Samata Party leader Jaya Jaitly on Thursday flayed Nobel laureate V S Naipaul for expressing 'profound disappointment' over Tehelka's treatment by the Centre.

"I request Sir Vidia and his Pakistani wife not to play politics in India on behalf of his website friends and to keep himself away from the dirt and machinations about which he claimed to have no interest," Jaitley said in a press statement in New Delhi.

The Samata leader, who quit as party chief following the Tehelka expose, said she had received a letter from Nadira Naipaul stating her husband "has a larger historical interest in India and is removed from the dirt churned by the day to day machinations of democracy, and is not interested in it either".

Jaitly recalled she had sent a letter to Sir Vidia in November congratulating him for the well-deserved honour in receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature, and said, "Let him retain his respect as a writer and not lend his stature where it is not called for."

She said that she brought to Sir Vidia's notice the examples of Tehelka tapes being tampered, because he was a director on the board of Tehelka's website.

She believed he would be intellectually honest enough to agree that to find the truth, forensic examination of the original tapes was required.

The Great Defence Scandal