The CBI on Wednesday night questioned Chhattisgarth Congress chief Bhupesh Baghel (left) for close to three hours. (File)
The CBI on Wednesday night questioned Chhattisgarth Congress chief Bhupesh Baghel for close to three hours in the case of the alleged dissemination of an explicit CD allegedly featuring Chhattisgarh PWD minister Rajesh Munat. It was in this case that the Chhattisgarh Police had controversially arrested former BBC journalist and member of the Editors Guild Vinod Verma in October 2017, who was then given bail by a Raipur court in December.
While the first FIR in the case was based on a complaint by a BJP worker named Prakash Bajaj who alleged that he had received a threatening phone call where he was told that the caller had explicit CD’s of his “aaka”, and that if he did not pay money, they would be defamed. In action that followed that drew much flak from the opposition, Verma was arrested within hours from his home in Ghaziabad in the wee hours of the morning, despite his name not featuring in the FIR, and the police refusing to say, to this day, whether they believed it was Verma that made the phone call, or if any money exchanged hands. The second FIR in the case was filed by the PWD minister Rajesh Munat himself, who accused Baghel of distributing the CD at his residence the day of the arrest.
According to the summons the CBI sent to Baghel, he was asked to appear at 7 pm at the Officers Mess in Police Lines in Raipur. Emerging after a three hour questioning, Baghel said that he would cooperate with the CBI, but also said that the Chief Minister Raman Singh’s office was involved in the case, and must be investigated too.
The questioning came on a day when Chief Minister Raman Singh, on his state wide Vikas Yatra ahead of the elections in later this year, attacked the Congress in Antagarh for “stooping to the levels of CD politics.”