NEW DELHI - The Indian government has launched a probe into allegations that a former close confidant of opposition prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi had ordered police illegally to spy on a woman.
The move to investigate the alleged 2009 surveillance just months before general elections came as a court, in a major boost to Modi, rejected a petition to prosecute him over his role in 2002 religious riots that left some 2,000 people dead.
“The Cabinet has approved a proposal to set up a Commission of Inquiry .. to look into the incidents of physical/electronic surveillance in the states of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, allegedly without authorization,” a government statement said. The decision provoked outrage from Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which slammed the probe as a “witch hunt”.
Modi, the chief minister of western Gujarat state since 2001 and now a prime ministerial candidate, is leading in opinion polls ahead of the ruling Congress party just months before elections due by May.
Modi has been crafting his image as a pro-business reformer who can revive India’s flagging economy as head of a corruption-free, efficient national government. But the allegations, contained in 267 audio recordings released to two investigative websites last month, could potentially damage that reputation.
The websites said the recordings included telephone conversations in which Modi’s former junior home minister in Gujarat ordered a police officer to track the woman. In the phone calls, the minister purportedly asked the surveillance to be carried out for his “saheb” - a respectful Hindi word for boss. Modi was not named.
Meanwhile, India’s fiery opposition candidate for premier, Narendra Modi, voiced Friday his “grief” and “misery” over deadly 2002 anti-Muslim riots that swept his home state of Gujarat after he became chief minister.
Modi, in his frankest statement to date about the riots, said in a blog he was “shaken to the core” by the violence in which as many as 2,000 people, mainly Muslims, were hacked, burnt and shot to death, according to human rights activists.
“Grief, sadness, misery, pain, anguish, agony - mere words could not capture the absolute emptiness one felt on witnessing such inhumanity,” Modi, named by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as its candidate for prime minister, wrote.
“This is the first time I am sharing the harrowing ordeal I had gone thorugh in those words at a personal level,” he added.
Modi’s statement comes ahead of general election expected in May in which his leadership of the state during the riots remains a contentious issue.
The riots erupted in February 2002 after a train carrying Hindu devotees was torched in Gujarat, prompting a wave of Hindu-led reprisal attacks against Muslims. A 2005 inquiry concluded the train fire was accidental.
Meanwhile, a bicycle bomb that killed five people when it exploded prematurely in eastern India was the work of militants fighting for a separate state in the Darjeeling tea district, police said Friday.
Detectives probing Thursday night’s blast in West Bengal said they believed the bomb exploded accidentally as a member of the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation (KLO) cycled through the town of Jalpaiguri.
A senior police officer said that a KLO militant named as Lalmohon Debnath was among the five killed when the powerful device exploded on a bridge, near a school.
“Preliminary investigations have revealed that Debnath was carrying the bomb to plant somewhere else,” West Bengal police inspector general Anuj Sharma told AFP, adding the blast could be felt two kilometres away.
“A timer device had been fitted to trigger the explosion, but the bomb went off suddenly while he was on the bridge.
“Debnath was blown in half... We do not think it was a suicide attack,” Sharma added.
Police had received a tip-off about a possible attack and arrested three suspected KLO followers before the explosion which was carried two days before the anniversary of the group’s founding in 1996, said Sharma.
Ten people were also injured when the bomb exploded late Thursday. Earlier reports put the number of dead at four but a fifth victim died later in hospital.
The KLO has carried out several other bombings with devices strapped to bicycles and has also marked its anniversary with attacks in the past.
Sharma said the KLO were behind a 2009 bombing in Jalpaiguri which killed four and an attack at a train station in November 2006 that claimed seven lives.
The KLO wants to create a separate state of Kamtapur in northern West Bengal which would include the tea-growing region of Darjeeling and five other districts, some of which border Bangladesh and Bhutan. It would also incorporate parts of the neighbouring state of Assam.
West Bengal is one of India’s largest states and Jalpaiguri is some 600 kilometres (375 miles) north of the state capital Kolkata.
The Indian government agreed in July to the creation of the new state of Telangana by splitting Andhra Pradesh, a move that critics said would fuel separatist campaigns.
India has been wracked by separatist conflicts since its independence in 1947, most notably in Kashmir and the remote northeast region.