Rajdeep Sardesai just had his “Dosti bani rahe moment”. He was asked tough questions, he picked up a glass of victim-hood, and quit.
It all began with the startling claim regarding “Agusta Patrakars”. A few days back, a document surfaced showing AgustaWestland paying 6 million Euros to Christian Michel from January 2010 onward for handling the media. That is nearly Rs 50 crores to manage the Indian media, who reports suggest were also taken on a fully paid junket to Italy by Finmeccanica the firm which produces the AgustaWestland chopper.
Nobody knew the names of these journalists who had been dubbed “Agusta Patrakars” by media and social media. But Social media was rife with speculation. In many discussions on social media, Rajdeep’s name came up, along with the names of scores of other journalists. We want to make it clear her that we are not endorsing any corridor whispers. There must be an inquiry to find out who these corrupt journalists are.
Some social media users trolled Rajdeep Sardesai on this issue, and like his MSG moment, it seems something “snapped” and suddenly the trolls began receiving abusive Direct messages from Rajdeep Sardesai’s account:
We talked to a couple of those posting these screenshots to confirm that these were genuine messages, and they confirmed affirmatively. Still, to be fair to Mr. Sardesai, we decided to get his view too. We asked him on Twitter, although in the past 12 hours, hundreds of Twitter users had asked the same question to him and he had not responded, while merrily tweeting about other matters.
Finally, 2 hours after we asked him, Rajdeep answered and claimed his account had been “hacked”:
Rajdeep claimed that his account was hacked and some miscreant who put out those abusive direct messages (DMs). We explained why this seems unlikely because the sending of abusive DMs began at near midnight on 29th April, and after that Rajdeep Sardesai has been accessing his “hacked” account and tweeting normally for more than 12 hours. He never felt any problem logging in or got any security alert from Twitter?
Furthermore, all these hours, he was asked the same question that we asked. He could have clarified back then only and the matter would have rested. In fact, one of the abused users had specifically asked if his account was hacked. He didn’t respond. He was not bothered about this hacking till we put up our previous report?
And why would the hacker only send a few abusive DMs and block people afterwards? If the aim was to give bad name to Rajdeep and embarrass him, would the “hacker” have not tried to send a publicly abusive tweet and embarrass Rajdeep even more? Was it a genuine case of hacking (Mr. Sardesai should file a complaint with the Delhi Police’s cyber cell in that case) or was it a Suresh Raina’s “nephew moment” for Rajdeep Sardesai?
After all, many like Kirti Azad and Lalit Modi too have used this “my account was hacked” card to run away from some controversial tweets. People and media were hardly ready to believe these as credible excuses, so should we take Rajdeep’s alibi with a pinch of salt?
Also, Sardesai must lodge a complaint with the police and with Twitter. Twitter India can provide IP logs etc. and this can be verified. So we hope that when Rajdeep initiates this and finds out who the alleged “hacker” was, relevant proofs are put forth and the “hacker” is punished.
Now Rajdeep has gone ahead and deactivated his Twitter account. Reports say he has disabled it “temporarily” so that he can “change his password” and get the “account checked”. He says he may consider returning to Twitter too.
In short, some “trolls” questioned Rajdeep Sardesai on Agusta links, they got abusive messages from his allegedly hacked account, from which Rajdeep was blissfully tweeting for a good 12 hours, and after our story, Rajdeep had the divine realization that his account had been “hacked”, which is why he disabled it. It all started with Agusta!
We sincerely hope he does come back, its no fun without him.
UPDATE (1 May 2016): Rajdeep Sardesai is now appearing to do flip flops and change his stand. After claiming that his account was hacked, now he is claiming that the abusive messages are photoshopped (fake images). He said this to a website Catch News. The report says:
Catch spoke to Sardesai about it. He said: “Now they are photoshopping pictures to prove their point. All I can say is that I have not sent anyone any abusive messages.”
So if those messages were photoshopped (please note that one of the users was asked this and he denied any image editing), why did he first claim it to be a case of account hacking? Because the claim of account hacking has to backed with proofs such as IP logs, and a police case? In fact, Mr. Sardesai should know that photoshopping to defame someone too is a criminal act. Will he now act against those whom he accused of photoshopping? Or will he just continue to change stands?
