M A I N   N E W S

Focus back on Sanjay Joshi CD case
Faraz Ahmad
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 25
The arrest of outgoing Home Minister of Gujarat Amit Shah by the CBI in the Sohrabuddin case today has brought the spotlight back on the Sanjay Joshi CD episode.

A Gujarat Police inspector, BK Chaubey, working earlier in the Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) under its then chief DG Vanzara (now under arrest), has told the CBI that at Vanzara’s instance he carried the fake sex CDs of Sanjay Joshi, an RSS pracharak and former organisational general secretary of the BJP, to Mumbai (on November 26,2005) where the BJP national executive meet was being held. Chaubey also admitted that he distributed them to newsmen and others present at the meet. In the CD, Joshi was purportedly shown having sex with some woman whose face was blurred in the film. Following these disclosures, he had resigned from his post, even though he maintained that the CD was morphed and the man shown in it was not him.

The Madhya Pradesh Government immediately sought a report from the Forensic Science Laboratory, Hyderabad, which also found the CD to be fake.

Chaubey, too, claims that the CD was fake and that the character in the CD was actually Sohrabuddin Sheikh, whom Vanzara’s ATS killed a few months later in a fake encounter. The film was made mainly while keeping track of Sohrabuddin’s movements.

Sanjay Joshi was known political opponent of Gujarat chief Minister Narendra Modi. After LK Advani had praised Pakistan-founder Mohammd Ali Jinnah, Joshi was among those who spearheaded the campaign for removal of Advani from the party president’s post.

Chaubey chose to distribute the CD in the BJP national executive where Advani was ousted. The CD diverted the attention from Advani’s humiliating ouster by the RSS.

But a new dimension has been added to this controversy, with a report (a copy of which is available with The Tribune) claiming that there was nothing fake about the CD and nothing was morphed and the man in the film was actually Sanjay Joshi. It has also identified the woman in that CD, with her name and address.

This report is addressed to “Sadanand Sapre, Prant Karyavah, RSS, Bhopal, and bears the date 14/1/06. Recently, Sanjay Joshi’s name surfaced when the controversy about BJP office secretary Shyam Jaju came to light, embarrassing the BJP establishment.