12 years on, Supreme Court to take up Ratan Tata's privacy plea in Radia tapes case

NEW DELHI: Twelve years after Ratan N Tata, then head of the Tata Group and now its chairman emeritus, moved Supreme Court seeking protection of his right to privacy in the wake of leaked private conversations contained in the Radia tapes, the SC will take it up for fresh hearing on Thursday.
The last effective hearing was held on April 29, 2014, when a SC bench had crystallised the issues - right to privacy vis-a-vis the government; right to privacy vis-a-vis the media; and the right to information. "The issue with regard to the criminality or illegality in awarding various contracts to the private parties which has surfaced in the recorded conversations between various persons will be taken up after the completion of hearing of the three issues before us," the bench had said.
In between, a nine-judge bench of the SC in K Puttaswamy case had ruled that right to privacy is a fundamental right of citizens and is an intrinsic part of right to life.
In 2012, the Centre had informed the SC that it had destroyed the entire Radia tapes, publication of excerpts from which threw the spotlight on ways of doing business as well as the tendency of security agencies to violate privacy of citizens.
Tata's petition, countered by another filed by NGO Centre for Public Interest Litigation seeking making public the entire Radia tapes except purely private conversations, put the case at the intersection of the duelling considerations of nation's security and citizen's right to privacy.
The I-T department had tapped the telephones of Radia, a corporate lobbyist who has since wound up her business, on the basis of a complaint received by the finance ministry.
Tata has sought protection of his right to privacy after a few intercepted private conversations between him and Radia were published in a magazine. He had sought an inquiry into who had leaked the excerpts from the intercepts and wanted a foolproof mechanism in place to guard against such indiscriminate invasion into a citizen's privacy.