BHUBANESWAR: The Sri Jagannath Temple Administration (SJTA) appears to be using diversionary tactics to cover up the more burning issues of bunglings in Nabakalebara rituals by seeking a probe into the circulation of fake pictures of “Brahma” on the social media.
While the pictures doing rounds on Facebook as well as Whatsapp are already known to be fake, the intention behind recommending an inquiry to track those who uploaded it on two social media sites has raised many an eyebrow.
Though the ongoing inquiry by the SJTA has found that many Daitapatis had entered the temple on June 15 night to witness the secret “Brahma Parivartan” rituals, the temple administration has chosen to completely ignore the possibilities that the servitors could be carrying mobile phones into the temple, which is forbidden.
Informed sources in SJTA pointed out that the temple administration should have requested the CB to find out the servitors who had gone inside the temple carrying mobile handsets and if their phones were active on the shrine’s premises. “This would have brought to light how the secret rituals were violated and if the real photographs of “Brahma” and the rituals such as ‘Patali’ were captured and leaked by some of them in violation of the age-old practices,” said the sources.
Instead, the SJTA, in its complaint to the Crime Branch, stated that three “fake” pictures of the “Brahma” were being circulated on two social media sites and the uploader should be traced. By doing so, the temple administration played a role in covering up the real bungling.
The Cyber Crime Cell of the CB, which has already initiated probe into the matter, is struggling to track down those behind dissemination of the pictures. Sources in the Cyber Crime Cell said, investigators contacted legal wings of both Whatsapp and Facebook seeking data about the fake picture of the “Brahma.”
The Whatsapp officials revealed that the Script Servers they use do not retain data, which means the source of the pictures cannot be pinpointed.
On the other hand, the Legal Extension Wing of Facebook has been requested to retrieve data since their servers store information for the last six months as per the IT Act.
The challenge, though, is hundreds of people have accessed, used and circulated the pictures and tracking the source could be a Herculean task for the Cyber Crime Cell.
The million dollar question, however, is what is SJTA trying to achieve by tracking the person(s) who first circulated the pictures which were fake and sourced from Youtube.
Meanwhile, a team of the Cyber Crime Cell reached Puri on Thursday and held discussions with SJTA officials as part of the investigation.