Brig Dasgupta in jail for 4 yrs without trial gets bail

  

 Tuesday, August 24, 2010 New Delhi Today's Issue (The Pioneer)

Staff Reporter | New Delhi

Brigadier (Retd) Ujjal Dasgupta, who was arrested four years ago on the charge of passing on classified information to an American diplomat, was finally granted bail by a city court on Monday. The ailing Dasgupta had been incarcerated all these years with no chargesheet filed against him.

His family members and former colleagues had been struggling for months for his release after Dasgupta’s health deteriorated inside Tihar Jail. The Pioneer, in a series of reports, had highlighted the Brigadier’s plight, following which he was admitted to AIIMS in May 2010 for a complete medical investigation.

Additional Sessions Judge Inder Jeet Singh granted the bail subject to his furnishing a personal bond of `75,000 and a surety of the same amount, with the conditions that he will not leave the country or contact any of the case witnesses.

Dasgupta, now 64, had been seeking bail on health grounds. He had suffered a massive heat attack in November 1988 and undergone a coronary artery bypass graft surgery at AIIMS. Dasgupta is the last of the three accused to get bail in the case. Commodore (Retd) Mukesh Saini, who was working with the National Security Council Secretariat, and Shib Shankar Paul, a senior systems analyst at the Secretariat, have already been granted bail by the Tis Hazari court.

The soldier was put behind bars for four years, though evidence against him could not be gathered. His friends and relatives had been pointing out that denying him medical help amounted to denial of justice. In the wake of investigative agencies’ failure to gather evidence, his former colleagues had begun a campaign seeking justice for Dasgupta. “This is good news and we are very happy. I am sure his glory will be restored since he has always been an intelligent person and an officer,” said one of his former colleagues.

Dasgupta, director of computer cell at the Research and Analysis Wing, was arrested on July 19, 2006, under provisions of the Official Secrets Act and accused of giving sensitive information to Rossanna Minchew, an American diplomat. The prosecution claimed that he had passed on the information through pen drives, which were recovered during investigation. His office laptop, home computer and some hard disks had also been seized by the prosecution.

“The house of the applicant was searched and raided in violation of the statutory provisions of law envisaged in the Official Secrets Act and Sub-Inspector Sajjan Singh was not authorised to conduct the investigation in the case,” Dasgupta’s counsel Pramod Kumar Dubey argued.

“There is collusion between the police/special cell, R&AW and IB officials to implicate the applicant (Dasgupta) falsely,” he added.

Dubey also argued that Dasgupta, a 63 year old heart patient, has clean antecedents and has undergone triple bypass surgery. The documents contained in two envelopes, supplied by the prosecution, do not contain classified information, he said. Dasgupta was detained on the basis of these documents which the prosecution had claimed were classified. The documents were supplied to Dasgupta only after an intervention by the court.

Dasgupta was looking after the development of ‘Anveshak’, a database management system. The court, in its “prima facie” observation, said Central Forensic Sciences Laboratory analysis of seized hard disk showed that computer files related to Anveshak were last accessed in May 2005. Minchew was given visa for India in August, 2005 and therefore could not have received any information on Anveshak from Dasgupta as the file had last been accessed in May 2005. Minchew was in India to coordinate Indo-US Cyber Security Forum. Dasgupta also pointed out that as per the prosecution itself, the Anveshak software is not classified.

Original Story: http://www.dailypioneer.com/278281/Brig-in-jail-for-4-yrs-without-trial-gets-bail.html 

Two security hands find themselves chained to bizarre charges

  

 The following excerpts of an article raises some pertinent questions: Why are they in jail if the charges are unprovable for more than 5 years?Is it not a Human Rights violation? Why is Government of India silent when Delhi Police has committed a gross error and impropriety? And the terrible cost is being paid by the two veterans who had devoted their life in the service of the nation and had pledged their life for the cause every day of their life in service of the nation!
What will be the case if these two honorably discharged veterans  were related to the powerful families of India? Why are the India's veteran community so silent? Because we, the veterans community lack the  power of critical thinking and courage of conviction to take a stand for our fellow veterans! Are you listening, the so called veteran community leaders and organizations? Is your conscience made of rotten dead wood?

Wake up, the veteran community of India.

Security

The Web Of Kafka

Two security hands find themselves chained to bizarre charges!

Saikat Datta

While the intelligence and police apparatus spares the likes of Ravind Sistala and Arun Dixit—NTRO officials of joint secretary level who mysteriously lost their laptops containing top secret information about India’s missile monitoring system and N-weapons programme—it has been quick to victimise innocents. The authorities failed to affix blame for laxity even when 53 computers full of secret codes were stolen from DRDO’s labs at Metcalfe House, Delhi. The computer shells were found subsequently, but their hard disks remain untraced. But in 2006, an overenthusiastic Delhi police went all out against Commander Mukesh Saini, a retired naval officer, after he was accused of leaking secrets to a foreign agent. Saini, who has a masters in computer management and business administration, had served the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) for almost three years as its top cyber security expert.
In 2006, Saini was granted premature retirement to seek a career in the private sector. Armed with his expertise, Saini landed a job with software major Microsoft. He was all set to begin a new career when his world fell apart. The Delhi police arrested him for allegedly leaking secrets to an American agent. Also arrested was Brig Ujjal Dasgupta, the computer security expert of RAW, India’s external intelligence agency. Both arrests were made under the draconian Official Secrets Act. According to the grapevine, in its overenthusiasm, the IB had got the wrong men and once it set the police on them, it didn’t want to admit its mistake.
Saini finally got out of jail on bail after nearly four years. Today he is an angry and bitter man, who has already spent more time in jail than what even his maximum sentence would have entailed—which is three years—and that too even before the trial began. His story, and that of Dasgupta, are in stark contrast to the security breaches committed by NTRO’s Sistala and Dixit. And yet, without any powerful lobby to help them, Saini and Dasgupta became victims of a case that was questionable from the very start.

