when the saffron party's responses to the charges have been weak and unconvincing. Narendra Modi has topped several recent opinion polls, but the charges could tarnish his carefully crafted image as a pro-business and graft-free administrator..."
"Much before the controversy of snooping on a young architect and a senior IAS officer in Gujarat was exposed, the State Intelligence Bureau had drawn the attention of the Narendra Modi government to rampant state-sponsored phone tapping. The Bureau had apprehended "trouble and controversies in future" in an official letter and demanded a strict phone interception policy..."
"...After the destruction of the Babri Masjid and a myriad speculative conversations around how many temples Muslim rulers had destroyed in India, Eaton decided to count. That became a book titled Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India. In other words, he is the best myth-buster there is and that’s precisely what he did to the audiences at THiNK. Eaton explains why it’s crucial today for us to get our history right. Especially on the period he writes about..."
"Many stories have been written about the myth of Modi’s development and perhaps parts of what we will be releasing in the next few stories, would have already appeared in various places but what has so far not come in public domain are the documents relating to blatant breach of rules and constitutional norms...
"An ever-growing online community of pro-Hindu, pro-BJP, pro-Narendra Modi, right-wing tweeters has taken over political discourse on the Internet... A mark of their overwhelming online supremacy can be found in the India Today Group's e-lection poll, a mock online General Election in which users were asked to vote in Lok Sabha constituencies across India. The ballot worked through one-time passwords sent to mobile phones, ensuring only one vote for every cell number to prevent rigging.
"The systematic use of gang-rape as a weapon occurred in the Surat riots after the Babri Masjid demolition, and an ugly innovation was the videotaping of the gang-rapes. This was not a case of some random bystander filming the attacks, but a meticulously-planned spectacle with the venues flood-lit despite the fact that electric wires to the rest of the neighbourhood had been cut [1]. According to Praful Bidwai, Modi was the mastermind of the unspeakable atrocities against women in the 1992 Surat riots [2]. Modi is pictured there with Advani in their wake [3].
