Chennai: Justice CT Selvam of the Madras High Court has ordered the Chennai City Police to block the website www.savukku.net immediately. He has directed all those affected by savukku.net to file complaint with police. Senior Tamil Nadu police officer Jaffer Sait is likely to be the first complainant in the case. Savukku.net, which is known as a Tamil Wikileaks is likely to face a huge trouble after this order.
What is www.savukku.net?
It is run by a man called A Shankar alias Achimuthu Shankar. Some say he is a loose canon and some call him a home grown Julian Assange. He was an ordinary government employee till a few years ago. He was with the state vigilance and anti-corruption department. According to a report in Business Standard his life changed in 2008, when he was accused of leaking sensitive information to the media. In April 2008, transcript of a taped conversation between S K Upadhyay, the then director of DVAC, and L K Tripathi, the then chief secretary, was published by the Deccan Chronicle English daily. The then DMK government appointed a commission of inquiry under judge P Shanmugam to probe the leak. The commission zeroed in on Shankar. According to Shankar, he was subjected to third degree torture by the police and was forced to testify against some officials.
After his release on bail, he became an RTI activist and started collecting information on corrupt government officials. He wrote a blog to make his findings public. The very next day, he was arrested in a false road rage case. But, he was expecting this and was mentally strong to face that. After that his life changed forever.
He later converted his blog into a full pledged website to expose corruption and the people started calling him a Tamil Julian Assange and his website a Tamil Wikileaks. Recently a Chennai court had ordered his arrest after a Sun TV employee lodged a criminal defamation case against him. Local journalists union claims they sided with him and even requested the CM J Jayalalithaa to give him relief.
His Facebook has more than 5000 followers and his every post gets hundreds of comments, mostly abusing the corrupt.
The Biggest Expose
He had posted the sensational 2G tapes conversation on his website much before the AAP leader Prashant Bhushan released them in New Delhi. It had contained the alleged conversation between the DMK MP Kanomozhi, IPS officer Jaffar Sait, Nira Radia, M Karunanidhi's wife etc.
Savukku means 'whip' in Tamil. Shankar is an admirer of the LTTE chief the late V Prabhakaran. He has a picture of V Prabhakaran on one side and a picture of a cowboy with a whip on the other side of the masthead of his website.
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