The Bombay High Court has provided relief to senior IPS officer and former Maharashtra intelligence chief Rashmi Shukla by quashing two FIRs related to alleged illegal phone tapping.
These two First Information Reports (FIRs) had been filed against Shukla, with one originating in Pune and the other in Colaba, South Mumbai. The allegations were centered on the purported illegal phone tapping of opposition leaders during Devendra Fadnavis’ tenure as the state’s Chief Minister. These FIRs were lodged while the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, led by Uddhav Thackeray, was in power.
Shukla’s legal counsel, Mahesh Jethmalani, informed the high court that in the Pune FIR, the police had submitted a C-Summary report, indicating that the case neither proved false nor true, and had sought to close it. In the Mumbai case, the government had denied granting sanction to prosecute Shukla.
A division bench, comprising Justices A S Gadkari and Sharmila Deshmukh, accepted these developments and subsequently quashed both FIRs. The Pune case was centered around the alleged recording of phone calls of Congress leader Nana Patole, while the Mumbai case involved the purported recording of phone calls of Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Sanjay Raut and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Eknath Khadse, who had previously been associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).