EXCLUSIVE
Following scathing remarks by the Supreme Court against the CBI on August 12 while hearing Dayanidhi Maran’s bail petition related to the BSNL illegal telephone exchange case, chartered accountant and RSS ideologue S Gurumurthy, who has been singularly fighting against the Marans and was in fact the first to expose the alleged BSNL scam, has penned another article in The New Indian Express, exhorting the CBI and the AG to fight the SC judges on their observations.
During the SC hearing, the details of which you can read here, Maran had petitioned for a stay on a Madras High Court Order cancelling his bail. Granting his plea and thereby allowing Maran to stay out of jail, the SC also made some other remarks. There were three main points regarding the case which SC made,
One, there was a political vendetta against Maran.
Two, the loss in the ‘scam’ is Rs. 1.2 crore and Maran was willing to pay that to the BSNL.
Three, this was just misuse and not the kind of corruption which requires arrest.
Gurumurthy is not taking kindly to this line of argument. In his response in TNIE, he makes the following arguments,
One, the loss of the 764 illegal telephone lines stands at over Rs. 200 crore, and that te Rs. 1.2crore is just the cash-cost incurred for laying the cable lines.
Two, the lines were established in the name of the Chief General Manager of Chennai Telephones, which points to not just a misuse but a“deeper and highly meditated conspiracy and fraud”.
Three, Maran was not prosecuted earlier because the DMK was a part of the ruling UPA. So there was no political vendetta now, there was political leniency earlier.
Four, he says that it is not just the financial loss, what Maran did was also a threat to national security.
In the documents filed in the court by Dayanidhi Maran’s counsel – which are in possession of The News Minute – Maran makes a case for a much lower financial loss what S Gurumurthy claims.
According to answers received from BSNL in response to an RTI request, Maran’s counsel argues that the billing cannot be done for all the hundreds of numbers listed out – but only one pilot number. How and why?
The alleged telephone lines were ISDN lines, or Integrated Services Digital Network, which is a “set of communication standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data and other networks.”
To use the ISDN, you need an interface called the Primary Rate Interface or PRI. This is the interface BSNL uses.
Now, there is a service all telecom operators including BSNL offer called the DID service. Direct Inward Dialing is a service offered by telephone companies to subscribers who operate a private branch exchange (PBX) system. The feature provides service for multiple telephone numbers over one or more circuits to the PBX, and signals the dialled telephone number to the PBX.
If you have not completely understood the above, it’s ok. Here is what Maran’s defence says and what you need to understand.
Based on the RTI response from MTNL/BSNL, Maran’s defense counsel say that the ‘telephone exchange’ at the Maran residence was DID-PBX system operated using PRI and has several such ISDN lines.
According to BSNL, on an ISDN PRI connection, only 30 numbers can function simultaneously at any point in time and the billing is done only for one number. “All the DID calls are consolidated on a single Pilot number,” says BSNL and even if an ISDN PRI line has 300 lines as DID, it is treated only as one connection and billed as one connection.
In other responses sought by Maran’s counsel, MTNL says that 300 DID cannot be operated simultaneously on one PRI. If ISDN PRI has 300 DID, means 300 numbers are mapped on the PRI and cannot be treated as 300 connections, says BSNL.
To put it simply, Maran claims that the loss cannot be calculated by multiplying the number of telephone numbers which were registered to the alleged exchange at his home, but by how many of them were billed. So the financial loss cannot be pegged at several hundred crore rupees, as per Marans.
It is up to the CBI to verify if this – that Maran telephone exchange was a set of DID numbers in an ISDN PRI line – indeed was the case. The CBI, however, has pegged the loss at Rs. 1.2crore after preliminary investigation.
The other arguments raised by S Gurumurthy however are not countered by these RTI responses.