INDIA: India's Supreme Court ordered a federal inquiry yesterday into allegations that a magistrate issued arrest warrants for the country's president, chief justice and other legal luminaries after allegedly accepting a 40,000 rupee bribe (€713.863) from a reporter in a "sting" operation.
Chief justice V. N. Khare ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate allegations by Zee Television that Mr Brahm Bhatt, an Ahemdabad city magistrate in western Gujarat state accepted a bribe to issue arrest warrants not only against himself and President A.P. J. Abdul Kalam, but another federal judge and the head of the Supreme Court bar association.
"What is happening in Gujarat? By giving Rs 40,000 you can get a judicial order ," Mr Khare said after Zee TV reporter Vijay Shekhar handed over videotapes of the "sting" operation he claimed to have filmed to expose Gujarat's corrupt judiciary.
"If this is the state of affairs, only God knows what will happen to the country," added Mr Khare who has been leading a judicial campaign against government corruption.
In a chat show Mr Shekhar said he conducted the sting operation following reports that, for many years several businessmen had taken undue advantage of Gujarat's corrupt criminal justice system by filing complaints against rivals and getting arrest warrants issued against them.
He claimed to have chosen the leading personalities on the assumption that any judicial officer would be familiar with their names and addresses.
But the magistrate, unaware of who the "guilty" were, issued arrest warrants for them after allegedly accepting the bribe. "Maybe if I had haggled (with the magistrate) the price would have come down," the reporter added.