New Delhi: The government told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that documents related to the Rafale deal had been stolen from the ministry of defence and threatened The Hindu newspaper with action under the Official Secrets Act for publishing articles based on them.
The newspaper reacted saying that documents related to the Rafale deal were published in the public interest and nobody would get any information from The Hindu on the confidential sources who had provided them.
Those who put documents on the Rafale deal in the public domain are guilty under the Official Secrets Act and had committed contempt of court, Attorney-General K.K. Venugopal said before a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi.
An investigation into the theft is on, the attorney-general said on a day the newspaper published another article on the fighter deal.
The bench, which also included Justices S.K. Kaul and K.M. Joseph, was hearing a batch of petitions seeking a review of its December 14 ruling dismissing all the pleas against the deal for the warplanes which India procured from France.
Former Union ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and advocate Prashant Bhushan, who had jointly filed a petition, alleged that the Centre had suppressed crucial facts when the court decided to dismiss the batch of PILs against the Rafale deal in December.
When Mr Bhushan referred to an article written by senior journalist N. Ram in The Hindu, Mr Venugopal said the write-ups were based on stolen documents. An FIR had not been registered so far into the theft of the documents pertaining to the Rafale deal, he added.
He said the first write-up by Mr Ram appeared in The Hindu on February 8, and Wednesday’s edition had another article which he said was aimed at influencing the court’s proceedings. This amounted to contempt of court, he said.
Reacting to the issue, the chairman of The Hindu Publishing Group, Mr N. Ram, said, “The documents were published because details were withheld or covered up.”
He added, “You may call it stolen documents...We are not concerned. We got it from confidential sources and we are committed to protecting these sources. Nobody is going to get any information from us on these sources. But the documents speak for themselves and the stories speak for themselves.”
The newspaper published the documents by omitting the word “secret” on top, he said, seeking a dismissal of the review petitions and raising objections to Mr Bhushan’s arguments based on The Hindu’s articles.
The bench sought to know from the Centre what it has done when it alleges that the stories are based on stolen material.
Advancing his arguments on behalf of Mr Sinha, Mr Shourie and himself, Mr Bhushan said the court would not have dismissed the plea for an FIR and probe had critical facts not been suppressed.
The bench was told that every statement the court made in the case may be used to destabilise either the government or the Opposition and therefore court should refrain from making it.
