New Delhi: The Supreme Court has come down heavily on the approach of the government-owned Central Forensic Sciences Laboratory (CFSL) towards handling the audio tapes that includes a voice allegedly sounding like the former Manipur chief minister N. Biren Singh and was heard taking credit for the May 2023 ethnic conflict in the border state.The conflict thus far, has taken over two hundred lives and displaced at least sixty thousand people, majority of whom are still taking shelter in various relief camps.Hearing the case this August 19, a bench comprising Justices Sanjay Kumar and Satish Chandra Sharma said it hadn’t asked the CFSL to authenticate the audio clips but had directed it only to test two voice samples – one in the tapes and one authenticated sample of Singh’s voice submitted by the petitioner, and give a report if they matched.“We had not asked about the authenticity of the video. What we are asking for is after testing that voice with the admitted voice of the individual whether it can be identified that the same persons are speaking in both?” The apex court said.An India Today NE report underlined that the bench went on to tell additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati, “We don’t need the authenticity of the video to be established. The entire exercise seems to be misdirected. Only wishy-washy answers are being given. The CFSL is under the impression that we want to know if the video is authentic or not.”Solicitor general Tushar Mehta was not present in the court as he had to attend another case, said the news report.Alleging that the government of the same party to which the former Manipur chief minister belongs to, had administrative control over the CFSL laboratory, advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the petitioner Kuki Organisation for Human Rights Trust (KOHUR), sought an independent SIT investigation into the matter.The news report said the court, however, stated, “You cannot suspect the bonafides of every organisation on the ground of administrative control. We will have to bring an organisation from abroad.”Earlier, the petitioner had submitted to the court, at its direction, findings from Truth Lab, a highly respected private forensic laboratory, which had said in its report that the two voice samples matched “93 per cent”.However, Mehta sought the court’s order to match the voice samples by a government-owned laboratory instead which was allowed, and thereby CFSL was tasked to do the testing of the voice samples once again.However, since then, the government has not been able to submit a full report from the CFSL, leading the court to call it now a “misdirected” move by the laboratory.In the August 19 hearing, Singh’s daughter also filed an application and wanted to be added as a party to the case but the apex court rejected it saying, it wasn’t a “family support programme”.This May, hearing the case, the SC had told Mehta that there is no need to protect any person if they are found to have been involved in the wrongdoing in relation to the ethnic conflict in the north-eastern state, after the solicitor general questioned the credibility of the petitioner in the court.In November 2024, the court had agreed to hear the KOHUR petition which had sought an independent probe into the audio tapes as the voice allegedly sounding like Singh had claimed engineering the conflict.Prior to it, in September 2024, in public interest, The Wire had published those controversial tapes after they were accepted by the judicial commission on the Manipur violence set up by the Ministry of Home Affairs.