Mumbai: Bengaluru man booked for calls made to IAS officer

Michael (35) was released the same day on a personal bond of Rs 5,000.

By Srinath Rao 

The Mumbai Police on Wednesday arrested the director of a Bengaluru-based civil society group for allegedly bombarding IAS officer Ashwini Bhide with thousands of phone calls. Avijit Michael, the executive director of Jhatkaa that organises campaigns on several issues, is accused of orchestrating a “denial of service attack” on Bhide’s cellphone and landline to protest the construction of a metro car shed in Aarey Colony. Michael (35) was released the same day on a personal bond of Rs 5,000.

From January 12, Bhide, managing director of the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Limited, started getting missed calls on her cellphone. Bhide blocked a few numbers from which repeated calls were being made.

“On the first day, she got a few calls. As soon as she tried to answer them, the calls would end. From January 13, her phone did not stop ringing,” said Kalpana Gadekar, senior inspector, Bandra-Kurla Complex police station.
The police said Bhide got several thousand calls, one after the other. “She did not answer any of them and a lot of calls got diverted to her office landline,” said Gadekar. The calls continued and Bhide registered a police complaint on January 18.

Gadekar said the police found from the service providers of some of the numbers from which the calls had originated that they were from a Bengaluru-based telecommunications firm, Exotel. The calls to Bhide stopped on January 19 after the police contacted Exotel. Inquiries with Exotel revealed that the firm had received a request from the website, Jhatkaa.org, for the purchase of 10-12 cellphone numbers to send bulk text messages.

“The trust availed of the services from Exotel for Rs 1.5 lakh and sent bulk text messages to more than 2.5 lakh people,” Gadekar said. The messages listed Bhide’s cellphone and office landline numbers and urged the receivers to register protest against the metro shed by giving missed calls on the numbers. Several text messages, Gadekar said, also mentioned Bhide’s name. The police said after giving missed calls to Bhide’s number, the callers received an acknowledgement thanking them for registering their protest.

Gadekar claimed that Exotel had communicated with Jhatkaa.org only through emails. “The servers of the trust are located in USA so, we could not get the domain blocked,” she said.

In 2016, Jhatkaa started an online campaign against the construction of a steel flyover in Bengaluru that would require felling of more than 800 trees. Last year, the Karnataka government scrapped the plans to construct the 6.7 km-long, six lane flyover at a cost of Rs 1,791 crore.

With the police receiving only a postbox number and email address for Jhatkaa from Exotel, an email was sent to the trust with a summons to attend the police station. “They did not reply to our first few emails. But they must have realised the seriousness of the matter because, the trust director, Avijit Michael, came to the police station on May 9. He was placed under arrest the same day,” said Gadekar.

Michael, who also runs an IT consultancy, was booked under the Information Technology Act, for causing denial of service, and the Indian Penal Code, for obstructing a public servant from discharging her public function.
Michael was later released on a personal bond of Rs 5,000. The police claimed that Michael, as an executive director of Jhatkaa, has claimed responsibility for taking the decision to send the bulk messages. “He has claimed that the trust has several thousand volunteers across the country.

The volunteers in Mumbai had told him about the metro car shed issue. He has claimed that the trust took a poll of its volunteers about targeting the official,” Gadekar said. The police are now probing to find out who in the trust had managed to route the calls to Bhide’s landline when she did not answer her cellphone.