AHMEDABAD: What was the need for amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran to put down these words in his final report before the Supreme Court which became public this week? “The cost for boarding and lodging for both the amicus curiae at BSF mess, Gandhinagar as well as the cost for local transportation by private taxi was arranged by the SIT ...the cost of travel from Delhi to Ahmedabad and back (for both the advocates) was borne by the amicus curiae. In all the interactions with the witnesses, my advocate colleague Gaurav Agrawal was present.”

For a while, there has been a buzz in legal circles that the SIT chief and former CBI director R K Raghavan, who has given a report which is very favourable for Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in the Zakia Jafri case , was being pampered by the state government.

While he had a salary of Rs 1.5 lakh and was entitled to executive-class travel by air, there were murmurs about personal trips at Gujarat government expense to London. Besides, Raghavan had no earmarked headquarter so that he could submit all his travel bills across the country even though these visits were not related to the probe.

Attempts to get information on Raghavan’s travel bills under Right to Information (RTI) are being stone-walled. At least three persons, including the state Congress president Arjun Modhwadia have repeatedly tried to extract these details but even an appeal to the Chief Information Commisioner (CIC) D Rajagopalan four months back has not helped. A Modi confidant, Rajagopalan retired as chief secretary of Gujarat in 2010 after a six-month extension. Post-retirement, the Modi government then made him chairman of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam and then gave him a three-year term as CIC.

More importantly, there are strong bonds between Rajagopalan and Raghavan as their wives are closely related. Sources said Modi had in fact met Raghavan for the first time at a wedding in the Rajagopalan family while the SIT probe was still on.