WHAT THE TAPES PROVE© Ankush Arora
Jun 4, 2000
Manoj Prabhakar, in a sensational investigative act, videotaped private conversations with fellow cricketers, board officials and police & income-tax officials. He caught them off guard while they were explaining many things they knew about the dirty world of illegal betting and match fixing. And on May 27th, Prabhakar along with his team of the newly launched website tehelka.com, played those videotapes at a press conference before a stunned audience. This caught in a tangle, those people who had earlier publicly denied what they had told Prabhakar in private. In my previous article, which was written before Prabhakar's sensational disclosure, I had exhorted everyone to come out with all that they knew about matchfixing. It is now proved that they knew much more than what they had claimed earlier. Prabhakar has made the job easier, as now they will be compelled to come out with the facts.
A hotly debated topic among legal experts now is whether the videotapes can be admissible in the court of law as evidence, since the recordings were made without the consent of the speaker. This debate shows the myopic views of those engaged in this debate. First of all, why should it be considered that the sole aim of the videotapes is to establish legal evidence and convict the guilty. Prabhakar is neither a police official, nor a CBI agent, and nor from any other investigative agency. He is just an ordinary individual who is out to expose the double standards of others. If the investigative agencies have any shame, then they should swing into action immediately to find the truth and nail the guilty. There was no need for Prabhakar to be a detective if these agencies had done their job earlier. There was no need for Prabhakar to shoulder all the responsibility himself, had the BCCI and the government acted upon his disclosure earlier that he had been offered money to throw a match. There was no reason for Prabhakar to breach the privacy of others had the government not allowed a Justice Chandrachud to get away with a farcial enquiry which gave a clean chit to Indian cricket. Since others failed to perform their duties earlier, Prabhakar had no option left but to be a James Bond himself. And what he has conclusively proved with his videotapes is that Indian cricket is deeply infested with the malice of matchfixing, and many of those had refuted this fact earlier were lying. Gathering legal evidence against individuals is not his job, that job belongs to the CBI or the police.
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