Journalistic tongues in Delhi have wagged unabashedly after finding the voices of Vir Sanghvi, Barkha Dutt and Prabhu Chawla in the Niira Radia tapes in the 2G spectrum allocation scam, but the first big piece of action seems to have come from Tamil Nadu in the deep south.
The residence of A. Kamaraj, the associate editor of the Tamil bi-weekly Nakkheeran that shot to fame during the reign of the forest brigand Veerappan, has been raided in Madras’s tony Besant Nagar locality.
Kamaraj is said to be a close friend of A. Raja, the disgraced telecom minister who is alleged to be at the centre of the Rs 173,000 crore scam.
Kamaraj first hit the headlines in 1993 after he accused the English newsweekly India Today of infringing on its copyright, by carrying an interview with Veerappan, which had actually been conducted by its correspondent Shiva Subramaniam. That interview appeared in IT with the joint byline of Raj Chengappa, now editor of The Tribune in Chandigarh.
Kamaraj has often found himself in the middle of defamation cases.
Ironically, last year, Kamraj, along with his editor R.R. Gopal, had been sentenced to two years in jail in a defamation case involving then Union minister A. Raja.
IJR 