Forensic analysis has shown this RAW hand had not accessed what he’s accused of leaking in years. He languishes in jail, awaiting trial.Brig Ujjal Dasgupta (Retd), Computer security expert

Sample this. Saini, who was serving with the NSCS, should have been arrested and prosecuted after the competent authority gave sanction, as mandated by the Official Secrets Act. The authority in this case was clearly the NSCS. But when the police went to it for sanction, they were turned down. Embarrassed, the cops approached the defence ministry, which, incidentally, had nothing to do with the case to begin with. But the defence ministry’s deputy secretary, V.P. Varghese, didn’t even seek, let alone examine the documents cited as evidence by the police. Sources say Varghese was given a draft sanction order which he immediately signed without applying his mind or even referring it to his seniors. This brings us to the documents allegedly “leaked” by Saini and cited as “evidence” against him. They were the “draft report of the Indian nuclear doctrine” and a note on the “KRA Canal (Thailand) and its impact on India”. But both documents were unclassified. In fact, one of them, the nuclear doctrine document, had been released to the media years ago, according to the NSCS. The other document, a note on the proposed KRA canal in Thailand, was written by Saini himself. It examined the dangers posed by such a canal, as it would link the Andaman Sea to the South China Sea, giving China access to the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The NSCS has clearly stated that this is not its document, and therefore couldn’t be  one that was classified. All that Saini had done was some loud thinking, set down on paper, about a canal project that eventually was cancelled by Thailand. If this was laughable, the evidence cited against Saini was even more ludicrous.

The police alleged that Saini had leaked the minutes of a meeting of the Indo-US Cyber Security Forum to an American agent, a  US embassy official, Rossanna Minchew. While Saini was the Indian coordinator for the forum, Minchew was his counterpart from the US. While submitting this document as “evidence”, the police failed to explain how a document that recorded the minutes of a meeting that was held with the Americans could be considered classified?
“Even if I did give the document to Minchew, as alleged,” says Saini, “then I am only giving her what she or her colleagues who attended the meeting already knew!” But the police nevertheless cited this as “evidence”. To take the cake, there was a far more serious flaw in the allegation: the police claimed the document was the minutes of a meeting held on January 28, 2003. “However, no such meeting ever took place at all,” says Saini. “And the records of all the meetings of the forum are readily available.” Also cited as ‘evidence’ was a proposal by Saini for a network of computers that would enable all the intelligence agencies to share real-time data seamlessly. It remained on paper and was a harmless document showing how such a project could be implemented. Any networking engineer could draw up such a document.

Both the documents this officer is alleged to have leaked were not classified. In fact, one had been released to the media long ago.Commander Mukesh Saini (Retd), Ex-NSCS cyber security expert

And for Dasgupta? The police cited numerous calls between Dasgupta and Minchew as “evidence”. But both were after all part of a forum set up by the Indian and US governments, and therefore bound to interact. The police also alleged that Dasgupta had leaked a secret RAW software, which he had developed, to the US. But how could a mere internal operating software be a secret? Files created using that system could have been secret. The operating system itself wouldn’t amount to a secret, so there’s no question of leakage. The more insidious parts of the prosecution lay elsewhere. The computers of Saini and Dasgupta had been confiscated on their arrest and sent to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory for analysis. Its report was devastating to the police case: the documents cited as ‘evidence’ hadn’t been accessed by Saini or Dasgupta for long. If that was true, how were they transmitted to Minchew? The strangest aspect of the case was government’s attitude towards Minchew, a co-accused in the case. Documents now available clearly show that the Indian embassy in Washington had done a thorough background check on her before granting her a visa. Ironically, while she was in Delhi even while the investigations were on, no effort was made to either arrest her or declare her persona non grata. Instead, she quietly flew out of Delhi and no one knows where she is. Even though India and the US are signatories to the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, no effort has been made by New Delhi to seek the questioning or deposition by Minchew.
Unlike the security breaches committed by the NTRO and DRDO officials, which have the potential to lay bare India’s most sensitive secrets, including its efforts at developing a capability to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike, Saini and Dasgupta’s alleged leaks were inconsequential. They were probably not even leaks. But for a security establishment in the habit of responding to the whims of the powerful, Saini and Dasgupta’s lives were expendable. Today Saini, though out on bail, is struggling to make ends meet, having sold off his house to pay legal fees. He has to go to court as and when summoned. Dasgupta languishes in jail awaiting trial.
Full Story: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?266788