The Indian Express Senior Reporter Stavan Desai has won the PoleStar Award 2004 in the Best Breaking News category for his exclusive report, Three Years Later, When Cellphones ring: Who Spoke to Whom When Gujarat was Burning.’
Desai, 27, investigated over 5 lakh entries of cellphone calls in two compact discs to write one of the most chilling post-riot stories in Gujarat. The two CDs, which have been lying with the Gujarat police and are now with Nanavati Commission, contain records of all cellphone calls made in Ahmedabad from February 25, 2002, two days before the horrific Sabarmati Express attack, to March 4–days that saw the worst communal violence in recent history.
An investigation by Desai, which took several weeks, revealed for the first time details of those telephone calls. The six-part series, which Express began on November 21, 2004, also found that top police officers were in touch with some of the riot-accused; BJP MLA Maya Kodnani and VHP leader Jaideep Patel were in riot-hit areas at the time of massacres and that top police officers knew ex-Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was being burnt but did not do anything to help him.
It took me one month to get the details of the cellphone records and give faces to the numbers,’’ says Desai.
The award instituted by the Chennai-based PoleStar Foundation comprises Rs 1 lakh and a trophy. Desai was the unanimous choice of the jury for the Best Breaking News category introduced this year. He will receive the award at a function in Chennai on March 26.
Other winners of the PoleStar award this year are Gauri Shukla of usiness Standard for the Best Feature in Business Journalism, and Nandini Vaish of the Business World for the Best Business Feature in IT journalism. The jury for The PoleStar Award 2004 met in Mumbai on Saturday, March 12.
